fossgoss

The 60’s:

Sunday morning bread and radio stories
The family down the road gets a TV
Space Race
The Beatles
GI Joe
Star Trek
Flower Power
Slim Jane Pretzel Sticks
The Avengers
Launch of Coronation Street
JFK assassination
Woodstock
Jimi and Jimmy and Janis
Martin Luther King
Vietnam
Anti War marches
The pill
The sexual revolution
Decimal currency
Pot
LSD

The 70’s

M*A*S*H
Thunderbirds
Munich Olympics, Nadia Comaneci
Elvis dies
The Walkman
Stevie Wonder
Saturday Night Fever,
Disco
The Sex Pistols
Dark side of the moon
Glam Rock,
Punk
Star Wars,
Grease
Cold War
Smurfs
Abba
Ready to Roll
Bay City Rollers
Fred Dagg
Jon Stevens
Monty Python
David Cassidy
Disco
Smack


The 80’s

Police violence during ’81 Springbok tour
Pat Benatar,
Police
New Wave
U2
Free Nelson Mandela
Dallas, Dynasty, Taxi, Charlie’s Angels, Fame
Madonna,
John Lennon
The death of disco
Rubik’s cube
ET
Thriller
Political correctness
Cold War, Challenger, Chernobyl, Mir, Berlin wall, Tianenmen Square
Aids, Apartheid protests, Stop the tour, Think Big
McPhail & Gadsby, A Dog’s Tale, The Exponents
Blam Blam Blam,
Duran Duran
Radio with Pictures
The Black Monday crash
Cocaine.
Shoulder pads
MDMA

The 90’s

Seal,
Nirvana
Grunge
Acid Jazz
Acid House
Seinfeld, Pulp Fiction, ER, X Files, Frasier
NYPD Blue
Nelson Mandela freed, collapse of Soviet Union and Apartheid
End of the cold war
Y2K bug
Unibomber, Columbine,
Princess Diana dies,
Clinton gets blown by Monica
Sarajevo,
Rwanda
Ebola,
Mad Cow
Internet
Broadband
Email
Generation Y
Epic Trance
Glow sticks
MMP

Technology for the nuclear (atomic) bomb and the technology to allow television broadcasts, were both discovered at about the same time – in the very early 40’s.

At that time, one can imagine that most people felt that the bomb would have the power to destroy the world.

And that they felt that television had the power to ‘save’ the world, through its ability to educate on a mass scale.


In fact, as pointed out by the unlikely Steve McQueen back in the day, the reverse has proved to be true.


The sheer scale of destruction capable with the nuclear bomb – as discovered by the Hiroshima ‘experiment’ – left the world in awe; fear to use it. It created the cold war. Had the nuclear bomb never been invented it is highly likely that Russia and the US would have been in a 'conventional' war with some fairly serious results and flow on effectys. Albeit swift, it could have made WW2 look like a kindergarten squabble.

Over the same era – the great saviour called television has hardly saved us.

It has dumbed us all down to a level that we just do not realise.

And it has served to feed a massive hunger for violence and crime and, indeed, it has promoted it to a disgusting degree.

It is one of the great ironies.

The world – for the last 50 years anyway, has been much safer, because of the bomb. Through the same era, our communities have become much less safe, because of television.

The safety delivered by the bomb however, will not be infinite. The technology is now within reach of very unsafe hands and it is my prediction that we will, sadly, witness a nuclear disaster of awesome (in the true sense of the word) consequence, by 2015.

Perhaps the Mayans’ predictions about December 2012 will prove to be correct.

But that is another story,

Way back in the day when I was a budding young 'radio announcer' on ZM - all the national programme guys had to speak like BBC guys and things like pronounciation and enunciation and projection were considered to be awfully important. We had a green room to prep in and on the wall were voice exercises with phrases that were written to exercise all the vowel sounds, mouth shapes etc so you sounded tickety boo when you went on air. Two voice exercises I remember are 'That's My Pie Bob' and 'Weave Bob Vie'. There were heaps more but basically you'd walk into the green room and there'd be all these guys like Geoff Robinsin, Joe Cote, Dick Weir and Philip Sherry all walking around saying - very loudly - stuff like 'Thats My Pie Bob, Weave Bob Vie' etc etc. We kinda got used to it, but to outsiders who happened along it must've looked like an institution for the totally insane. This one time, a typewriter repair man walked in, and he had a fucking pie! OK, you can imagine it now eh! he was fully gobsmacked. It went something like this:
That's My Pie Bob!
Eh - I just bought it at the cafe!!
That's my pie Bob!
No., it's mine. And my name is Carl, not fucking Bob!
Weave Bob, vie.

Another time my mate Chris was was leaning over the gestetner machine in the green room, and I crept up behind him, grabbed his hips and thrust my pelvic region into his butt-ocks, to kinda freak him out.

And he did freak out. Mainly because it wasn't my mate Chris - it was the gestetner service guy who I'd never seen before in my life - he was wearing the same goddam Sansabelt pants as Chris. I tried explaining but it really was impossible. "Sorry mate, I thought you were Chris' just didn't cut it with this dude, who was, by now, well wary of me. Well wary!
Never saw him again, last seen wandering out of Broadcasting House mumbling about the 'Pinko Faggot Homo Radio Guys" (sic).

Oh dear. All witnesses just threw their heads back and laughed and laughed and laughed a river of tears.

I wonder if that guy is still telling the story - somewhere - from his perspective of events? Dinner party fodder probably.