Good Old Days, Bad TV.

The thing nobody tells you about the “good old days of music hall on TV” is that they were only “good” if you were over fifty, mildly tipsy, and had a fondness for jokes that relied heavily on the word cor. 

For everyone else specifically bored teenagers in the 1970s they were a form of psychological endurance training roughly equivalent to being trapped in a lift with a man who insists on telling you about his stamp collection.I speak here as that teenager. Or rather, as the ghostly echo of every teenager who ever slumped on a sagging sofa in 1976 while the BBC enthusiastically broadcast The Good Old Days, a TV programme that seemed to exist solely to remind you that entertainment used to involve a man in a top hat shouting “Hear hear!” while women in ostrich feathers sang songs about moonlight. If you were unlucky, your parents loved it. Mine adored it. They thought it was “proper entertainment,” by which they meant “performed by people who looked like they’d been carved from mahogany and polished with gin.”

The host would stride out, booming like a foghorn, and announce something thrilling like: “And now, Miss Gertie Blenkinsop will render a humorous ditty!” At which point the teenager, me,would sink further into the sofa, praying for a power cut, a meteor strike, or even a mild electrical fire. Anything to avoid another “humorous ditty,” which was never humorous and barely a ditty. It was usually a song about a cheeky lad who worked down the docks and had a habit of losing his trousers.Meanwhile, the audience an army of pensioners wearing hats last fashionable during the Crimean War would roar with laughter. 

They LOVED it. They laughed at jokes involving the phrase “my word!” They applauded songs that rhymed “merrily” with “verily.” They clapped in time, which was impressive because the time they clapped in was 1893.And there I was, a teenager whose idea of entertainment involved guitars, volume, and at least one person screaming about social injustice. Instead, I was watching a man in spats perform a monologue about a drunken vicar. My parents would say things like, “You don’t get talent like this anymore,” and I would think, “Good.”The worst part was the compulsory nature of it. In the 1970s, families had one television. One. It was a giant wooden box that hummed ominously and smelled faintly of dust and despair. If your parents wanted to watch music hall, you watched music hall. There was no escape. You couldn’t go to your room and stream something else. Streaming didn’t exist. Rooms barely existed. 

You sat there, trapped, while a man with a waxed moustache shouted “Roll up! Roll up!” as if he were trying to summon the dead.Every so often, the programme would attempt to appeal to “the younger generation” by including a “modern act,” which meant someone who had been considered edgy in 1952. They would perform a comedy routine involving a ladder, a bowler hat, and the phrase “steady on!” My parents would howl with laughter. I would consider running away to join a punk band.But here’s the thing: decades later, I find myself remembering it fondly. Not the acts they were terrible but the sheer absurdity of the whole experience. The velvet curtains. The gaslight aesthetic. The audience dressed like extras from Mary Poppins. The sense that the entire programme was being broadcast from a parallel universe where entertainment had been frozen in amber.And I realise now that the “good old days” weren’t good because of the content. They were good because they were shared. Families sat together, even if half the family was silently dying inside. You watched what was on. You endured it. You mocked it. You rolled your eyes so hard you saw your own brain. But you were there.

So yes, the music hall on TV was ridiculous. It was outdated. It was aggressively unhip. But it was also a strange, communal ritual—one that bored teenagers survived, parents adored, and everyone remembers with a mixture of horror and affection.