Welcome to the 70’s

Disclaimer: ‘Nooni’ is the name used for my Grandma/my father’s mother. ‘Telly’ means television.

My father’s parents and my grandparents, Barry and Unabelle Howell, posing in from of their first television in the early 70’s.

My dad, Pete, was sitting in his Sharks jersey, and ironically enough, watching the television before I prodded him with my questions. He’s also got an astounding memory for things, as I have just recently learned during this interview about his childhood memories of television. My dad seemed the most engaged when I asked about specific details, like shows he watched or ornaments in the house. He seemed genuinely happy to be looking back into the past and searching for solid and specific memories. I myself can relate to some of the things he said, which I find interesting and also surprising. Since televisions have because mainstream and available, children have been watching cartoons after school, or sneaking around to watch the television when they shouldn’t be. It appeared to me that although the technology in TV’s has advanced, our childhood experiences with television were still far more parallel than I anticipated. It just goes to show that everybody was young once.

Josie: So where did you grow up? Do you remember your TV growing up?

Pete: I grew up in Murwillumbah with family; mum, dad, brother, sister.
I remember it was a black & white TV. It was “HMV: His Master’s Voice”; it was the old style one with the channel turner that you had to get up and turn to get it to work. Sometimes the picture would start flickering and you had to go and play with this button called the vertical hold to try and stop it from doing it. Big, old box telly on four legs, I remember.

J: So definitely old school! Where was this TV located? Was it a relaxed room or a formal one?

P: It was in a separate room, like a TV room. You only went in there to watch television, so it was a bit probably formal in that sense, but just full of old couches and stuff. That’s the old house though. The one where Nooni lives now, where the TV is, that’s my old bedroom. And the TV there, used to be out in the lounge room area.

J: Oh, that makes sense! Do you remember there being anything placed on the TV or surrounding it in the room where it was?

P: I remember there being little ornaments on top of the telly. There was a little statue of… do you know the Venus De Milo with no arms? We had a little one of them sitting on top of the telly. And we also never ever had more than one TV.

J: I’m a touch disappointed we can’t fit a Venus De Milo atop our TV these days! Do you have any memories of watching TV as a child, and who you watched it with?

P: I don’t have a lot of memories of when we were at the previous house, because we left there when I was six. But the other one; you just sat on the couch, or on the floor. Sometimes we’d just sit on the floor and watch. Nooni didn’t watch telly a lot, but Poppy loved telly. We always watched football, we watched the news. We weren’t allowed to watch it a lot so I used to watch it when I got home from school before Nooni got home. I used to watch “Batman and the Goodies”. I sometimes watched it by myself, sometimes with my siblings, but usually there was more than one of us watching it.

J: Good choice of TV show, “Batman and the Goodies”. Lastly, are there any specific moments you remember watching on TV?

P: I do remember watching the space shuttle blow up. That was in the mid-eighties at some point. The Space Shuttle Challenger was going up and it blew up… I also remember  snippets from ‘Countdown’ in the 70’s; you know, watching different people on countdown… I remember watching cold chisel, different bands like that when I was growing up.