Long Hot Summer

Hi De Hi campers

Anyone who remembers the summer of 1976 will recall it as being very hot for a very long time. Indeed this is why it is generally known as the long, hot summer of 1976.

The 1976 British Isles heat wave lasted for three months during which the whole country suffered a severe drought and there wasn't even a mention of global warming.

15 year old delinquents like me spent most of the long hot summer hanging around in the local park hoping to attract girls with my Bay City Rollers spiky hair cut. Whilst I quickly realised that it wasn't that cool for lads to emulate the infamous tartan army, fortuitously my hair cut meant that just 12 months later I was able to say I was the first punk rocker in our school.

With the sun shining brightly for weeks on end and hairy men donned in budgie smugglers flocking to Britain's beaches in their millions, what better time for Blue Peter to have issued their one and only Holiday Special bumper comic, featuring the iconic John Noakes on the front cover, resplendent in a fetching Butlinesque blazer, striped tie and straw boater ...all that was missing was a fringe trim, but it was 1976. 

The Blue Peter Holiday Special cost just 30p and far from being a comic, it was more like a mini soft-back annual, printed on good quality paper that has survived the years (but we didn't have deforestation back then either), it was packed with quality articles, jokes, comic strips, crosswords and even a nature update from the brilliant Grahame Dangerfield. Yes children of the new millennium, in our day tv naturalists had proper wildlife names like Dangerfield. In fact it was probably Grahame Dangerfield who eventually discovered deforestation and greenhouse gases, but back in 1976 he was doing the serious work of washing oil from puffins and keeping a watchful eye on the breeding patterns of badgers. Grahame was, by the way a Blue Peter regular.
 

Legends Purves and Dangerfield preparing lunch

Another friend of Blue Peter to get a page in the 76 Holiday Special was John Craven, the man who had made news about wars, famines, street riots and assassinations more accessible to the ears and minds of children through his popular News Round. Sporting a hair cut not too different to Noakes on the front page, though arguably better combed, Craven brought us the good news of famine relief in the Bangladesh village of Pullacandi. John Craven's Newspage was aptly followed by a comic strip of Angels, the tv series about nurses at St Angela's General Hospital. A few pages on and lovely Leslie picks up the theme with a 'make' featuring First Aid Angels made out of yoghurt cartons, steel wool and lace all held together with the inevitable sticky backed plastic.  
 
The Holiday Special featured two pages headed 'underground jokes' which might have suggested something along the lines of Private Eye, though apart from a couple of dodgy gags mainly about horses, provided some great comic magazine history from the archives of IPC, the publisher of this summertime BP comic. 
 
As if to combat it's poptastic rival Magpie, the 76 Holiday Special also dipped it's toe into the world of the contemporary young people's popular music culture of the time, with a feature called Noel Edmond's Pop Pop Pop Page. Whilst the comic's editors might retrospectively be relieved that they picked the forever squeaky-clean Noel Edmonds as their celebrity DJ (consider for one moment some of the available alternatives during that era), with Noel picking out stories on Elton John, David Essex and Marie Osmond for his 'special peek around the pop scene', unfortunately he also included the now disgraced glam rock star Gary Glitter. If only we knew back then what we know now, but we certainly can't blame Noel or Blue Peter for that!
 
The comic also has a sports section featuring the great strong men of the time, Geoff Capes and Precious Mackenzie, now there's two blasts from the past! Whatever happened to Precious Mackenzie? Is he still pulling jeeps I wonder?
 
All in all a great read in 2019, though I'm not sure it would have competed with Record Mirror back in 1976.
 
So it's Shang-a-Lang from me and "I am an anarchist and I wanna destroy" from him.