CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
As Bobby Moore lifted the World Cup at Wembley...
CHEERING
..the summer of 1966 became the stuff of legend.
We were on top of the world.
The euphoria still hasn't worn off 50 years later.
In that moment, Britain went from grainy black and white
to glorious Technicolor,
and across the country, people's lives were doing the same.
We love talking about many, many subjects, but here's something.
1966, it was such an exciting time.
What were you doing?
Revolutionary times, without a doubt.
I just had sex with someone.
I didn't really bother to get clearance from anyone.
Erm...
Did you take drugs?
Did you do blueys?
Would you call keep-awake pills drugs today?
Do you remember the World Cup?
Men in short shorts.
Oh, happy days!
That's me there. I used to score with a lot of girls!
It was a golden moment for Britain - the peak of the '60s wave -
but what was life really like at the time?
The big problem in those days for me was my sexuality,
because it was illegal.
So, you live a lie.
'66, I was living a lie.
We were caught between the old world and the new.
I honestly never felt, at any time during 1966, secure,
and one was just sort of hoping,
digging in until something good came along.
It's interesting, isn't it? 1966.
Give us a ring.
CHEERING
We all remember the World Cup final,
but what about the other 364 days of the year?
The real revolution of '66 was happening
far away from the football pitch,
in the lives of a new generation who would shape modern Britain.
As the bells struck 12 and 1966 began,
23-year-old Chris and 18-year-old Linda were seeing in the New Year
in Central London.
They had no idea what was just around the corner.
To celebrate New Year's Eve,
I went with some friends to the Blind Beggar pub.
A few of the lads that we'd met took us back to the train.
We happened to be talking about where we were going and I said,
"Oh, I'm going to Barking."
And they both said, "No, you're not. The train's going the wrong way."
And I went, "Oh, no."
Chris said to me, "I'll take you home, if you like."
I was shy, to be honest - very shy.
It was meeting Linda that brought me out of myself.
So, for me to have picked up Linda the way I did
was totally out of character,
so something must have happened, mustn't it?
MUSIC: Land Of 1,000 Dances by Wilson Pickett
Chris wasn't the only one who was feeling more confident.
The grey post-war days of the 1950s were being swept away by
a new generation determined to live a very different kind of life.
21 years on from the end of the war, modern Britain was coming of age.
I was aware that things were changing, usually through music.
Everything was different from the way Ma and Pa
and Uncle John and Uncle Bill had done it.
It was a freedom in the '60s, because we had nobody to follow.
There was no... "the generation before".
The older ones, well, stayed at home, I should imagine,
but the youngsters thought it belonged to them.
You know, if you wanted to do it, you did it.
If you wanted to wear whatever you wore, you wore it, so...
You were there to enjoy, you know, so I did.
We did. Yeah, we did. Yeah.
In 1966, over 40% of the population were under 25 -
including every member of the Beatles and the Stones.
In just a few short years,
British pop music had conquered the globe
and inspired a huge shift in attitudes at home.
Time Magazine declared the capital to be "swinging",
and it certainly seemed to be true.
London in 1966 is the equivalent of Florence during the Renaissance,
or something. It's like the peak, the place to be, and I was there.
Much of London was still bomb-damaged and swathed in smog,
but in the very centre was a splash of colour - Soho.
Fashionable Carnaby Street was the destination by day, but after dark,
there was only one place to be seen for the true music fan -
a rough and ready basement club called the Flamingo.
Well, the thing about the Flamingo was it was really packed and sweaty.
It was a really hot atmosphere.
There was a bit of an edge to the Flamingo.
There was a bit of a dodgy... gangster vibe about it.
It was fabulous.
Run by Johnny Gunnell and his brother Rik,
the Flamingo often stayed open until dawn.
In '66, Eddie Tan-Tan was playing trumpet
for Georgie Fame's house band, the Blue Flames,
though sometimes, it was more than just music
keeping the party jumping.
The raids. The raids. Oh, the raids! The red...
The red light would come on and everybody throwing it on the floor.
I got jailed at one of those nights.
He arrested me, and took me to West End Central. Yeah.
They searched me - I had £600 on me.
Yeah, yeah. £600. Yeah.
"Ha! Purple heart dealer, are ya?"
Ah, yeah!
In the whole of London,
where else could you find a club like the Flamingo? No, no...
Nowhere. There wasn't even one that was close.
For the 23-year-old GI Geno Washington,
the Flamingo was like a second home.
It's got a great vibration in there.
What you need, an American away from home...
it's just so right, this music.
The Flamingo was soon to give Geno his big break.
I went and asked Georgie, "Could I sing a song with your band and you?"
He said, "Can you sing?"
I said, "Sing?
"Well, my sister is in Martha and the Vandellas
"and my auntie is Dinah Washington."
Of course, I'm lying, you know.
I'm lying my tail off.
They started up and I hit that singing, man,
and the house was rocking. You know?
I was very popular with the ladies, you know?
Yes, yes, yes. I didn't have to beg no more.
On the edge of Soho,
19-year-old Janet was in her first year of architectural school,
one of only a handful of girls in her year.
When I go see Georgie Fame, that's...
In my diary, that's rated as just about as important
as everything else.
"Go to see Georgie Flame at the Flamingo," 9th of July.
11th of July, "Start work, Wembley, four weeks. Yuck."
By the summer of 1966,
the college had said we have to have work experience.
We had to work in a real architect's office.
I thought, "Oh, my God, it's real people."
Anyway, my father,
he pulled a load of strings to get me a job
as a temporary architectural assistant, and he said,
"For Christ's sake, whatever you do, don't embarrass me."
And yet I turned up at their offices on Wembley High Road
in a very, very short miniskirt with the silver hair
and they asked me if I was the new secretary.
I went, "No, I'm the new architect!"
And they just looked ill.
To add to everything, it was the World Cup.
England were at Wembley.
You couldn't get in or out or anywhere near the building.
It was like World Cup fever,
including with my dad,
and all I was doing was sitting in an office
trying to draw a bloody sports centre.
I've actually found two of my payslips.
"JV Bull, 23rd of July."
This is 1966,
so I'm a temporary architectural assistant,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, tax.
"Net, £10.16."
No wonder I made all my own clothes!
The average weekly wage for a woman in 1966 was £12,
while men were earning £23.
Despite this inequality,
wages had been on the rise and much of the '60s optimism came from
having a bit more money in our pockets.
'66 was the peak of British industry.
Our factories were producing more than they ever had before
and they ever would again.
In the Midlands, Sandi was 21 years old
and working at the Botterill boot factory.
We were making all sports footwear, really,
and I can remember working on running shoes, mainly,
and football boots.
Ordinarily, making football boots wasn't anything to shout about,
but the impending World Cup had the factory buzzing with excitement.
I think we lived in hope, because you do, don't you?
"Oh, wouldn't it be lovely if they did win?"
Especially, you know, being in England, as well.
But Sandi was about to play a bigger role in the World Cup
than anyone could have imagined.
Somebody along the line said,
"Oh, we're going to do the World Cup football boots.
"Better not mess them up."
I went home and told my dad, and he was over the moon
because he was a sports fanatic.
He said, "That's really, really good."
"Oh, is it?" He said, "Yes. It's really good." You know?
And I think he made some kind of remark.
"Well, if you're helping make them, girl, they're bound to win."
The boots were being made for the German brand Puma,
and once finished,
they were shipped off ready for the England team's first match.
It was magical, I think.
I was young and it was just really nice to be part of something
that was so important at that time to our country.
You know, because we'd had the really dark days when I was a child,
of just after the war,
and then you've got this really nice golden era.
You were a lot more free than you had been in the past, I think,
and it was just nice to be able to be part of something
that was national.
Young women were feeling these new freedoms most keenly.
Though many still married young,
new opportunities were starting to open up.
Even outside of the big cities, things were changing.
In Cornwall, 20-year-old secretary Gwyn Haslock had taken up
the new sport of surfing.
MUSIC: Good Vibrations by The Beach Boys
# Good, good, good Good vibrations... #
This is the first beach that I surfed in a competition in 1966.
I had to enter with the men because there was
no lady competitor, so as far as I was concerned,
we were just surfers.
Well, in '66, it was really the start of a whole way of life.
Gwyn caught that revolutionary wave and never looked back.
She went on to become our first female surf champion.
Having an older brother who was four years older than me,
he was a very good surfer, so whatever my brother did,
I wanted to do as well.
# Ah... #
50 years on, Gwyn still surfs most days.
# I don't know where but she sends me there... #
I just liked to get out on the water as much as I could,
and I'm one of these people that if the surf looks good, get in there,
and it's just freedom, really, from everywhere else.
MUSIC: Groovy Kind Of Love by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders
# When I'm feeling blue All I have to do... #
Just outside London,
Chris and Linda had been dating almost every night
for six whole weeks.
We usually went to the cinema locally, didn't we?
Yes. But on Valentine's Day we went into London to see
The Sound Of Music, didn't we? We did.
We had a lovely evening and we came home on the train
and we went back to your house, didn't we?
And... I think you said...
I was certainly getting ready to propose, but...
You said to me, "Will you..."
And I said, "Marry you? Yes!"
Linda got it out first.
It was the 14th of February, after all.
That's right, and it was 1966.
# When I taste your lips... #
For all the talk of '66 swinging,
most of Britain was still pretty uptight about sex.
If you didn't have a ring on your finger,
then you shouldn't be sharing a bed.
# Baby, you and me Got a groovy kind of love... #
Michael Palin was 22 and heading to London to find work.
# A groovy kind of love... #
At the start of 1966, my girlfriend, who I'd met in 1959,
she and I decided we wanted to get married.
It was just the only way we could really live together at that time.
Slight disapproval if you were, you know, sort of
unmarried and living together.
So, the big thing at the beginning of '66 was to get married
and to find enough work to pay for our life together.
# Got a groovy kind of love... #
Michael wasn't alone.
96% of couples who got married in 1966 hadn't lived together
But attitudes were changing fast.
The BBC even produced this documentary
about the thorny issue of cohabitation.
I think a lot of young people who live together do it for kicks,
do it to be smart and because it's a kind of "in" thing to do.
There'll probably be a great big swing of the pendulum
when the children of this generation
will go back to being frightfully Victorian.
MUSIC: It's Not Unusual by Tom Jones
Well, that didn't turn out to be true.
Sex was here to stay.
Everything was talked about
in a way it hadn't been about five or six years before.
I remember buying my first condom in London.
You know, I was terrified, and I went into the shop
which just said "Durex" in enormous letters.
So I thought, well, that must be OK, then.
I didn't just want to go into a chemist and...
HE MUMBLES "Condom, please."
"Excuse me, this is a book shop."
I mean, I managed to lose my virginity at about...
I think I was about 15. It took a lot of doing.
I had asked someone before and they weren't very keen
because I was so young, and I was really curious.
And that was it - it was like, job done.
Not everyone was so keen to dispatch their virginity.
In Skegness, Terri Channon was 21 and starting the holiday season
as a Redcoat at Butlins.
It was still a popular family destination, but by 1966,
the camps had acquired a bit of a reputation.
I'd got the contract to go to Butlins,
and Mum and Dad were... not really happy about it.
And one of my really good friends, her mum said to my mum,
"You shouldn't let her go to Butlins.
"It's only tarts and slappers who go to Butlins
"and she'll come back pregnant."
My mum was mortified and it really, really hurt her and upset her.
So I think with that, that was probably in my mind
that I wasn't ever going to let that happen.
I was never going to let my mum and dad down.
My cousin had a baby out of wedlock and that was absolutely frowned on.
I always remember her walking down the aisle with a rather large
bouquet of flowers in front of an off-white dress covering the bump.
Dave Manvell was 17 and living at home in Sheffield.
I know people that did get their girlfriends pregnant.
Some of them either kept the child, or they were adopted.
Having been in that position myself,
I remember going home and saying to my mum and dad,
"I've got a girlfriend pregnant."
My dad said to me, "What are you going to do?"
So I just said, "Oh, I'm going to marry her."
And we just carried on, that was it.
The pill had become available in 1961,
so you might think that everyone was over it by 1966,
that the fear of pregnancy had faded into the past,
but the truth is rather different.
By 1966, there were still fewer than 500,000 women actually on the pill.
It was expensive, hard to get hold of,
and, for some, morally questionable.
The doctor would turn round and ask you, had you not got any morals?
They would try to convince you that you were morally wrong
in wanting contraceptives.
You couldn't go to a doctor for advice.
Yeah, I'm quite convinced you wouldn't get it.
GPs were instructed to only prescribe the pill
to married women -
with the written permission of their husbands, of course.
Why couldn't I have sex with whoever I wanted?
Why should someone else decide?
I still get angry about it.
With no access to the pill and still doing her A-levels,
Janet discovered she was pregnant.
Abortion was illegal, but backstreet practitioners were commonplace.
I realised I was pregnant and there was no pill or anything, then,
and someone told me about somewhere I could go in Camden Town,
or Kentish Town, and the woman would do it for 25 quid.
I waited until a weekend when my parents had gone away
and I phoned this woman up and I went up there.
I don't really want to go into details,
but it wasn't very pleasant.
And...I came back to Perivale and I lost a lot of blood, but I was fine,
and then just went back to school on Monday.
Actually, I can't tell you it affected me mentally.
I just felt a huge sense of relief.
I mean, obviously now you'd think,
"Oh, God, you let a woman do stuff to you with washing-up liquid,
"or whatever it was."
God knows what it was.
But I had tried before to take pills.
You used to go to these chemists around Leicester Square
and ask for this, that and the other, but they didn't work.
An estimated 100,000 illegal abortions were carried out
every year during the '60s.
A bill to legalise failed in 1966,
but was finally passed the following year.
It didn't change the country overnight, but gradually women
began to have more control over their bodies and their lives.
Back in Barking, anticipation was building for the big event.
No, not that one.
Chris and Linda's wedding!
We got married on June the 16th.
On the 11th.
June the 11th, yes. June the 11th.
And then we went to Stratford-upon-Avon
for our honeymoon. Yes.
We stayed in a hotel.
But somebody had brought a book with him.
Had I? Yes.
He always did things right, and he still does,
and he always did things by the book,
and we sat in bed with a book
telling us exactly how to do it.
I do not remember this! Oh, yes, you did.
You used to be able to go into the chemist
and there'd be a stand of books on haemorrhoids and diabetes
and having a baby,
and one of them was on sex.
# Yeah, yeah, yeah Well, here it comes... #
Sex manuals were a thriving market in 1966, and a happy marriage
promoted as the cornerstone of respectable adult life.
Over on the Wirral,
19-year-old Pete Price realised that his own feelings about sex
were not being explained in a pamphlet.
When I started to feel the way I felt,
I didn't know what I was feeling.
You know, it wasn't talked about. It was still a criminal activity.
It was illegal to be gay.
In 1966, being gay could feel like a life sentence,
and that wasn't far off the truth.
If caught or even suspected of homosexuality,
you faced a prison term.
I lived a lie. I lived a lie.
I went out with girls,
I dabbled with a couple of pals who were experimenting with sex,
but it was a lie.
The whole thing was a lie because I was frightened.
When you got married,
were you consciously aware of the fact that you were
marrying somebody with homosexual tendencies? No.
I was marrying somebody I loved, and that was it.
'This woman married a homosexual.
'Twice during their marriage, he was arrested for importuning.
'The second time he killed himself rather than face
'the punishment of a court and the disgust of his friends.'
Still living at home with his mum,
Pete had to be careful to hide his secret.
I came home one Thursday night, 2am in the morning,
and my mother was lying in bed, and normally she wasn't awake,
and she had a letter in her hand, which had fallen out of my bureau,
which was referring to other guys.
And my mother said, "What's this?"
And she was white as a sheet, and I was white as a sheet,
and I thought, "It's got to be done,"
and I said, "I'm homosexual."
To which she was physically sick - absolutely distraught.
She cried herself to sleep for three years.
There wasn't so much a gay scene in Liverpool as a gay pub.
The Magic Clock offered Pete a rare opportunity to let his guard down -
once he made it inside, that is.
So, this was the area where it was all happening,
and the Magic Clock was about here.
It was a small pub, but we had to be careful when we went there,
because of the theatre.
Because all the people coming out of the theatre,
if they saw you, what were you doing?
Going into a gay bar.
You couldn't go to a gay bar, and it was really weird.
So we would wait outside and then somebody would say,
"Now! Come on in."
Gay life was so well hidden in '66, most people didn't know it existed.
What was gay? No idea, because it didn't become part of the game.
You know, the biggest stars in the world may have been gay
but we didn't know, and we didn't really care.
Not the era I'm talking about - not '66.
Maybe in sophisticated London,
maybe, but not in Sheffield.
Like Liverpool, Sheffield was a city of macho men and heavy industry.
Sheffield was a tough city.
Steel and tough, tough people.
A peculiar mix of everything,
because it was still the old Sheffield -
the steelworks were still there.
Yeah, you were factory fodder.
When you failed your 11-plus, that was it.
Nobody wanted to know.
The Beatles may have made working-class accents cool,
but the majority of work available in Sheffield
was still hard manual labour.
Peter Stringfellow had found his strengths lay elsewhere
and got a job as a door-to-door salesman
touting carpets to housewives.
I could talk. You know, too much.
I could talk, which transferred into being a salesman.
I didn't know what a salesman was.
I just would talk to people about what I was trying to sell them
and somehow it worked.
But that also got me into trouble, and I actually...
transferred some stock from the company I was working for
into my car, which became mine, and I mixed it up,
their stock with my property.
In other words, I was stealing their carpets.
And I starting selling those for cash,
knocking on doors and selling them.
And I went, "Wahey, this is a lot of money."
Then someone reported these carpets going missing
and I went to court, and the magistrate decided
that I needed teaching a lesson.
I was 20 years old, just married.
My wife was about...was pregnant, and he really sussed me,
so he sent me to prison for three months.
I thought that was the end of my life. That was me finished.
You couldn't come out of prison in those days and get a job.
You were finished. There was no, like, "Give this boy a chance."
You know? No. They liked me.
I had about three or four interviews...
They liked me, but no way were they going to give me a job.
Michael had left Sheffield for Cambridge University
a few years earlier,
but was still very involved with the fortunes of
the local football teams.
Sheffield Wednesday were in the cup final.
This meant more to me than the World Cup in any shape or form.
We were coasting home and suddenly, Everton we were playing,
scored two late goals.
It was an absolute disaster. I felt absolutely mortified.
I'm a Sheffield United supporter and this was Sheffield Wednesday,
but it was because I was from Sheffield.
I wanted - so much wanted - them to win in the World Cup year.
The FA Cup had whet our appetites.
Television sets were flying off the shelves
as we got ready for the World Cup.
For the first time, the matches would be broadcast live,
and by the summer, nine in every ten homes owned a TV.
The growing popularity of television provided Michael
with his very first job,
presenting a new youth show, appropriately called "Now!".
The ordinary pop show, Ready Steady Go! and Top Of The Pops
had sort of led the way but there was something more now.
So I was there, really, to do little comedy links
and I happened to be able to do a Harold Wilson accent.
AS HAROLD WILSON: "Hello, good evening. This is your Prime Minister here."
And the rest of it was doing all sorts of strange things.
I remember acting with a wonderful actor called Arthur Mullard
who did a piece where I'm playing "dum-dum-dum-dum"
and ended up smashing the piano in the middle of a field.
So whatever the guys wrote,
I would have to do these little sort of links.
Anarchic television was proving popular,
and it wasn't long before a new opportunity came along for Michael.
Quite out of the blue, the BBC rang up and said,
"We've got this new series called The Frost Report.
"It's going to have a theme to it each week.
"David Frost is going to present it.
"There are going to be sketches.
"We've got a cast of ten new performers -
"Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett,
"and a man called John Cleese you might have heard of."
I said, "Oh, yes, I've heard of him from Cambridge."
LAUGHTER Does it hurt you if I do this?
LAUGHTER
Of course it does!
Oh, you see, it hurts.
"And we would like you to submit material."
A new kind of comedy was being born.
The Frost Report brought together all of the British Monty Pythons
for the very first time.
The first thing we sold to them - the Two Ronnies did it -
was just a police man coming in and saying...
Good morning, Super.
Morning, Wonderful. LAUGHTER
'It was a very silly thing.'
The embers were burning.
Television was changing as quickly as we were.
In 1966, the BBC even announced the move to colour broadcasting,
but this radical innovation
didn't apply to the colour of the people appearing on it.
It was completely dominated by white people,
and when they saw a black face on the television
they used to call everybody and say,
"Come, come! There's a black person on the television!"
Well, "a coloured person on the television".
Nina Baden-Semper became a huge star in the '70s,
appearing in the frankly quite racist sitcom Love Thy Neighbour.
Perhaps we ought to go next door
and introduce ourselves to our new neighbours.
Come on. Let's get settled in first.
I can't help feeling that we are going to come as
a surprise to them. If you ask me,
I'd say it'll be more of a shock. LAUGHTER
But back in 1966,
she had arrived from Trinidad and was struggling to find work.
There weren't many parts written for women, for a start -
therefore, they weren't many parts written for black women,
so it was...
You had to take whatever there was in those days, you know?
You didn't have a choice, really.
There weren't very many black people around so it was difficult for them
to identify with us, you know?
Because they treated us with suspicion because of the colour.
They didn't know - it was ignorance.
In 1966, a new sitcom appeared on our screens that captured
that ignorance perfectly - Till Death Us Do Part.
I mean, the ones I'm talking about, they're your proper blacks,
ain't they? The ones that was born in the jungle, your natives.
I mean, don't tell me they're educated.
Half of them are still eating each other.
Poor devils. You talk such ruddy nonsense, the pair of you.
Oi, oi, oi! That's enough of that! What?
All that swearing. I won't have it. LAUGHTER
What's the matter with these nails, then?
The programme quickly became the most-watched show on television.
The irascible Alf Garnett and his bigoted, racist tirades
drew an incredible 16 million viewers an episode.
Though Till Death Us Do Part was intended as satire,
it certainly reflected some very real attitudes of 1966.
I've got a lovely story from my sister, actually,
who is a nurse and the surgeon said to her, "Oh, Miss Baden-Semper,
"how come you speak such good English?"
And she said, "Well, an Englishman lived in the tree next to mine."
How did you find that, Geno? The black-white thing in those days?
How did you hack it?
Well, I just...
Went with the flow. ..like most GIs, stayed away from the whites.
Yeah. Cos, you know, it's just trouble.
It's going to cause trouble and all of that,
and you go somewhere where blacks hang out. Hmm.
As a matter of fact, in England, you have a country, a variety,
the changes of the seasons,
and it has entered into the people themselves,
yet the Englishman - or the white man, for that matter -
doesn't want the variety of the human species.
He likes to see white only.
The impending World Cup only added to the international feel
of Britain in 1966.
Alongside the footballers,
thousands of migrants were arriving to make a new life here.
The Asian population of the UK had quadrupled in the five years
leading up to '66.
Yasmin Sheikh was 21 and had arrived in Leicester from East Africa
to live with her sister and brother.
The city now has an abundance of Asian shops,
but back then you were lucky to find a bulb of garlic.
This is tamarind.
Bittersweet - you make chutney out of this.
Lovely stuff.
Ladies' fingers - okra.
Not gentlemen's fingers, not men's fingers.
Thank God somewhere the women got the preference!
Yasmin and Parveen had been teachers in East Africa and found work at
a local school, changing quickly with the influx of new faces.
I used to volunteer to sit with the kids,
only to eat the dessert,
because I loved the English, you know, puddings and all those things.
Spotted Dick? Spotted Dick with custard.
Everyone was talking against school meals but we loved them, didn't we?
Yes, yes. Because it was a change for us.
The first school I taught was Medway Junior School
and that is myself on this side here.
And you can see the diversity at that time
because of the influx of the immigrants.
Many of the new arrivals didn't speak any English at all,
so for a while, daily life was mystifying.
One of our friends was a doctor,
and he was having problems because the health visitors were not allowed
in the homes of the women who had just delivered a baby
because they were suspicious, "Why this woman is coming?"
They had no idea that that's part of the system here.
So he then remembered that these two sisters can speak the language,
and we suggested that because we can't expect these women,
who had never been to school in their life,
to learn English straight away,
but we thought if the health visitors can pick up
a few greeting words and build a bridge,
so I had to teach Urdu in 1966 to the health visitors.
Like...
SHE SPEAKS URDU
You know, very friendly words.
And they went to these homes and they would come and greet them
and the women were, "Oh, Urdu!
"That you can speak Urdu. Oh, come, come, come."
And they would let them come in.
And then the problem was they wouldn't let them go,
because that's the Asian culture, you know,
until they've fed them so much.
It wasn't only new arrivals who had stigma to overcome.
In Sheffield, Peter had served his time and needed to earn money.
The booming youth scene provided the perfect opportunity.
Alongside his brother Geoff, he decided to open a music venue.
That was another club,
I had great times and he helped me when he could -
Pete Stringfellow,
the Mojo Club.
'65 and '66, I was having an absolute ball.
I was having a great time in my King Mojo Club.
I'd got an ear for music.
I heard something, I liked it, I booked them.
In '66, Dave and Paul were working for the electricity board
and the department store C&A,
but they were at the club every night it was open.
Paul even got a job painting psychedelic murals on the wall.
'66, it was a whole world for me.
Tuesdays, Thursdays was records.
Friday, Saturday, Sunday could be live music, a live band.
We got all the top London heights
that we would never have seen in Sheffield.
So we got everybody - Rod Stewart, Elton John...
The Kinks, Pink Floyd, and on and on it goes.
The Who were so loud,
I think you could have heard them in Peterborough.
What do you reckon was one of your favourite nights in the Mojo?
The one that I remember is the Small Faces.
And I'll tell you another one, Ben E King. You know why?
Because he invited me to sing. You sang. You sang.
I sang with him, yeah.
I sang with Ben E King, and I can't sing.
It gives you a little idea how big that stage was. Remember?
Well, I couldn't figure out how Little Stevie Wonder
and his orchestra... And his orchestra.
..and Ike and Tina Turner and their big band.
And the Ikettes. Yeah, how they all fit on.
MUSIC: My Generation by The Who
When the groups weren't playing, you had to fill in time.
I had a piccalilli sandwich eating competition.
I'd have dancing competitions.
Anything to keep them focused, because if you didn't,
a fight would start.
A fight would start, bang, wallop, crash,
and it would only stop when the group came on.
The King Mojo didn't look like any club you'd see today -
a suburban house on a residential street -
but it became the beating heart of the music scene in Sheffield,
and Peter was the king.
We'd invented all-nighters, which came from London -
a club called the Flamingo which had all-nighters
with all the blues boys.
And we were booking some of the biggest soul names in the world
for 4am in the morning, cos there was nowhere else would book them.
Of course, for the few years it was there,
the neighbours were going mad.
They thought they was the almighties.
That's how the Stringfellows worked.
They just wanted to push everyone around.
They didn't think about the children or the old people or anyone else,
or the residents.
The police soon had Peter in their sights, again.
He was back in court, this time to try and save his club.
Everyone outside gets an idea that it's nothing but a dirty cellar,
when, in fact, it's just a wonderland for young people.
They've got to come inside to assess this.
Even the magistrates never came in.
Nobody is interested, that's what it really was.
They just want to get rid of the Mojo, and that's it.
The story goes that the guy was breeding budgies
next door to the yard as you come into the Mojo Club,
and when we went to court and I was asking for
a licence and they were opposing,
and he went up in front of the magistrates
and he actually said, this guy,
"Look, I've been breeding budgies all my life.
"Since that Mojo has had the all-nighters,
"all those eggs have cracked and we've never had a new budgie."
And the magistrate went, "Oh, that's terrible. That's awful."
And they turned the licence down.
I blame the budgies.
The authorities may have been clamping down,
but the genie was out of the bottle.
The morals and attitudes of the older generation
were fast becoming a thing of the past.
After six months of marriage, my husband became allergic to...
To latex... Which is... ..so I could no longer use condoms.
We had to start using the pill, and my mum said,
"It's no good going to see your doctor here,
"because she's Catholic and she won't prescribe the pill."
So you went to your doctor, didn't you?
And he said, "Tell Linda to come to me and I'll prescribe it to her,"
because I wasn't on his list, and so I didn't get pregnant.
Chris and Linda weren't the only ones looking for medical advice.
In Liverpool, Pete and his mum had booked an appointment with her GP.
We went to the doctor because it was seen as a medical problem.
The doctor informed my mother that I could be cured of
being a homosexual.
There was a treatment, if I went to a mental institute in Chester.
They put me into this place with a false name,
which I had to have, a false name, because I was a criminal.
And then the big day came when I had to have my treatment
and what they did was they recorded me talking about sex for an hour
on a Grundy TK20,
the old tape recorders, I'll always remember that.
And they would ask me everything about sex,
but using the graphic description.
They then put me in a room with no windows with a male nurse
and I was in a bed and I had magazines, dirty magazines.
And then they asked me what I drank,
and I drank Guinness in those days, so there was cases of Guinness.
So, I listen to the tape, drink the Guinness and look at the books,
and halfway through the hour, they injected me,
which made me vomit and also made me go to the toilet.
I sat in my own excrement and my own vomit, and that lasted an hour,
and then they did it again and again and again and for 72 hours.
There wasn't much left of me at the end of it.
I wasn't being cured of being gay.
All I was was lying there thinking,
"I am never going to be seen again alive
"because nobody knows I'm in here cos I'm under a false name.
"I'll never, ever get out of here."
And I was really, really frightened.
That's all I was thinking of, so I said, "I want out."
And from that day onwards, I said, "Enough is enough.
"I've got to try and accept who and what I am."
MUSIC: I Feel Good by James Brown
# Whoa I feel good... #
Mod, rocker, moon maiden or dandy,
your clothes told the world who you were in 1966.
Fashion had exploded into a sea of colour and combustible nylon.
I can't believe I walked down the street in Liverpool
in a pair of blue leather hot pants with Mickey Mouse braces
and a leather cloak,
and I didn't think I was gay.
I thought I was getting away with it.
I really shake my head in disbelief at what I got away with.
# So nice, so nice I got you... #
Pete wasn't the only one stretching his sartorial wings.
Let's be honest, we were all dressing like lunatics.
Well, apart from Chris, maybe.
You had a knitted tie.
I had a knitted tie, yes.
I can still see the knitted tie.
It was the same width all the way down with a square end. Bottom.
Well, I was probably just on the transition from corduroy...
to jeans, you know?
I looked fantastic in 1966.
I used to wear all the modern clothes
and my favourite shop was Biba.
Well, here's a little Biba dress, very nice, very simple.
It so revolutionised the whole thing - a very clever lady.
I loved Biba.
They always produced nice swimsuits, I think, in the '60s.
They were quite fashionable, weren't they?
And the bathing hats, they were very flowery.
Lots of hair, lots of eyelashes -
the traditional, iconic Twiggy look.
Very short skirts, but my legs were better then.
They had bikinis, but not me because I've always been quite buxom,
as I would say, and if I dived under a wave,
the bikini wouldn't be there at the top any more,
so I never liked bikinis.
It would be off!
Here's another one, with a short skirt.
and we always had to wear boots with it
because it was the fashion in those days.
We just thought we could do anything.
We were so cocky, it was unbelievable,
and I just thought,
"Well, I might have funny teeth and glasses,
"but, you know, I look great."
But we did look and dress outlandish.
And if you really wanted to look unique, well,
you had to break out the needle and thread.
From the age of 14,
I'd always made loads of my own clothes,
and I didn't want to look like anybody else.
I made myself a silver leather coat,
and it just looked fabulous.
Janet's silver jacket was soon to land her a part
in a legendary film of '66.
Set in swinging London,
Blow-Up follows a young mod photographer in a world of fashion,
pop music and easy sex.
The Italian film director Antonioni was looking for extras
at Janet's university.
He needed to shoot in a nightclub,
and he was using Jeff Beck and the Yardbirds to play in the nightclub,
so he needed a lot of London trendies.
Antonioni picked me out,
and I got to dance with this black guy,
and we got extra money, and I remember the others got the hump
cos I got action.
The others had to stand around, and I was, like, dancing.
'66 may have been swinging for London singles, but in Leicester,
Yasmin realised that her sister's arranged marriage was in trouble.
'When I came here, it was like a grey cloud everywhere,
'and I thought,'
"What's happened to her?", you know? I mean...
this is not normal.
It was great to have her.
If she wasn't there...
..we wouldn't be here today.
SHE CHUCKLES
Yasmin arrived to discover that her Indian brother-in-law
was living with another woman, and had been for years.
My husband wasn't with me, he was with an English woman.
I didn't know. When I came, I found out.
He never stayed with me.
And in fact, I went to see him.
She saw him, she said,
"He's not good for you.
"Just forget him and leave him."
In 1966, Parveen did something unheard of in the Asian community -
she filed for a divorce.
Muslim women, it was unheard.
But what my ex-husband thought -
"She will not do anything, so I'll have English and Asian."
That's what he had in mind, but I said, "No way."
I'd rather be alone than as a second wife.
And I took the...
very difficult decision, but I did.
I think we set the precedent after that, didn't we?
SHE LAUGHS
A lot of Muslim girls started coming out of the deadlock, you know.
They realised that you can do it, you know?
You can't just suffer, while the man is having another woman on the side.
It wasn't just women who were asserting their rights.
In Belfast, sectarian prejudice meant that Catholics
were being treated as second-class citizens.
Jobs were being advertised "Protestant only,"
and many Catholic families were living in slum conditions.
But young Catholics in Northern Ireland
were growing in confidence, too.
Queens University student Eamonn McCann picked up a loud-hailer
and started campaigning for change.
'I was perhaps naive and romantic'
to believe that we were about to transcend,
to sweep over the old sectarian divides
because we were young, cool, international people.
Sadly, it wasn't to be, but it was a very attractive idea at the time.
For me, anyway.
Inspired by the civil rights demonstrations in America,
the students saw that peaceful protests could have a huge impact.
There was a tendency always within the Catholic community
to see ourselves as the equivalent of black people
in the United States.
Martin Luther King's speech would have been listened to and read
and celebrated as much, I think,
by young people in Northern Ireland
as by anybody outside the Afro-American people themselves.
The emerging civil rights movement offered many people hope
that change was on the way.
A huge housing estate was even being built on the Falls Road,
to provide better housing for the Catholics there.
Tommy Fisher was eight years old and living nearby
when he saw the Divis flats going up.
People were sold on the idea. It was going to be wonderful.
They were going to have central heating,
they were going to have baths.
A bath!
You know, I don't remember anyone having a bathroom.
You had a tin bath that was put in front of the fire.
Tough luck if you were the last one!
HE CHUCKLES
In 1966, the threat of violence in Northern Ireland felt very far away.
The peace didn't last long.
In the May of '66,
a loyalist paramilitary group called the UVF re-formed
amid rumours of a resurgence of IRA activity.
By June, they had killed two Catholic civilians -
John Scullion and Peter Ward.
For Eamonn McCann,
the killings seemed like the last gasp of the old sectarian ways.
But others saw what was to come.
My aunt Cissie said to me when we were marching for civil rights -
very, very early days - she said,
"Son, if you keep this up, we'll be burned out of our house."
HE GASPS
"Eh?" She says, "We'll be burned out of our house
"if you people keep up this marching in the streets and causing trouble."
"Yeah, right."
She was right.
She WAS burned out of her house just a couple of years later.
The Divis flats became an iconic image, not of progress,
but of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Those shots fired in '66 would echo for another 30 years.
America was influencing Britain in other ways, too.
In London, Geno was finding that his new career as a soul singer
was perfectly timed.
Black American artists were now leading a charge on the charts.
Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band.
Geno and his Ram Jam Band had become the hottest live act in town.
# You don't know like I know
# What that woman has done for me
# Cos in the morning... #
Geno became the biggest act ever to draw a crowd at the Mojo Club.
We could play him once a month, no problem.
It cannot be denied - we was the best house-rocker.
Geno! HE CLAPS RHYTHMICALLY
Geno's reputation as an electrifying live performer
meant that the Ram Jam Band were playing high up
on the festival bills that summer.
I just got me some new clothes out of Carnaby Cavern.
Off Carnaby Street, here.
I'm going to the festival. I'm looking sharp, I'm feeling sharp.
And we get there - the crowd dragged me out of the van
and put me on their shoulders, right?
Now, my trousers are all split, my butt is hanging out and everything.
You know what I mean?
They're carrying me through the audience, about 100 yards there,
and you got the Small Faces, they are playing, right?
Steve Marriott's doing his thing and everything,
and so when they put me up on the stage, he says,
"All right, you want the nigger, you can have him!"
HE LAUGHS
It didn't bother me, you know what I mean?
I was worried more about my trousers!
HE LAUGHS
# Come on, baby
# Come on, baby. #
CHEERING
Yeah!
Geno Washington.
Do you know why the flags are flying in Birmingham here today? Yes.
Why is it?
Oh, the World Cup.
You remember the excitement building, cos,
"Oh, we've got through that, we've got through that."
And sort of all of a sudden, we're in the final, aren't we?
And you think, "Oh, wow.
"Oh, we've got to stand a chance."
Who do you think's going to win? England, I hope.
Wer den Cup gewinnt?
The German!
World Cup fever had broken into a sweat.
England had got into the final, and the whole world was waiting to see
whether Alf's boys could beat their arch-enemy, West Germany.
I got out of going out to a wedding to watch the World Cup final.
Everybody was sort of full of World Cup football fever.
I wasn't even remotely interested in the World Cup.
In the Midlands, Sandi counted down the days,
waiting for the team to walk onto the pitch
wearing the Puma boots she had helped to make.
But the beautiful game was about to turn ugly.
Rival brand Adidas had offered the England players £1,000
to wear their boots instead.
Jack Charlton was so annoyed at the dealings
that he threatened to wear one Puma boot and one Adidas.
The day of the World Cup final arrived.
32 million Brits gathered around television sets to watch the game.
For the eagle-eyed, it looked like a clean sweep for Adidas,
but not quite.
One key player was wearing Puma boots.
I think the only person that actually wore those boots
was Gordon Banks, which was the goalkeeper.
I know he definitely had Puma boots,
cos I was quite a fan of Gordon Banks.
SHE CHUCKLES
I thought he was quite cute, the goalkeeper.
Even if you weren't rooting for England, for those 120 minutes,
the eyes of the world were on Britain,
in a year when more than just a football match hung in the balance.
It's the equaliser!
The first time I went to London, I got to Euston Station,
I took my coat off, put it on my shoulders,
got my cigarette holder out, and I minced down the platform,
and I was home.
We were taking control of our destiny.
It's in!
I went home, and my mother was shoving washing in the machine,
and I just looked at her and went, "Well, that's it, I'm off."
I just got a bag of stuff and walked out,
and I never went back home after that.
'66 put us on the path to the lives we live today.
A live album.
Cool. It sold.
"It sold?! Did it?
"What, it sold?!" HE LAUGHS
It kept bouncing from number two to five for 42 weeks.
We were making choices that would shape our entire lives.
Geoff Hurst saw an opening in the defence and achieved the hat-trick!
For Terri and her boyfriend Dave,
that day would stay with them forever.
'Dave walked me back to my little tiny poky chalet,'
and he proposed to me that night,
and I think it was because we were just on a bit of a high, really.
That was my sort of recollection of the World Cup,
was me getting engaged, really.
That was far more important to me than the World Cup.
It was lovely.
You know what?
SHE LAUGHS
They may have thought it was all over...
THEY LAUGH
But actually...
Oh, yeah...
..it had only just begun.
1966 changed our lives completely.
We're where we are today because of 1966, aren't we?
And you won the World Cup.
And West Ham won the World Cup.
# ..thunder
# Lightning
# The way you love me is frightening
# I'd better knock
# On wood
# Baby
# I'm not superstitious
# About you
# But I can't take no chance... #