Paradise Circus

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.

For most of living memory New Zealand was simply a fictional village which was used to rehouse spent characters from Neighbours. In Neighbours – and by extension all popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s – a trip to New Zealand was equivalent to the Eastenders trope of “going up West”: something other and exotic, but never seen.

All this was set to change when popular Birmingham pointy sword franchise The Lord of the Rings went to those sleepy antipodean islands in 2001. So popular was the film series that it single handedly regenerated New Zealand, taking this abstract idea of a place and fixing it in the minds of a generation of gap year students: a backpacking destination was born.

Before Birmingham’s intervention, the biggest cultural event to happen to New Zealand was the arrival of community radio DJ Henry Mitchell from Erinsborough. No Birmingham, no New Zealand. Imagine what David Lodge’s Campus Trilogy could do for Samoa.

Okay, so James Brown got down and Afrika Bambaataa saw b-boy and the freak as a way to change the World with his Zulu Nation. But that was back in the seventies and was that really likely ever to cross-over?

Okay, yes, so the Rock Steady Crew were busting up the East Coast (not Lowestoft) in the eary 80’s but were they ever more than one-hit wonders?

No, what really made sure that street dance hit the mainstream and is still there thirty years later—battling with comic opera singers and amusing dogs on Saturday night telly—was the crew from Studio 3 of ATV on Broad Street. First introduced by Jasper Carrot, the b-boy stylings of lying on your back waving your arms and legs in the air was what really make breakdancing what it is today. So ingrained into British culture was ‘the dying fly’ that the dance at one point soared high in the RoSPA list of common causes of household injury.

Without Tiswas, no breakdancing. Without Birmingham, no Tiswas.

Do you do little loops at the bottom of your y’s, do you draw little hearts over the top of your i’s? Do you, when actually pressed to use a pen at all after years of typing and texting, get all flummoxed and end up using block capitals so at least people have a fighting chance of understanding you? Well, you’ll never guess, Birmingham is responsible for that.

Y’see back in the 19th century people used quills for writing, it was a splodgy, blotty, ink-stained business. You had to be skilled and neat, you couldn’t develop your own style very much. But then John Mitchell. down in Newall Street, pioneered mass production of steel pens and suddenly writing just became a bit easier.

Soon thousands of people and dozens of companies were using Birmingham to make pens of different sizes and quality and the city gave easy communication to the world. And that lasted until a few years ago, because loads of us just don’t pick up a pen very often any more—and even the prime minister uses text speak. LOL.

Lots of love.