Category: 101 Things Brum Gave The World

Are you troubled by debts, mortgage repayments, or other loans? Do you struggle to make ends meet? Are you tempted by those adverts on television offering short-term loans at rates of interest that would make a Serbian gangster blush?

If you are, then you are far from alone. People everywhere are also feeling the pinch as the worldwide financial crisis lumbers on, sucking with it the hopes and dreams of tens of millions of human beings, right down the toilet. The blame for this mess has been laid firmly at the door of the banking community (and, to a lesser extent, those who draw their curtains during the daytime). For years bankers the world over had been selling imaginary money to each other and pocketing the very real profits. When the bubble eventually and spectacularly burst, it was with such ferocity that the children’s children of ordinary folk like you will still be paying for it when they are old and grey.

No, I don’t really understand how it works, either, but it’s bad. Real bad. Anyway. None of this huge mess would have been possible without the city of Birmingham, for it was here, in 1775, that Richard Ketley founded the world’s first Building Society.

Both the Lloyds and Midland (now HSBC) Banks were also formed here shortly afterwards. From its humble beginnings in the taverns and coffeehouses around the Snow Hill district of central Birmingham, Banking quickly became a very popular thing indeed, spreading globally within a matter of years, and eventually leading to the arsing financial meltdown were are all enjoying today.

We’re all in this together, bab.

Essentially it’s eating less food, so how is dieting a huge industry around the world? Weight Loss Packs that work well is a good version of dieting. However, Heinz (the HP-stealing bastards, see No 8) produce special ‘Weight Watchers’ foods, supposedly healthy versions of their TV dinners. Here’s the rub: the main way they contain less calories is by having less food. And they cost more. For less. See what they’re doing to you here?

The king of diet food, as opposed to amusing Barry Bethel promoted food replacement food like Slim Fast, is ryvita. Rough to the eyes, rough to the tongue and rough to the tastebuds, ryvita is the most diet-y of diet food. And that’s how we do things in this country.

In Scandinavia, they just thought it was normal food—the jumper-wearing, murdering, alfresco sex, fools. It took Birmingham to see its potential as food you didn’t really want to eat but bought and ate because it was less calories than the food you wanted to.

Having seen crispbread abroad Englishman Campbell-Garratt opened his ryvita factory in Birmingham in 1925 and the rest is history.

Literally in terms of the factory as the Germans bombed the heck out of it during the war. One could almost understand.

Ah, Manchester! Competitive little Manchester! Gutsy, plucky, Manchester! What makes you tick? What makes you worry so much about Birmingham? What makes you enter into dick measuring contests with us all the time? Well, our Psychology 101 training suggests it’s something oedipal. Tell us, people of the North, tell us about your mother.

Folksy little Manchester was something of a 14th Century Etsy, producing all manner of cutesy home spun bits of Flemish weaving, that was of course until Birmingham started and then sent the Industrial Revolution up country to them, giving them the opportunity to step up their ideas a bit and start to grow.

Whilst Birmingham, a sort of Cupertino for the 1700s, was busily producing more and more great ideas to send out into the world, Manchester rolled up its sleeves and swore it would be bigger than us one day, just you wait and see.

And so, like Frankenstein’s Monster, it lurches about the place grasping at things it doesn’t understand and crying out. One day its clumsy fists might crush Birmingham, the maker. We can’t stop it and perversely we don’t want to. We watch Manchester, simultaneously disgusted and fascinated by it as it shouts something about having more sausages than us, bellowing something about Salford.

Imagine the chip they’d have on their collective shoulders if they were scousers.

As Anthony Pratt and his family huddled in their Kings Heath fall-out shelter while the Luftwaffe flew over Birmingham, it bothered him that there was nothing to do. He was concerned that, rather like Christmas, all you could do was sit in a confined space with your nearest and dearest and wait for the whole thing blow over. Something was desperately needed to relieve the boredom.

So he invented Cluedo.  And, all over the world, Christmas was saved.

We’re told that Birmingham City Council has refused to exploit Cluedo’s tourism potential, or even acknowledge Cluedo as a product of Brum, as it claims it does not want the city to be associated with homicide. But it’s a Brum thing alright, and is said to be based on nearby Highbury Hall.

Tony’s neighbours had already invented Buccaneer (no, not Buccaroo, calm down at the back) and he wanted in on the act. He pitched his new board game to Waddingtons and they liked it. They made a few directorial changes and began mass production. It became one the most popular board games in the world.

Not that Balsall Heath-born Tone was able to enjoy the life of a millionaire.  A bit short of financial advice, he signed over his royalty entitlements for a one-off payment of £5,000.

He died in 1994 in a nursing home.   

In the lounge.

Submitted by Steve Nicholls

The essential ingredients of daytime television are: jumpers, middle aged people, chat. Whether they’re hunting for antiques, buying or selling or failing to sell things (especially houses) or even solving murders or being real in some sort of institution—it’s the middle-aged jumper chat that’s important.

Once all that was on the day was programmes for schools, which would be shown by teachers happy to have a cup of tea and a sit down. In class we counted down the clock until Fred Harris appeared, him tidily bearded us tidily bored, did some sciencey thing and went away. At home, you did the cleaning to the testcard music; praying for pages from Ceefax to brighten up the long dark teatime of the soul.

But then daytime TV arrived, and arrived live from the foyer of the BBC’s studios in Pebble Mill. In Birmingham, with the middle-aged jumper chat formula already immaculately sorted. That they eventually employed Alan Titchmarch is just a middle-aged jumper chat bonus.

Loose Women? Cash in the Attic on tour? Without Birmingham it would be the potter’s wheel for you.

Americans hated New Coke. Scared by loss of market share to Pepsi, The Coca-Cola Company decided in 1985 to reformulate and relaunch their particular brand of sugary mess. As it turned out people don’t like change, and this played even more into Pepsi’s hands.

One chap in New Mexico reportedly stockpiled a thousand dollars worth of ‘old coke’, drinkers were revolting. And their teeth were dissolving. Southern USA-ians considered the drink a fundamental part of regional identity and viewed the company’s decision to change the formula through the prism of the Civil War, as another surrender to the Yankees—which is about the standard of reasoned debate you see in American politics today.

It’s the biggest PR disaster in business history—and Coke soon returned to ‘classic’—just be glad we didn’t have hordes of social media bloggers blogging on the lessons we could all learn from it.

You shouldn’t mess with fizzy pop. And fizzy pop, as any fool knows was created by the Birmingham Lunar Society member Joseph Priestley as he worked on isolating Oxygen from the rest of air—presumably as that was thirsty work.Priestley published a paper called Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air in 1772 , which explained how to make soda water. I haven’t read it but assume it’s “put normal water in a Soda Stream”.

In the 1970s a young filmmaker named George Lucas began putting together an ambitious project to bring us the story of a boy, a girl and a universe.

He took a pretty standard Proppian fairy tale structure, added some Flash Gordon adventure serialisation tropes, and stopped by Kurosawa for some eastern mysticism and warrior codes. And no one knew what the hell he was talking about. Desperate to show people his vision he assembled a rough cut of the film. The problem: he needed to show the complicated space battles he’d planned for the finale of his film.

Some 35 years earlier Birmingham’s shadow factories had been churning out Lancaster bombers, Spitfires, and all kind of airborne weaponry to win the Battle of Britain and generally show jerry a thing or two. A few years later the stories of those magnificent flying machines became WWII movies, full of daring-do and high-altitude dogfights. Lucas literally took those movies and cut the battles into his space opera as place holders showing how things would go down. The rough cut did enough to convince the money men in Hollywood that The Star Wars was going to be worth persevering with. With his project saved Lucas reproduced those dogfights shot for shot using his own plastic models and a black sheet for space where Northern Europe used to be. And so it goes, Birmingham’s factories put the bearded Jedi master on the road to building his own Galactic Empire.

No Brum, no X-Wings, simple as that, but we ain’t going to apologise for Jar Jar Binks – you only have yourselves to blame.

Every woman of a certain age wants to read about a ‘red room of pain’ it seems. Every supermarket bookshelf is filled with copies of the—originally–self-published and—apparently, I of course haven’t read it—turgidly written mommy-porn.

Just who’d have thought that some women would like reading about s-e-x? I don’t know, what’s the world coming to? I mean, isn’t a quick look at Eric Bristow showering in I’m A Celebrity… enough to keep them buzzing along? With or without batteries.

But it’s really just a romance novel, not particularly sexily sexed up. And the progenitor of romance novels that really hit the spot?

Dame Mary Barbara Hamilton Cartland, of course.

Of Edgbaston, of Birmingham.

Of course.

You may stand now.

(from original idea by Frilly)

“Sing, Lofty.” said Sgt Major Tudor ‘Shut Up’ Williams, and Lofty did—tubby little everyman tho he was. And tubby little everymen and everywomen around the World have sung. Along to backing tracks, badly, when they’ve had just over the recommended amount of booze.

The recommended amount of booze being just a sip below the amount that assures you that other people need your version of Paradise By The Dashboard Light in their ears.

But, hang on? Isn’t Karaoke a Japanese invention, like the digital watch and cartoon porn?

Well…back in the mists of computer and video time, Aston Micro-Electronics Ltd invented an easy way of putting captions on video. Electronically. Before that Karaoke would just be some sod reading the words to songs off a bit of paper. Aston dominated TV captions from their introduction in the 1980s. 

And why were Astons called Astons?  After Mr Aston? Hell no. Aston in Birmingham of course.