Nobody Needs a Woolworth's Store These Days

So it looks like Woolworth's is finally on its uppers. The media are inevitably trying to roll this story into the general recession coverage but, while that won't have helped, most people will just be surprised the chain has made it through the last twenty years at all. For at least two decades, Woolies has been a shop out of time.

Up until the mid-'80s, a town centre shopping trip that didn't include Woolies was practically unthinkable. An American chain run with ruthless commercial hard-headedness, it still managed to be, in this country at least, as aimlessly British as the Triumph TR7, George Brown MP and Bruce's Big Night Out.

A corner shop that fancied itself as a supermarket, Woolies was the department store you could actually buy something from. Its situation was ideal. Proper department stores were prohibitively expensive and wouldn't touch most of what Woolies had to offer, and the big three supermarkets (Sainsbury's, Safeways and MacFisheries, natch) were still strictly stewing steak and greaseproof paper outlets. As long as the status quo was regulated, they were sitting pretty in a sizeable niche. Then all of a sudden Tesco's got Scalextric in, butchers stopped wearing straw hats and you could buy a first class stamp in a pub. Something had to give.

It's unlikely the shop has much personal significance for anyone under 25 now. The Pick 'n' Mix has hung around, though health and safety rules have made the sweet-buying process akin to retrieving spent fuel rods from a nuclear reactor. but when the records went, there was no going back. If you wanted a 7" single before 1986 there was only one place you went. No-one stacked the Top 40 in a series of little wire-basket pigeonholes like Woolies.

Then there were the cassettes, either functionally blank or the shop's own brand of Chevron licences, heavy on the Gordon Lightfoot side of things. (Woolworths hosted a bewildering maze of loosely-affiliated own brands, including Lilliputian rock star outfitter Chad Valley, pint-size duffle coat fashion house Ladybird and deceptively posh-sounding jigsaw dispensary Winfield.) Oh, and the flick-through rack of chimp-on-the-potty posters, of course.

Which brings us to the gags. Woolies' cheap and cheerful atmosphere meant it was the standard reference point for Jasper Carrott and his topical ilk whenever a metaphor for something down-at-heel or shoddily made was required. Jokers of today, hopelessly disorganised as they are, can't decide between Netto, Lidl and Poundstretcher as the modern signifier of naff, and even if they did settle on one, it wouldn't drop as neatly into a gag as the word 'Woolies' did. It was a comedy store in the truest sense.

And there was the long-running gag that it took forever to get served, which as far as I know had no basis in fact, but it fitted the whole gloriously shabby image, which Woolies seemed, at least, to grin and bear. Try something like that with Tesco's and you'd soon be on the receiving end of a nocturnal visit from some large men with mirrored sunglasses and blue stripy baseball bats. They can make Nick Hancock push a trolley on the telly all they like, but the comedy's gone out of commerce.

Even I could tell something was up in 1986, when I finished browsing the ground floor (ie. the good bit) of the Woolies located in the corner of Aylesbury's dystopian concrete Friar's Square shopping centre (the perfect location), and ascended on the escalators past the second floor (plates, pans and toasters - boring) to the top floor, which housed white goods, self-assembly greenhouses, ladders you could carry round with ease and, most importantly, demonstration models of brown-cushioned garden swing-seats you could easily spend a quarter of an hour lounging on and reading Smash Hits until a brown-coated floorwalker told you to naff off out of it. This time, however, all that was to be found up there was a single, forlorn-looking Zanussi washer-dryer being loaded onto a trolley while, across the void of the vast, dark and empty floor, a Vildea supermop topped over. 'Sorry, son. Top floor's closed, now.' That was that, then.



So it's far too late to weep for Woolies (and Woolco), but it's always worth remembering the once wonderful place, especially at this time of year. Christmas suited Woolworth's. For one, it was possibly the only shop which actually looked classier after it was bedecked with a surfeit of tinsel. Secondly, the mood-predicting cellophane fish in their crackers actually worked (occasionally). And of course there were those filibustering seasonal advertising extravaganzas, taking up an entire commercial break, which, to some of us, suggested untold power and influence. Had they done a deal with Willie Whitelaw? I wouldn't be at all surprised.

If that's not enough, there is this fantastic site, run by Woolies themselves. Can you imagine the Stalinist edifice of Tesco ever giving two hoots about its history?

One-two-three-four!

School music lessons. Some love them, some hate them, some just appreciate the opportunity to stare out the window for half an hour. Surprisingly they're still going strong today - I thought they'd have been replaced with more tests, or something less alienating for the tone deaf community, or at least something a little less - well, hippy.

Because the music lesson as we know it was undoubtedly a product of the 1960s. It's all so folky and folksy and 'everyone join in'. You can't imagine Jimmy Edwards leading the class of Whack-O! in a few choruses of We're All Going to the Zoo Tomorrow. Round my way, where teachers with perfect pitch were thin on the ground, it was up to the radio or, best of all, telly to provide the sonic education, most usually in the form of the xylophone-plonking, high-pitch-counting-in Music Time on the BBC. here's a clip from a slightly-too-late edition (Helen Spiers eschewing the floaty blouse and wearing a knee-length skirt, which is all wrong of course).



Anyway, when it came to ensemble playing, there was no getting around the division between those who could play an instrument (ie had grade I recorder) and the vast majority who could just about clap, but that was it. To the rescue came the percussion cupboard, a treasure trove of tambourines, triangles and other weird noisemakers for the musically incapable to hit, scrape, or generally muck about with, including:


Shakere

How fortunate the proper African name is so close to 'shaker', which is what it basically is. Usually the most 'ethnic'-looking instrument in the cupboard, even though it was manufactured in Nottingham and half the beads on the outside have been idly picked off over the past term. By the third it's threadbare, and an emergency yoghurt-pot-and-dried-pea session is in order.
Mucking about rating: low.


Guiro

That's 'scraper' to you and me, wary teachers not wanting to tempt fate with the exotic pronunciation. ('Miss, my dad has a guiro every fortnight but me mum has a go at him for spending it all down the pub!') Good one to get as it's quite sizeable, and makes that amusing cockroachy noise so beloved of cheap TV serials to accompany the adventures of a furtive moustachioed lurker up to no good.
Mucking about rating: moderate.


Cuica

I.e. that drum with a stick in the middle that makes a sound like a cartoon hippo reading Punch magazine. Whoever gets this instantly becomes class hero for their mastery of sonic hilarity for about thirty seconds after it's taken off them for 'mucking about', put back on the high shelf and they're given the last tambourine with a split in the skin instead.

Mucking about rating: off the scale, while you can get away with it.

Vibra-slap

Missus. Makes that exotic rattlesnakey noise when hit. And does damn all else. Good choice for the lazy pupil, as you can just sit there through the whole recital idly calculating the odds on getting hold of that elusive Everton gold badge Panini sticker, then leap in right at the end with your vibra-slap and steal all the glory.
Mucking about rating: sporadic, but high.


Flex-a-tone

The best one of all, that wibbly-wobbly tinny cross between a bell and a Swanee whistle that's absolutely useless for anything but providing the soundtrack to someone unsteadily transporting a really big jelly.

Mucking about rating: countermanded.

It'll be Alright on the Night (on the right of the night on the left of the night opposite Mordred)

So The Krypton Factor is coming back, as plugged here - bizarrely with Gordon 'The Chain' Burns holding building blocks spelling 'Trumpton Wanker'. Well, it's an angle.

Nothing amazing about another old quiz being plundered by poor old strapped-for-brains ITV of course, but all the talk of the 'iconic' assault course and 'state-of-the-art technology' suggest that, once again, they're missing the point of the original before it's even begun.

Even at the time, The Krypton Factor was a very ordinary sort of programme. While quizzes in the 1980s gradually stared beefing themselves up, with blonde women in helicopters and Richard O'Brien playing an ocarina, The Kryp (as we all called it) remained sober and, that shouting sergeant major at the end aside, very, very quiet. Gordon Burns's supernormal powers of whispering were stretched to the limit as he conspiratorially confided with the viewing public the key to solving the three-dimensional jigsaw (always something about getting the base segement the right way round) while the camera focussed unforgivingly on Jim, a systems analyst from Redditch who 'doesn't appear to be making any progress at all'.

Since then, silence has become as much a crime on TV as it always was on radio. But radio had a reason for it, as pointed out by John Peel whenever he played a record on the BBC World Service which featured a whopping pause in the middle, half-fearing the momentary silence of the global broadcasting bastion might trigger World War Three.

Blame Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and its constant, pulsating, sub-Jean Michel Jarre backing track, complete with matching Destination Docklands-style sweeping lightshow. Someone decided the sound of a silent studio wasn't 'tense' enough. Either that, or they had a morbid fear of the janitor's broom falling over and destroying the carefully constructed edifice of intellectual suspense.

ITV might decide to help their product stand out from the menacingly thrumming crowd by going back to whispering basics. Who knows? Mastermind managed it after all, but the Beeb tend to have more confidence in their resurrected brands, and don't share ITV's boobish, eager-to-please compulsion to kit the old model out with the TV equivalent of flashy rear spoilers and those blue lights that go along the bottom of the door frames. (They certainly tried odd things towards the end of The Kryp's original run, as I recall.)

But it's an important fact that The Kryp was, even by the standards of the time, quiet, thoughtful, modest telly. No bells, no whistles, no throbbing Fairlights or billowing carpets of dry ice. Even the assault course looked like a badly-tended adventure playground at times. And if they get the mechanics of the quiz right, there's no reason why it can't be like that again. They could even save a few bob to plough back into blinging up that Series Champion perspex trophy.

Oh, and what are the odds they'll persuade Steve Coogan into a one-off return to those 'spot the difference' dramatic film clips he used to appear in?

Funny the Things, eh?

I used to like Sounds. Not as good as the NME admittedly, and a tad heavy on the DEATH TO FALSE METAL! Coverage, but streets ahead of the dour, priggish Melody Maker, for sure. Anyway, one of the wacky stunts the paper pulled towards the end of its life was to fill two whole pages with made-up charts. Not just the notoriously unreliable ‘indie charts’ (ie what some surly get in Notting Hill thinks his customers ought to be buying), but charts of everything from pie fillings to the most popular catchphrases on Bullseye. (This last achieved fame by being read out, a few weeks later, on the programme, to the mock-bemusement of Jim Bowen, and the as ever genuine bemusement of the crowd.)

One of these charts, published some time in early 1988, has stuck in my mind ever since. God knows why - it’s not especially funny or interesting in itself. A lot of it doesn’t even make sense. But, well, ‘funny the things, eh?’ And in an attempt to purge this pointless bit of whimsy from my mind for good, here it is, as the inkies used to say all the time, ‘in full’:

“WHERE ARE THEY NOW?” PETES

1. Pete Stride & John Plain
2. Peter Perrett
3. Pete Wylie
4. Peter Glaze
5. Peter Oosterhuis
6. Peter, Paul and Mary
7. Peter Lorimer (Leeds)
8. Peters and Lee
9. Pete Gunn
10. Pete Best
    

(The little flower things didn't appear in the original paper, of course, it's just Blogger being an arse and not letting me do a numbered list, for some reason. Anyway, let's have a rummage...)

PETE STRIDE AND JOHN PLAIN
A very Sounds choice, these two being members of pub-punk act The Lurkers and punk-pub band The Boys respectively. Dunno about The Boys, but The Lurkers sounded like 101 variations on The Clash’s White Riot to my punk-ignorant ears and, shall we say, respected the privacy of the UK Top 40. Still, loads of other people, including Peel, loved them, and they ‘made The Ramones sound like Queen’, which has to be worth something. Here’s some phlegmatically flailing skinny tie action from the lads on Revolver (sadly the clip cuts off before we get to hear Peter Cook’s soused verdict on the band.)



PETER PERRETT
Lead signer of The Only Ones, of course, who may have been nowhere to be seen in 1988, but now are all over Jools Holland, adverts and compilations – doing Another Girl Another Planet in all cases, admittedly, but Perrett’s still about, albeit tainted with association with The Libertines, of all folk. And he could still do with a bun or two by the looks of things.



PETE WYLIE
Bit cheeky of them to bung the Wah!meister into this list, as he’d been in the charts with Sinful just over a year previously. Sadly it’s more appropriate these days, as an accident in the early ‘90s put the kybosh on his solo career, though a comeback is apparently ‘imminent’, which could be rather good. Of course, the best band he was ever in was The Crucial Three, one of those late-’70s Liverpool bands who never actually wrote songs or performed, but just hung about in tea shops all day talking about how great it was being in a band. That’s the music career for me. Other members were Julian Cope, who is ace in a bizarre new way every day, and Ian McCulloch who I’ve never been able to stick. Put that jumper on properly lad, you’ll ruin the neck hole! And stop pouting!



PETER GLAZE
Not a very well-researched list this, is it? The former Crazy Gang understudy turned shortarse recipient of a giant tuning fork to the head on Crackerjack* had been dead a good five years by the time this chart was compiled. He carked it halfway through a series of the late-period, Stu Francis-’n’-gunge-era incarnation of the show too, raising the question of how, if at all, the programme commemorated that sad event. A memorial round of ‘get the whistle out of the tray of Sugar Puffs with your teeth’? Or just a mournful Jimmy Krankie with two downturned thumbs, declaring the tragic loss decidedly un-fandabidozi? Best of all, while Glaze was still operational, he could conceivably have covered the work of any of the abovementioned Pete’s in that section of Crackerjack where they do a daft mini-play and shoehorn a Hit parade number into the action. Not sure Glaze’s bluff tones would suit a Perrett song, but I bet he ould do a belting Seven Minutes to Midnight.


PETER OOSTERHUIS
Bit of a zany choice here, with the oddly-named lanky golfer who was all over the telly in the canary yellow plus fours era of the sport, but had buggered off to America by the time this list came out. That’s it.


PETER, PAUL AND MARY
Were still going in ‘88! And are still going these days to the best of my knowledge. Just because you stopped listening to Junior Choice when they started going overboard with the Ralph MacTell songs doesn’t mean that world just vanished, Mr List Compiling Man!



PETER LORIMER (LEEDS)
Footballer famous for his ability to kick the ball very hard. Unlike his team-mates, who preferred to do the same to the opposing side. No joke like an old joke, eh?


PETERS AND LEE
This list does admittedly run out of steam towards the end. Though this pair are a legitimate Where Are They Now? Target, being as they were bloody everywhere in the 1970s on the back of pretty much one song, with their own TV Christmas specials and everything. They’d long packed it in by 1988, though I do remember seeing them on Summertime Special once, which must have just about been in the ‘80s.



PETE GUNN
Not sure who this even is. Do they mean Peter Gunn, the 1950s detective series? Or the Duane Eddy theme tune from same? If it’s the latter, that was being covered by The Art of Noise about the time this was published, so zero points on the research front there. But knowing this paper, it’s more likely referring to the bassist from Peter and the Test Tube Babies or something.



PETE BEST
Oh, of all the cheap shots… It’s hard not to feel sympathy for the Biggest Loser in Rock (copyright lots of little losers). Twenty years of sterling work for the civil service and a rock solid marriage to the girl off the biscuit counter at Woolie’s mean nothing, do they? Oddly enough, this list was published in the very year Best knocked his day job on the head and went back to music, forming The Pete Best Band. I like to think this list was directly responsible.


* - Crackerjack!

It's all done in the Geoff POSSIBLE Capes!

This week’s British Olympic showreel wouldn’t have been complete without a misshapen lump of controversy every bit as artificial and underwhelming as one of those chunks of coagulated flavouring found at the bottom of a packet of Monster Munch. Apparently that rotten picture from bloody years ago of Myra Hindley made out of Jim’ll Fix It badges or something was bewilderingly featured, in a ‘deeply upsetting’ way.

It is upsetting of course, but only in the usual way – seeing genuine talent and hard work (your actual medal-winning folk) being piggy-backed by the usual lazy crowd of media slugabeds is as British as any unfolding London bus full of Crowley-worshipping billionaires. Never mind sport and politics being kept apart, sport and art shouldn’t be half-heartedly mashed together, certainly not in this boring, taking-the-shine-off-genuine-aceness, committee-driven way.

The irony is, of course, that not so long ago (well, OK, quite long ago), art was an Olympic event. You can see why this wouldn’t happen now – not televisual enough, and who would commentate? Brian Sewell? – but perhaps if a measurable element was added, it could work. Who can sculpt a reclining nude in less than four minutes? ‘And there’s the plucky Italian undergoing his own mini-Renaissance, coming back against the Spaniard with some rapid work on the upper torso there, just look at those chippings fly!’ Or the novel-writing marathon? ‘Fifty pages to go, and Amis has an awful lot of characterisation through revealed action left to do! He spent too long building up that allegory in the early chapters, and now he’s paying the price!’

Hmm. Perhaps it’s best left untampered with. We’ve got enough proper amateur athletes who’ve made it on their own ability and dedication as it is, let’s not let egregious, self-promoting faux-proles like Banksy in and spoilt everything. With him on our team, we’d be bound to cark it. Unlike Los Angeles in 1932, where Britain’s John Hughes won a gold medal in town planning. Er, result!

Someone's 50 Today...

... unbelievably enough. I won't tell if you won't.

Happy birthday, love.

.

Let's Go Shopping

It's just about summer at last, and there's something about the orange haze of a July morning that puts me in mind of holiday trips to the local newsagent-cum-general store round about the turn of the '80s. Leave your bike outside in a casual heap and enter its subdued, welcoming, blue-and-white vinyl floor tiled, no-cheques-cashed-thank-you interior.

Most important, on a day like this, is the little deep freeze with the two-way sliding top and the achingly outdated stickers on the front. This is, of course, owned by the company which makes both the contents and the little tin sign spinning out front in the breeze - Wall's if you must, but more properly Lyon's Maid, signified by that bucolic dancing troika of a small boy and two small girls, captured in the middle of a raucous round of Ring-A-Roses with alarming disregard for the safety of their Mini Milks.

The contents of the freezer depend, of course, on whether 'the man's been'. If he has, fill your boots with Fabs, Funny Feet, Starship 2000s and the urban drug legend magnet that was the 2-Ball Screwball. If he hasn't, it's a sad scrabble round the bottom of the unit forthe best of the dull stuff - Jubblies, popsicles (not even Cola flavour left), Callipos and, most spirit-crusing of all, big brown unopened boxes of boring wafery sandwich things and the ubiquitous family brick.

It's important to note that Cornettos and other posh fare were never spotted in these units. At best, you might have seen the occasional rogue King Cone, looking lost and nervous outside its natural habitat of a shoulder-mounted tray in a darkened Odeon. If you're really unlucky, the good stuff in the tiny deep freeze will be sharing freezer space with savoury abominations, usually Patsy Kensit peas and Findus frozen boil in the bag dinners, featuring the most suspiciously smooth slices of roast beef you ever did see.

But never mind that, if there's nothing to be found in the freezer, the pop's all there, lined up on a shelf to the right. Naturally, there's no refrigerator here - not for another three years, at least - so your tins of Lilt and first-generation Tab (the beautiful drink for beautiful people) have to sweat it out among the Panda Pops, Trendy Pops and Rola Colas. No preferential treatment here. Other uncomfortably warm drinks come in space age all-plastic packaging, like the listlessly fruity Tip Tops (there are probably fewer toxic elements in the tub than the contents).

On the floor beneath, the family-sized bottles with the dimpled necks and 3p deposit caps, lined up in serried ranks temptingly reminiscent of a 'lemonade fishing' fete stall. Again, brand egalitarianism rules. Amongst the big name liquids with bubbles which have passed their fizzical are the regional pop brands. It was Dayla round my way, but if you lived elsewhere it could've been Alpine, Larkspur or, for those lucky Yorkshire folk, pop bottled by father of future Tory leader Charles Hague. All delivered either by the milkman or via a good, solid beige Bedford van with the driver's semi-hard son sat in the back, flicking Big D nuts at dogs through the open tailgate.

And we have the sweets, of course. They've been pushed temporarily into third place for the season as, with the possible exception of those new-fangled Trebor mints with the hole blocked up, they're not in any way chilled (well OK, neither are the drinks, but that's more a psychological thing, I suppose). But one tradition still holds sway in the heat - the purchasing of too many old fashioned sotrage jar sweets in a big bag. Maybe it's their 'behind counter' taboo, or the fact they're slap next to the fags, sometimes even mingled with Castellas, St Bruno and other 'OK' smoking ware, but something always ensures the buying and wolfing of far too many Styrofoam bananas, coconut mushrooms or representatives of the mysteriously resilient mojo/fruit salad duopoly - these are sweets you'll be seeing again 2 hours hence on the wasteground behind the prefabs, like old friends.

Above all this sits the 'adult shelf' stocking swanky dinner party fare such as Black Magic, Dairy Box (the winsome lady on the top of a big two-pound box cloaked in a tell-tale Miss Havisham layer of dust), the dadcentric Spartan hard centres and Terry's Pyramints. Never mind 'gentlemen's relaxation periodicals', once upon a time anything placed 5' 5" or more above ground level instantly attained an aura of grown-up mystery. Height equalled sophistication. This despite the continuing popularity of Eli Woods and Tommy Cooper.

And of course, every proper shop of this kind has a mysterious vestibule which lies behind a mystical curtain of blue and orange plastic fly-proof strips, full of wooden shelves lined with wax paper in a red gingham check or wavy blue line pattern, affixed by drawing pins on the underside, yellowing and brittle in what sun there is straining through the tiny square rear window, which some obliging soul has partially cleared of dust with the finger-daubed legend 'DALGLISH 78'.

This is a sort of half-shop, half-storeroom area, which is kind of exciting as you're never sure if you're actually allowed in here, but generally contains a lot of dull, non-child-friendly sundries. Odd-looking paper-bagged bread, in particular the oddly disturbing 'milk roll'. Cylindrical and corrugated, everything about this weird, OAP-endorsed loaf seems wrong, resembling not so much bread as we know it but a calcified version of the wobbly tube of 'solid nourishment' perpetually bisected on Pedigree Chum ads.

Other oddities hang about, ever-present, never bought. A faded card bears brown shoelaces, folded up in little paper tubes. There are always exactly four missing. Great big Ever Ready batteries, plastic coated and the size of a Tea-Hee mug, present their weird spring contacts to the air. What are they ever used in? A cardboard presentation tray of sachets of Rise 'N' Shine, or some other alchemically powdered 'orange drink', defy you to guess their age.

And at the bottom of the ninth circle sits the mystery box, a rough cardboard pallet containing as sorted small tinned items that could have been there years ( and probably have, judging by the circular rusty grooves they appear to have worn in the base of the box). Toast Toppers, pea and ham baby food, Brasso, Colman's Mustard Powder, DioCalm - you pays your 10p and you quite literally takes your chance. But of course nobody does. Although Mrs Michinson's boy likes to rummage around in there of an afternoon. Always said he was a bit funny.

Coming up in five months' time: The Co-op at Christmas.