The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club

For the last few months on a Sunday night, Talking Pictures TV has been showing episodes of the Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, a seventies variety show supposedly coming live from a Manchester working men's club, but actually filmed at the studios of Granada TV on a midweek afternoon (the audience seems to consist largely of pensioners, no doubt drawn by the trays with pints of keg bitter on them being constantly filled at the bar and carried round the room by the waitresses).

The first thing to say is that most of the turns aren't very good. Bernard Manning as compere confirms that not only wasn't he very funny but he couldn't sing either, crooning in a strange cod Las Vegas lounge style. The two things that make it watchable are the comedian Colin Crompton, as the stereotypical committee chairman who makes humorous announcements between the acts, and the stars from beyond the Northern club circuit whom the legendary Granada producer Johnnie Hamp somehow managed to attract, like Howard Keel and Karl Denver. There is also occasionally some jazz from the traditional end of the genre (Kenny Ball, George Melly).

Some ITV regions, especially those in the South, apparently refused to show the programme until the early hours, deeming it too broad for their allegedly more sophisticated audiences, and you can sort of see their point. If you want to know why variety died, here is your answer.

Bear with us

I'm not sure what to make of the news that Hofmeister lager is being revived. I'm pretty sure I never drank it in the 80's when it was produced by Scottish & Newcastle, now trading as Heineken UK,

The entrepreneurs who have bought and relaunched the brand are working with Marston's to make it available in pubs again, although, unlike the original beer, the new Hofmeister will only be available in bottles, rather than the canned and draught versions of the past, has jumped in strength from 3.2 to 5% abv, is now a Helles rather than a Pils, and will be contract-brewed by a small Bavarian brewery just east of Munich, Schweiger.

Hofmeister was just one of a number of fake German-sounding lagers brewed in Britain in the 70's and 80's. Locally, Robinsons brewed Einhorn (German for "unicorn", the name of their brewery in Stockport) and Greenall's in Warrington Grünhalle, a very rough translation of the company's name.

That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore

The actor Warren Mitchell who died yesterday aged 89 was best known for playing the working-class racist Alf Garnett in the 1970's TV comedy Till Death Us Do Part.

Unlike out-and-out racist comedies of the 1970's like Love Thy Neighbour and Mind Your Language, it was Warren Mitchell and scriptwriter Johnny Speight's intention that viewers should laugh at, rather than with, the character they had created, but it didn't work out like that and Garnett became a hero to the bigots who took up his lines as their own. In an interview, Mitchell recounted how he, unlike West Ham-supporting Alf, a Spurs fan from an East London Jewish background, had once been embarrassed at a football match to become the subject of supportive chanting by racists on the terraces.

Garnett's views are challenged in the show, by his long-suffering wife and his left-wing "Scouse git" son-in-law (played by Labour-supporting actor Tony Booth), but they both tend to come off second best to him. A much better attempt to challenge racism by way of comedy in the 1970's was Rising Damp in which the reactionary views of boarding house landlord Rigsby are made to look ridiculous by a black and a white lodger, played by Don Warrington and Richard Beckinsale respectively, and the audience does end up laughing at his backward attitudes rather than having their prejudices reinforced.

All things bright and beautiful

The slot on the Yesterday channel in which Auf Wiedersehen, Pet ran this summer is now home to All Creatures Great and Small, the 1970's series about a veterinary practice in North Yorkshire in the 1930's.

Like Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, I remember watching All Creatures Great and Small as a child in the late 70's and 80's. Watching it again, it strikes me how enviable the vets' life is. Endless pints of draught Yorkshire bitter at the Drovers' Arms - drawn from a wooden barrel into a jug - followed by massive slabs of pork pie and a full cooked breakfast the next morning. It might not be the healthiest of lifestyles but it certainly looks like an enjoyable one,  more than making up for being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night by a farmer to stick your arm up the backside of his cow.

Back to the 70's

BBC2 are on a bit of a seventies theme at the moment with the drama White Heat - spanning the mid-sixties to early nineties - and the start last night of a new series about the decade.

I was born in 1970 so only have random memories of the time: having a bath by candlelight during the miners' strike in the early 70's, getting a week off primary school during the fuel tanker drivers' strike in the late 70's, the Silver Jubilee and Red Rum winning his third National in 1977, Björn Borg winning every Wimbledon in the second half of the decade, Jim Callaghan losing a vote of confidence by one and Margaret Thatcher winning the subsequent election in 1979 (the same year Manchester United lost the "five minute" FA Cup Final to Arsenal).

The series The 70's claimed last night that package holidays to Spain started the boom in wine sales. I'm sure that's true but as a beer drinker I was slightly irritated by the "everyone drinks wine all the time now" assumption. I don't at all, apart from the odd glass of champagne at weddings and christenings. In White Heat, the pub in North London the friends drink in was an interesting barometer of social change. Starting out as a basic boozer selling keg beer and ending up a gastropub with cask beer, it reminded me of the transformation of this real pub not that far away.