But we have so many exotic Fast Food shops, Barbers, Vape shops etc to choose from nowadays ! Plus we have all those lovely concrete blocks lining our streets to keep us 'safe' from those poorly maintained vans that seem to keep swerving on to pavements. Progress most indeed !
If he thought that was bad, he'd be shocked now. The grimness of the mid 70's was paradise compared to what Britain has become today, Swap it in an instant.
nothin changes the sickness in mans heart - sin - but today the provoker satan has been unleashed .... God did the same when Israel turned their back on God, He withdrew His protection & the Romans took their holy city and their land and scattered them, worse was to come in history with the Jewish Holocaust
That was the Britain I remember. What a terrible loss. I was much more interested in the country-side as a visitor, but even London was fascinating to me. The museums, churches, and historic buildings! I loved it all. I'm so glad I saw it then.
Ah, Fyfe Robertson! That brings back memories of Tonight with Cliff Michelmore, Alan Wicker, Kenneth Allsop and Polly Elwys. Those guys went out into the world and had real reporting fun!
I feel a bit sorry for Fyfe. He's made this thought provoking film in 1975 and rightly getting very angry about society's problems but all most people watching in 2024 are feeling (including me) is this huge sense of nostalgia for 1975!
I would hate to think of future generations looking back at 2024 in 50 years time and thinking life was so much better then. Imagine how bad life in 2074 will be if that is the case!
So true by comparison with today's world. Back then post WW2 the financial and material constraints unfortunately led to much of the architecture of the day that was rushed as a giant sticking plaster with little available and we have been paying the price ever since.
But in many respects it has improved. And I don't quite get how he could be complaining in 1975 when he must still have remembered the war and post-war years. In the video he complains about factory jobs. Today he would be complaining about no factory jobs. He just knows how to complain.
@@ronald3836 There was 3 day week imposed on people a year or so earlier. power cuts. Britain was still recovering from WW2. he had a lot to moan about.
"It's good to work for an organisation like the BBC where you can criticise your bosses". Good luck with that now, particularly if your boss is from one of the protected and venerated groups.
Physically lifes got easier for both men and women, generations ago you followed your father in occupation around where I live so you went down the pitt which must have been terrible condtions with the health problems many minors suffer from, and the home life was not better for the stay at home women just washing cloths must have been back breaking work without electricitonic appliances.
He was brilliant Fyfe. I remember him at an old street of cottages in Scotland where their only source of water was a natural spring. Fyfe came out with 'They've been drinking from the well for 40 years and it's Poison !' I nearly choked on my dinner laughing. He was great crak .
Alan Whicker, Cliff Michelmore, Fyfe Robertson..... the list goes on. None of them would be given a chance nowadays in this insanely "woke" world in which we live.
If he could see it today, I grew up in the seventies, and we all thought it was dire, oil crisis, government crisis, strikes, IRA bombings, immigration, overpopulation. But looking back, compared to today, it was delightful. Housing was a lot more affordable, new cars, although not as reliable, cost in real terms half of today's prices. Travelling by plane was expensive, but there was a lot less laws, regulation, fines and surveillance.
I unplugged 3 years ago - best decision of my life. Absolutely no news, no TV, no radio, no FB, no social. The only comms I have is youtube & netflix for entertainment, and keeping in touch with family and friends with whatsapp. Takes a bit of getting used to, but when you realise that 1. You can't alter any of the things that are happening 2. If something is going to affect you, it will affect you regardless of whether or not you have been stressing about it.
Fyfe a TV pioneer for 8 years was such a piece of British TV culture through the daily news magazine program "Tonight", with his distictive Scottish accent permiating British living rooms each weekday evening. He shared the program with three other pioneers, Cliff Michellmore, Alan Whicker and Julian Pettifer among others.
Cable TV and 24 hour news ruined everything, not to mention the internet and mobile phones. People are less social today than ever. Everything has to be instant.
@@alanmusicman3385but when they were outside they were actually outside not glued to technology I don't use my phone much outside and it's mad how many people are just staring mindless at their phones I'm 26 so I wasn't messed up as much by it
They are worse. Our population has grown by nigh on a third (50m-67m) due to immigration. People are living longer, and we are also poorer per capita by any measure. This small island is overcrowded and has been quietly dying.
What a great character Fyfe is - traditional elderly gent but with a youthful eccentricity in there too. It's a shame guys like this are almost extinct now. It really just shows nothing ever moves forward, just goes round and round, spiralling downwards. Everything he points out is more true today than in 1975 and yet we long for that time now. It's never really about the era, we mourn for the loss of human connection with each passing generation as technology takes over and eventually will make us extinct. Unless we wake up fast!
This would make a great documentary to bring this up to date with a similar reporter but who would compare with Fyfe? So many people saying how much better it used to be but i agree with the start of this one that it really depends on where you are in life. Make the most of today and it will always be the best time. Thanks to BBC Archive for introducing me to Fyfe. What a great man.
Fyfe Robertson should have had a time travelling machine to go visit the towns in the North of England as they are in 2024 compared to how he may have remembered them back in his youth; he may get a shock.
Is it that the BBC can’t make a programme like this, or is it us that are incapable of watching a programme like this, unable to resist the lure of the comment section and doomscrolling social media when Fyfe takes more than 5 seconds to make his point?
In 75, flares meant you didn't have to clean your shoes, Hai Karate, disco and punk arrived, you could still buy Vesta beef risotto, the BBC knew how to make sitcoms, you could go to the cinema, have 40 Embassy, get boozed up, and have change from a fiver, Cadburys Dairy Milk tasted like chocolate, Quality Street was quality, women didn't need botox, Angry Birds eyebrows, Cuprinol tans, and pneumatic lips to look glamorous, and we could all laugh at ourselves.
Its good that these historical films exist, to show people today how things really were and not the distorted fantasy presented to us in every tv series or film that pretends to be set in these times. Thanks @history debunked !
Good old Fyffe. As a teenager growing up in the seventies I didn't appreciate how inciteful he was and I probably did think of him as an old codger. How brilliant to be able to relive these clips on TH-cam all these years later...and realise what an arrogant flibbertigibbet you were🤭 He had a sense of humour too didn't he...I liked the going out of one Marks and Spencer and coming out of another in a different town😂 High streets did look the same in a lot of ways but you also got different cafés and specialist shops that you would seek out in a particular town. I wonder what Fyffe would make of today's high streets...I think he would be saddened by the number of soulless estate agents windows and fast food joints as well as the ever increasing number of charity shops and empty premises for sure...and good luck getting a bus by the way!
Great 👍 another great full documentary upload, absolutely brilliant insight from the past, congratulations to whoever is in charge of this youtube channel..keep up the great work...ps I was born in this year🎉
This is a superb piece of television history. Beautifully done. Zoom lenses are a bit out of fashion now, but used to perfection here. His to camera delivery is totally natural. Stunning.
Perhaps one of the most irritating aspects of modern news is the tendency of reporters to constantly gesticulate with their hands and arms am-dram style, in an exaggerated attempt to stress how important this or that point is. Watch Fyfe's hands. Actually, you very rarely see them, as they are, for the most part, folded behind his back or in his pockets. So natural.
I wonder what he'd think of the world today? Those franchised high streets are hanging on by a thread, while everyone buys things online. Looked up the Brighton high street. Marks and Spencer is still there! But Boots is now a Starbucks and the store next door is a Wendy's!
How heartbreaking to see how beautiful and peaceful the country used to be. It's not far off a third world slum now. All to line the pockets of the mega rich and to heck with the rest of us, our culture and countryside.
It is easy to take things for granted when they work well, and we often don't truly appreciate what we had until it's gone. Subsequent generations can struggle to really understand this (until, of course, they live it themselves). I remember telling a youngster that my parents would leave cash outside for the milkman each week in the early 70s. He didn't believe me. He said the money would have been stolen, and that 'people have always been the same'.
We ALWAYS view the past with fondness, because we've survived it. We are still unsure and insecure of the present and the future, hence the reason we look favourably on days gone by.
This superb commentary is even more relevant today than it was back then. And what a shame that we have to use the term ‘back then’ in the way we do. Less nostalgia for a better time, more a desperate longing for something that can simply never be again.
If he could come back to life for just a few days, his heart would break. It goes to show that, fundamentally, government has solved nothing in 50 years and, indeed, has presided over an exacerbation of these issues.
@@ashcross Of course governments must do 'stuff', but what they do and how they do it should really be a bottom-up process as much as possible. I really don't like it when people say something like "Keir Starmer is running the country." No, he's running the government, a different thing. We're not North Korea.
Poor man would, in a heartbeat, turn into a hermit on some uninhabited Scottish Isle had he lived to see a world of 24-hour news, non-stop "content", podcasts and X!
They keep telling me that my life is getting better by having so-called "supermarkets" and out-of-town shopping parks, and being able to buy everything under one roof. They tell me that by being able to buy tasteless and hard red things [masquerading as strawberries] at Christmas, my life is immeasurably improved. They even tell me now I should sit at home in a near hermetically sealed, flat-pack identikit house on some monotonous and countrywide-the-same housing estate and order "on line". NO THANK YOU! I will shop at my local independent shops; I shall eat what is in season and that which is grown locally; I shall speak with the shop keepers and not buy my meat in small plastic sarcophaguses, but rather buy from a butcher who knows the provenance of the poor, unfortunate animal I am about to but a part of. I shall grow what I can in my garden and have all my all-pervasive "tech" turned off as I spend hours pottering, digging, planting and weeding; harvesting and nurturing in my modest plot. I shall not be the one to wear "designer" clothes - whatever they are - that the gullible in society buy, but rather my old and worn-out walking boots, my 30+ year old corduroys and my agéd and moth eaten wooly pullover atop my old Tattersall shirt, its collar worn to nothing. I shall have a real life; a life of exercise and reward at what I have grown. I shall be able to pick an apple from my tree and some blackberries from the hedgerow and make a pie drizzled from cream from my local shop and which tastes as it should; I shall be able to make a wooden hulled model boat from a plan and not some kit; I shall go for a walk without my mobile face accessory held out in-front of me staring at a few square inches of screen - my screen will be the ever changing landscape, the passing seasons, the scudding clouds and the singing birds. I shall be the one who notices the swallows arriving and the flocks of starlings; I shall be the one who eats his own food from his garden, and I shall be the one who does not turn-on the massive TV with 500 channels of repeats and spend mind-numbing hours desperately trying to find something, anything ,worth watching. I shall sit by the fireside of an evening watching the logs burn down to glowing embers and read my book until it is too dark, I am the one who will then go to bed as night falls, and I am the one who will be woken by the sun, and I am the one who will be content.
Perhaps one of the most irritating aspects of modern news is the tendency of reporters to constantly gesticulate with their hands and arms am-dram style, in an exaggerated attempt to stress how important this or that point is. Watch Fyfe's hands. Actually, you very rarely see them, as they are, for the most part, folded behind his back or in his pockets. So natural.
I was born in 1975 when this came out, i have to say things are not getting better now, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, yes we have mobile phones etc now but they are a big destraction and i would probably get a lot more done without them.
@@yinoveryang4246 Pollution paid its great part as well. Don´t forget all those cars were powered by lead in the gasoline. Mind you they were not being hit with heavy radiation from mobile phone masts!
7.12 'We seem to be the helpless victims of minorities today as if a majority doesn't have rights too.' What has changed is what categorised as a minority but this statement still rings true. Just to show, humans are slow to adapt, its the same issues that plague 70s are plaguing us now.
I am writing this in 2024 and altho he has long since passed away, if he could see the state of the uk and all of europe he would be beyond shocked and have a very bleak then & now comparison..
@ BBC archives: why do you have to make the disclaimer “Of course, the opinions of Fyfe Robertson do not necessarily reflect those of the BBC Archive, much as we dearly love ol' Robbie.”?
Now I'm an old codger like Fyfe is here, I see me bemoaning precisely the same things (plus a few new ones - like smartphone addiction, rather than simple use). He lived in Derby when he made this video; me too. The Nottingham he visited was the place I studied for my degree just four years later. Now one of the shopping centres has been all but destroyed, I hear. As an old codger I have improved health-care - so many of the technologies which keep me here were beyond sensible prediction, then. Fyfe does have rose-tints on: crime, street-violence, poverty, child-abuse, abuse of women, racism, etc etc were all rife in the 1970s. They remain with us and crime-clear-ups are lamentable but much improvement has still been made. Nostalgia always glosses-over the past's failings and miseries. Today is so much better in many ways - though worse in others, of course. But we should never simply and ignorantly (through lack of knowledge or forgetfulness) praise all our yesteryears without celebrating today's better things. Though I retain my guilty pleasure of Glam Rock, just that, to quote Mud (Tiger Feet): "your hips swinging out-of-bounds" is now a somewhat dangerous prospect!
Just goes to show doesn’t it how people have always seen issues in society and this is from a well respected journalist of the time but even many interviews from the normal man on the street of that time would show a lot of discontentment also. That’s why it’s annoying when so many blinkered people insist that things only went downhill from this or that age (to suit their own agenda) but fact is the gap between the haves and have nots and moral outrage about various trends is not a new phenomena. Actually a great book is ‘Hooligan’ by G Pearson that looks at the fear of moral decline since before Victorian times even against the concept there ever was ‘golden age’. The conclusion seemingly is ‘the good old days’ are any years before what the majority of folks ever even experienced.
He's a few years away from Thatcher. She promised a future where business could do public services better than the government, she was wrong but people bought it because they were already discontented for a decade and wanted an easy answer It's important we learn our lessons from history. But I think we're close to being too late. He's complaining about things we're still complaining about now. Car centric cities, decimated public transport, houses for profit etc
He would be totally shocked if he came back now. I was born in 1952, and life was quite good in the UK up to the 1980's until Thatcher destroyed the manufacturing industry and sold off too many council houses, then deregulated the stock market making the UK a land of Speed and Greed !
@ - I meant they were both ‘Kindly grandfather’ types. I never knew my grandfathers so would have been proud to have either of them. No offence intended.
For all of our poverty, strikes, unbridled union power, three day working week, IMF ‘bailout’…1970s Britain was a million times better than today. At least the country was still ours.
I grew up in the sixties and seventies... 70s were a mess, and definitely a feeling of things getting worse and worse and end of empire. I have no nostalgia for the dirty rivers and polluted air, waste on the streets, shoddy goods, blatant racism, corruption and ignorance. Rose tinted specs on the whole in the comments. Of course some things were better in a world of half the population.
I also grew up in the 60's and 70's and your right there is undoubtedly a sense of rose tinted specs. Every generation laments for a world 20 or 30 years previously but i think it is more than that. It was a more egalitarian time. The country had assets which were nationalised. The trains, gas, water, electricity. You only needed three times your salary to buy a house and if you couldn't afford one then you could get a council house or rent in the private sector for a rent people wouldn't believe if you told them today. The bank s were deregulated and Thatcher rolled back the state and sold our national assets to the highest bidder. Now we have league tables and targets! Nothing is safe, everything is to be exploited and wealth inequality is growing by the day.
Fyfe's commentry is a useful reminder that change is perpetual and cyclical in nature. Brace yourself, discomfort is coming, always (as well as comfort)!
You don't meet enough Fyfes these days. Perhaps the banana company rendered the name unfashionable :) I was 4 when this was made :) I had to chuckle when he said that "News is a drug as potent as pot!" 🤣 It reminded me of my youth when my friends and I would all get together on Saturday nights, get some chips and dips and gather around the telly to buzz our heads off to _The News at Ten_ lol.
He would be horrified by the way we live now, I was born in 1969 in Nottingham and seeing that footage of the city center and ‘Vicky centre’ brought back so many memories, look how clean and tidy the place looks, no litter, no beggers, no homeless, no drunks, no one wandering around off their face on spice, no constant smell of cannabis in the air, no groups of dodgy looking youths in hoodies, no garish shop front and signage, no endless fast food and vape shops………I could go on and on!! If I was in the Victoria centre with my mum and it was coming up to the hour I’d trot off to the water clock and watch it transfixed, I loved it! I’d be 5 or 6years old, I’d wait there and mum would turn up 10mins later, no worries about adducted or beaten up etc, surely that says everything? You just wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that these days!
Simon Webb, thanks for making me watch this video. Greetings from Poland ✌️😎
Agreed!
Godbless you salute 🫡
I'm 76 - this only seems like yesterday - time flies. Thanks Simon for recommending this nostalgia.
But we have so many exotic Fast Food shops, Barbers, Vape shops etc to choose from nowadays !
Plus we have all those lovely concrete blocks lining our streets to keep us 'safe' from those poorly maintained vans that seem to keep swerving on to pavements. Progress most indeed !
And Curry! Dont forget that great Modern English Dish...
I’m looking back to 1975 in the same way he’s looking back to 1955
Good grief. We didn't know how good it was. Pity the poor folks in 2073 looking back at today with fond nostalgia.
The Islamic Republic of Englandstan, you mean?
If he thought that was bad, he'd be shocked now. The grimness of the mid 70's was paradise compared to what Britain has become today, Swap it in an instant.
nothin changes the sickness in mans heart - sin - but today the provoker satan has been unleashed .... God did the same when Israel turned their back on God, He withdrew His protection & the Romans took their holy city and their land and scattered them, worse was to come in history with the Jewish Holocaust
Indeed, where does one start!
That was the Britain I remember. What a terrible loss. I was much more interested in the country-side as a visitor, but even London was fascinating to me. The museums, churches, and historic buildings! I loved it all. I'm so glad I saw it then.
Ah, Fyfe Robertson! That brings back memories of Tonight with Cliff Michelmore, Alan Wicker, Kenneth Allsop and Polly Elwys. Those guys went out into the world and had real reporting fun!
Well done, i could only remember half their names.
Derek Hart....Robin Hall and Jimmy Mac Gregor
That was one of my favourite programmes
@@fredneecher1746 did he mention single mothers..?
Gateshead?@@geordie1032
I was his postman in Wimbledon in the 1970s, nice man
Was his flat there?
I feel a bit sorry for Fyfe. He's made this thought provoking film in 1975 and rightly getting very angry about society's problems but all most people watching in 2024 are feeling (including me) is this huge sense of nostalgia for 1975!
yup. also, the current generation probably nostalgic for 2024!
th-cam.com/video/vaqhQfj3fyE/w-d-xo.html
It's almost as if no matter what decade you are in time, people just love to moan about change
I would hate to think of future generations looking back at 2024 in 50 years time and thinking life was so much better then. Imagine how bad life in 2074 will be if that is the case!
Facts. Fyfe had a crystal ball, indeed...
So true by comparison with today's world. Back then post WW2 the financial and material constraints unfortunately led to much of the architecture of the day that was rushed as a giant sticking plaster with little available and we have been paying the price ever since.
Imagine what he would think of Britain now? Absolutely horrified.
It is getting Worse Fyfe...you'd hate it here mate.
He'd be terrified if he was still kicking around.
@@YoBoyMarcus He'd have a few things to say...and he'd know how to say it.
But in many respects it has improved. And I don't quite get how he could be complaining in 1975 when he must still have remembered the war and post-war years. In the video he complains about factory jobs. Today he would be complaining about no factory jobs. He just knows how to complain.
1975: Fyfe Robertson Wonders: Is LIFE Getting WORSE? | Robbie | BBC Archive 1813pm 10.11.24 a terminal cheesecake street...
@@ronald3836
There was 3 day week imposed on people a year or so earlier.
power cuts.
Britain was still recovering from WW2.
he had a lot to moan about.
He wouldn't be in the BBC today.
Not unless he wore a dress or had a Mao tattoo!
Yes exactly. Those were the days, Jimmy Saville, Gary Glitter, Rolf Harris.. oh wait..
@@marcfischetti5490 All of them were Idolised by Millions...
@@fryertuck6496 Or was black or Asian!
Of course not. He’s a white middle aged middle class man. One of those oppressive patriarchy
"It's good to work for an organisation like the BBC where you can criticise your bosses". Good luck with that now, particularly if your boss is from one of the protected and venerated groups.
I'm actually filling up 😢watching this. This was my era, I left school in 1975, life is just so different now and not for the good. Oh dear.....
take off the rosy spex, and wipe your eyes.
@@agfagaevart How do you know whether the "spex" (as you put it) are "rosy"?
Physically lifes got easier for both men and women, generations ago you followed your father in occupation around where I live so you went down the pitt which must have been terrible condtions with the health problems many minors suffer from, and the home life was not better for the stay at home women just washing cloths must have been back breaking work without electricitonic appliances.
@@richardmell299 how long ago do you think the 70s were?! Or are you just making fun?
@@richardmell299 Yes, but not by 1975.
Fyfe, what a legend. The beeb had some cracking reporters.
I didn’t realize how tall he was.
He was brilliant Fyfe. I remember him at an old street of cottages in Scotland where their only source of water was a natural spring. Fyfe came out with 'They've been drinking from the well for 40 years and it's Poison !' I nearly choked on my dinner laughing. He was great crak .
'Had' being the operative word!
Alan Whicker, Cliff Michelmore, Fyfe Robertson..... the list goes on. None of them would be given a chance nowadays in this insanely "woke" world in which we live.
Oh England, my England. I could weep.
"These 8 minutes can't be lived again." Love it.
If he could see it today, I grew up in the seventies, and we all thought it was dire, oil crisis, government crisis, strikes, IRA bombings, immigration, overpopulation. But looking back, compared to today, it was delightful. Housing was a lot more affordable, new cars, although not as reliable, cost in real terms half of today's prices. Travelling by plane was expensive, but there was a lot less laws, regulation, fines and surveillance.
And millions unemployed, rubbish on the streets, the IRA terror campaigns. Nostalgia…it ain’t what it used to be.
Look at the video closely. The streets even in London were not crammed packed with parked cars you could park where you wanted on most streets
Not sure about the price of cars but the rest is bang on
@@laurarojas8490 Absolutely. The population of the UK is now approximately that of France, although France is more than double the size.
FEWER laws, LESS regulation, FEWER fines and LESS surveillance.
I unplugged 3 years ago - best decision of my life. Absolutely no news, no TV, no radio, no FB, no social. The only comms I have is youtube & netflix for entertainment, and keeping in touch with family and friends with whatsapp. Takes a bit of getting used to, but when you realise that 1. You can't alter any of the things that are happening 2. If something is going to affect you, it will affect you regardless of whether or not you have been stressing about it.
Spoken like a true Calvinist 😎
It's a nice idea but you must miss out on things you'd enjoy
That’s a cool and liberating approach to things. Modern life is rubbish
And yet here you are commenting ..... so not actually a total Unplug is it ...
@@dino575 do you have learning difficulties? If not re-read the OP, and then maybe review your comment, as it looks a bit daft on your part.
Its amazing that what he is talking in 1975 is still holds water today.
Fyfe a TV pioneer for 8 years was such a piece of British TV culture through the daily news magazine program "Tonight", with his distictive Scottish accent permiating British living rooms each weekday evening. He shared the program with three other pioneers, Cliff Michellmore, Alan Whicker and Julian Pettifer among others.
He's right, obsessive news bombarded at us is like a drug and detrimental.
You know you have the option to... (brace yourself) ...turn it off
Cable TV and 24 hour news ruined everything, not to mention the internet and mobile phones. People are less social today than ever. Everything has to be instant.
This was a fascinating watch. Fyfe's observations were so true.
'If you're like me - on the home stretch' 😂
Not heard it put like that before.
Nobody staring at a smartphone. How refreshing.
They were all too busy staring at televisions. Each age has its obsessions. Books, films, radio, TV, phones - get over it.
@@alanmusicman3385they only ever stared at tv in one room. Get over it.
@@alanmusicman3385but when they were outside they were actually outside not glued to technology I don't use my phone much outside and it's mad how many people are just staring mindless at their phones I'm 26 so I wasn't messed up as much by it
@@Budbrothers420 Goi back to the 1980s and earlier it was not at all uncommon for people to be walking along the street reading a newpaper.
@@gaycha6589 Oh, but when TV was new a lot of people used to watch every moment of every day's broadcast.
Remember watching this when it was first broadcast. Fyfe was always relevant. Great upload.
I don’t think BBC would dare make a film like this today it would cause to much criticism.
I'm surprised they even uploaded it
Too much is right.
Would have a young bisexual black girl who would wind the story of colonialism in there
They don't have the inclination to.
"History Debunked" channel brought me here.
Same here 👍
What gold of an essay.
The more things change - the more they don't. 50 years have passed and the problems are identical.
They are worse. Our population has grown by nigh on a third (50m-67m) due to immigration. People are living longer, and we are also poorer per capita by any measure.
This small island is overcrowded and has been quietly dying.
@gaycha6589 "Officially" one third. According to data from supermarkets etc, the real number is way higher.
What a great character Fyfe is - traditional elderly gent but with a youthful eccentricity in there too. It's a shame guys like this are almost extinct now. It really just shows nothing ever moves forward, just goes round and round, spiralling downwards. Everything he points out is more true today than in 1975 and yet we long for that time now. It's never really about the era, we mourn for the loss of human connection with each passing generation as technology takes over and eventually will make us extinct. Unless we wake up fast!
This would make a great documentary to bring this up to date with a similar reporter but who would compare with Fyfe? So many people saying how much better it used to be but i agree with the start of this one that it really depends on where you are in life. Make the most of today and it will always be the best time. Thanks to BBC Archive for introducing me to Fyfe. What a great man.
That's what I was thinking.The conclusion would be that things then were worse than before and now they are even worse
A similar reporter would never get on the BBC.
Fyfe Robertson should have had a time travelling machine to go visit the towns in the North of England as they are in 2024 compared to how he may have remembered them back in his youth; he may get a shock.
He's Scottish so the North of England didn't figure in his youth...
He would get a shock in Glasgow today.
The deindustrialization
Considering how wonderful this clip is, it's a tragedy that the BBC is incapable in the modern age of making anything remotely as good.
Is it that the BBC can’t make a programme like this, or is it us that are incapable of watching a programme like this, unable to resist the lure of the comment section and doomscrolling social media when Fyfe takes more than 5 seconds to make his point?
@@virtualstatmannot everyone is addicted to attention like the young are .
Just wait until the internet comes along, mate.
It probably was being designed. email was up & running by 84.
I remember Fyfe Robertson's distinctive voice so well!
"You'll no be having a sale, will ye?"
A GREAT SCOT
Well sir at least back then people knew what a woman was
In 75, flares meant you didn't have to clean your shoes, Hai Karate, disco and punk arrived, you could still buy Vesta beef risotto, the BBC knew how to make sitcoms, you could go to the cinema, have 40 Embassy, get boozed up, and have change from a fiver, Cadburys Dairy Milk tasted like chocolate, Quality Street was quality, women didn't need botox, Angry Birds eyebrows, Cuprinol tans, and pneumatic lips to look glamorous, and we could all laugh at ourselves.
NO .
Beautifully written!
Spot on, well said!👍🏻
I am sure that some people in 1975 were spouting the same rose-tinted nonsense about 1925
It was Vesta beef curry! Used to have it loads! Even found some in a pound shop a couple of years back and couldn't resist!!
'But these 8 minutes can't be lived again!' is something we should consider when we're giving people or things our time.
Wow your deep man🤘🏻
My engineer , when I was an apprentice would always say to me " you can't spend thank you " if the customer didn't give him a tip .
@@MichaelWillby He had a point.
Its good that these historical films exist, to show people today how things really were and not the distorted fantasy presented to us in every tv series or film that pretends to be set in these times. Thanks @history debunked !
Good old Fyffe. As a teenager growing up in the seventies I didn't appreciate how inciteful he was and I probably did think of him as an old codger. How brilliant to be able to relive these clips on TH-cam all these years later...and realise what an arrogant flibbertigibbet you were🤭 He had a sense of humour too didn't he...I liked the going out of one Marks and Spencer and coming out of another in a different town😂 High streets did look the same in a lot of ways but you also got different cafés and specialist shops that you would seek out in a particular town. I wonder what Fyffe would make of today's high streets...I think he would be saddened by the number of soulless estate agents windows and fast food joints as well as the ever increasing number of charity shops and empty premises for sure...and good luck getting a bus by the way!
Turkish barbers...
"insightful"
@radioandtvmemories6178 Whoops yes🤭
Great 👍 another great full documentary upload, absolutely brilliant insight from the past, congratulations to whoever is in charge of this youtube channel..keep up the great work...ps I was born in this year🎉
This is a superb piece of television history. Beautifully done. Zoom lenses are a bit out of fashion now, but used to perfection here. His to camera delivery is totally natural. Stunning.
No autocue either.
BS
Cheers Simon! I hadn't thought about Robbie in a long while....quite the pleasant nostalgia trip watching that. Brought back some memories for sure.
If i had a time machine i would be there now .
Not seen this presenter ever before before, love his style. Why can't current presenters be themselves, like Fyfe Robinson?
Perhaps one of the most irritating aspects of modern news is the tendency of reporters to constantly gesticulate with their hands and arms am-dram style, in an exaggerated attempt to stress how important this or that point is. Watch Fyfe's hands. Actually, you very rarely see them, as they are, for the most part, folded behind his back or in his pockets. So natural.
I wonder what he'd think of the world today? Those franchised high streets are hanging on by a thread, while everyone buys things online.
Looked up the Brighton high street. Marks and Spencer is still there! But Boots is now a Starbucks and the store next door is a Wendy's!
Very Americanized
Found Larry, now need to find Stuart Ashen here somewhere xD
Always nice seeing you pop up Larry
How heartbreaking to see how beautiful and peaceful the country used to be. It's not far off a third world slum now. All to line the pockets of the mega rich and to heck with the rest of us, our culture and countryside.
It is easy to take things for granted when they work well, and we often don't truly appreciate what we had until it's gone. Subsequent generations can struggle to really understand this (until, of course, they live it themselves). I remember telling a youngster that my parents would leave cash outside for the milkman each week in the early 70s. He didn't believe me. He said the money would have been stolen, and that 'people have always been the same'.
We could left cash outside in the Swedish countryside until the late 1990s.
Things have gotten worse. 1975 seems quite favorable compared to 2024.
Including the usage of gotten.😀 Become worse. Here is your missing U.
We ALWAYS view the past with fondness, because we've survived it. We are still unsure and insecure of the present and the future, hence the reason we look favourably on days gone by.
Life is so much better when you´re 20!
An acute observer with a great sense of humour. What struck me above all was his deep humanity.
Fyfe trust me, you never had it so good
To be fair he could not have foreseen the shambles that Thatcher created with the UK housing stock. We are all still paying the price for it.
This superb commentary is even more relevant today than it was back then. And what a shame that we have to use the term ‘back then’ in the way we do. Less nostalgia for a better time, more a desperate longing for something that can simply never be again.
If he could come back to life for just a few days, his heart would break. It goes to show that, fundamentally, government has solved nothing in 50 years and, indeed, has presided over an exacerbation of these issues.
nope!
He would just laugh and probably say;
"in fifty years you've learned NOTHING!"
It’s up to people to solve things, not governments.
@@JMoruzzi How does that work in a representative democracy in which we vote for people to work on these problems on our behalf?
@@ashcross Of course governments must do 'stuff', but what they do and how they do it should really be a bottom-up process as much as possible. I really don't like it when people say something like "Keir Starmer is running the country." No, he's running the government, a different thing. We're not North Korea.
@@JMoruzzi How do people, as opposed to government, resolve issues around immigration?
What a fascinating video
What prophetic thoughts Fyfe Robertson held even then, which describes humanity so well then and absolutely on the mark for today.
After all his complaints about modernity I can’t believe he loved shopping malls.
Poor man would, in a heartbeat, turn into a hermit on some uninhabited Scottish Isle had he lived to see a world of 24-hour news, non-stop "content", podcasts and X!
'Curmudgeonly' what a beauty of a word
They keep telling me that my life is getting better by having so-called "supermarkets" and out-of-town shopping parks, and being able to buy everything under one roof. They tell me that by being able to buy tasteless and hard red things [masquerading as strawberries] at Christmas, my life is immeasurably improved. They even tell me now I should sit at home in a near hermetically sealed, flat-pack identikit house on some monotonous and countrywide-the-same housing estate and order "on line". NO THANK YOU! I will shop at my local independent shops; I shall eat what is in season and that which is grown locally; I shall speak with the shop keepers and not buy my meat in small plastic sarcophaguses, but rather buy from a butcher who knows the provenance of the poor, unfortunate animal I am about to but a part of. I shall grow what I can in my garden and have all my all-pervasive "tech" turned off as I spend hours pottering, digging, planting and weeding; harvesting and nurturing in my modest plot. I shall not be the one to wear "designer" clothes - whatever they are - that the gullible in society buy, but rather my old and worn-out walking boots, my 30+ year old corduroys and my agéd and moth eaten wooly pullover atop my old Tattersall shirt, its collar worn to nothing. I shall have a real life; a life of exercise and reward at what I have grown. I shall be able to pick an apple from my tree and some blackberries from the hedgerow and make a pie drizzled from cream from my local shop and which tastes as it should; I shall be able to make a wooden hulled model boat from a plan and not some kit; I shall go for a walk without my mobile face accessory held out in-front of me staring at a few square inches of screen - my screen will be the ever changing landscape, the passing seasons, the scudding clouds and the singing birds. I shall be the one who notices the swallows arriving and the flocks of starlings; I shall be the one who eats his own food from his garden, and I shall be the one who does not turn-on the massive TV with 500 channels of repeats and spend mind-numbing hours desperately trying to find something, anything ,worth watching. I shall sit by the fireside of an evening watching the logs burn down to glowing embers and read my book until it is too dark, I am the one who will then go to bed as night falls, and I am the one who will be woken by the sun, and I am the one who will be content.
That was beautiful! Thank you❤️❤️❤️
@@annchabassol5804 Thank you, and thank you for you rkind words in this sometimes less than kind world.
Wonderful presentation without hysterics. How refreshing.
Perhaps one of the most irritating aspects of modern news is the tendency of reporters to constantly gesticulate with their hands and arms am-dram style, in an exaggerated attempt to stress how important this or that point is. Watch Fyfe's hands. Actually, you very rarely see them, as they are, for the most part, folded behind his back or in his pockets. So natural.
ironicly as a white "cis" male he would never be allowed to present a tv show in this day and age
Great sound quality, where's the microphone? 1975 NHS and TV great for 65 year olds like this man.
I was born in 1975 when this came out, i have to say things are not getting better now, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, yes we have mobile phones etc now but they are a big destraction and i would probably get a lot more done without them.
Such seamless editing when he steps from the BBC newsroom back into his apartment.
I’ve still got that radio and it still works. It’s getting harder to find the massive cube of a battery though.
Fyfe Robertson talks about being on the home stretch - he died on 4th February 1987, aged 84.
Life expectancy was a lot lower in 1975. Due to poorer diet, dietary advice, and poorer healthcare. Things are definitely reversing though,
@@yinoveryang4246 Pollution paid its great part as well. Don´t forget all those cars were powered by lead in the gasoline. Mind you they were not being hit with heavy radiation from mobile phone masts!
@@yinoveryang4246People were slimmer,ate home-cooked food,walked more
Im no fan of 1970s British fashion, but it does look like people made a lot more effort back then.
7.12 'We seem to be the helpless victims of minorities today as if a majority doesn't have rights too.' What has changed is what categorised as a minority but this statement still rings true. Just to show, humans are slow to adapt, its the same issues that plague 70s are plaguing us now.
I am writing this in 2024 and altho he has long since passed away, if he could see the state of the uk and all of europe he would be beyond shocked and have a very bleak then & now comparison..
@ BBC archives: why do you have to make the disclaimer
“Of course, the opinions of Fyfe Robertson do not necessarily reflect those of the BBC Archive, much as we dearly love ol' Robbie.”?
Would’ve liked to have heard him Co-commentate the six nations rugby with with Bill McLaren, RIP to both.
Great character.
Thanks Simon.
That voice is simply iconic.
Really interesting documentary. Some of the new things he protests against are now old traditions much missed.
Now I'm an old codger like Fyfe is here, I see me bemoaning precisely the same things (plus a few new ones - like smartphone addiction, rather than simple use). He lived in Derby when he made this video; me too. The Nottingham he visited was the place I studied for my degree just four years later. Now one of the shopping centres has been all but destroyed, I hear. As an old codger I have improved health-care - so many of the technologies which keep me here were beyond sensible prediction, then. Fyfe does have rose-tints on: crime, street-violence, poverty, child-abuse, abuse of women, racism, etc etc were all rife in the 1970s. They remain with us and crime-clear-ups are lamentable but much improvement has still been made. Nostalgia always glosses-over the past's failings and miseries. Today is so much better in many ways - though worse in others, of course. But we should never simply and ignorantly (through lack of knowledge or forgetfulness) praise all our yesteryears without celebrating today's better things. Though I retain my guilty pleasure of Glam Rock, just that, to quote Mud (Tiger Feet): "your hips swinging out-of-bounds" is now a somewhat dangerous prospect!
Wonderful comment, very insightful 👍
It’s only now looking back on this that we realise the scale of the disaster that has occurred.
lol
Just goes to show doesn’t it how people have always seen issues in society and this is from a well respected journalist of the time but even many interviews from the normal man on the street of that time would show a lot of discontentment also. That’s why it’s annoying when so many blinkered people insist that things only went downhill from this or that age (to suit their own agenda) but fact is the gap between the haves and have nots and moral outrage about various trends is not a new phenomena. Actually a great book is ‘Hooligan’ by G Pearson that looks at the fear of moral decline since before Victorian times even against the concept there ever was ‘golden age’. The conclusion seemingly is ‘the good old days’ are any years before what the majority of folks ever even experienced.
Yes!!!
He's a few years away from Thatcher. She promised a future where business could do public services better than the government, she was wrong but people bought it because they were already discontented for a decade and wanted an easy answer
It's important we learn our lessons from history. But I think we're close to being too late.
He's complaining about things we're still complaining about now. Car centric cities, decimated public transport, houses for profit etc
Good comment,there have never been, “good old days “it’s just that we were younger,and blissfully unaware .
He would be totally shocked if he came back now. I was born in 1952, and life was quite good in the UK up to the 1980's until Thatcher destroyed the manufacturing industry and sold off too many council houses, then deregulated the stock market making the UK a land of Speed and Greed !
Fyfe Robertson: The Scottish Jack Hargreaves.
Although Fyfe did have an interest in urban life and Jack doesn't seem to have had. But I get what you mean
bit of an insult as ol' Jack was a posh boy slumming it as a country man.
@ - I meant they were both ‘Kindly grandfather’ types. I never knew my grandfathers so would have been proud to have either of them. No offence intended.
@@AtheistOrphanI get it, yes I do.
@@AtheistOrphan
none taken!
:-0
I had been thinking about the end of that programme not so long ago.
Thank you!
For all of our poverty, strikes, unbridled union power, three day working week, IMF ‘bailout’…1970s Britain was a million times better than today. At least the country was still ours.
Fyffe Robertson a legendary roving journalist next to Alan Whicker.
I grew up in the sixties and seventies... 70s were a mess, and definitely a feeling of things getting worse and worse and end of empire. I have no nostalgia for the dirty rivers and polluted air, waste on the streets, shoddy goods, blatant racism, corruption and ignorance. Rose tinted specs on the whole in the comments. Of course some things were better in a world of half the population.
I also grew up in the 60's and 70's and your right there is undoubtedly a sense of rose tinted specs. Every generation laments for a world 20 or 30 years previously but i think it is more than that. It was a more egalitarian time. The country had assets which were nationalised. The trains, gas, water, electricity. You only needed three times your salary to buy a house and if you couldn't afford one then you could get a council house or rent in the private sector for a rent people wouldn't believe if you told them today. The bank s were deregulated and Thatcher rolled back the state and sold our national assets to the highest bidder. Now we have league tables and targets! Nothing is safe, everything is to be exploited and wealth inequality is growing by the day.
I saw his name and remembered watching Tonight with Richard Dimbelby on the BBC as a very young boy and was fascinated with his accent.
Fast forward 50 years and you won't have to wonder.
Could you imagine him doing this in 2024?
I used to watch Robbie as a kid back in the 70s think it was on after Star Trek. Great to see it's on TH-cam.
Fyfe's commentry is a useful reminder that change is perpetual and cyclical in nature. Brace yourself, discomfort is coming, always (as well as comfort)!
You don't meet enough Fyfes these days. Perhaps the banana company rendered the name unfashionable :) I was 4 when this was made :)
I had to chuckle when he said that "News is a drug as potent as pot!" 🤣 It reminded me of my youth when my friends and I would all get together on Saturday nights, get some chips and dips and gather around the telly to buzz our heads off to _The News at Ten_ lol.
They’re all in prison (!) 😂
You'd think you'd moved abroad today Fyffe. We no longer need to go abroad for a holiday.
He would be horrified by the way we live now, I was born in 1969 in Nottingham and seeing that footage of the city center and ‘Vicky centre’ brought back so many memories, look how clean and tidy the place looks, no litter, no beggers, no homeless, no drunks, no one wandering around off their face on spice, no constant smell of cannabis in the air, no groups of dodgy looking youths in hoodies, no garish shop front and signage, no endless fast food and vape shops………I could go on and on!!
If I was in the Victoria centre with my mum and it was coming up to the hour I’d trot off to the water clock and watch it transfixed, I loved it! I’d be 5 or 6years old, I’d wait there and mum would turn up 10mins later, no worries about adducted or beaten up etc, surely that says everything? You just wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that these days!
Robbie was a superb journalist. Ironically the Beeb has played its part in the decline we now cannot fail to see in 2024.
1975 ffwd to 2024. House prices in Surrey Square SE17 (on this video) are between £700k and £1.7m. Gentrification and capitalism at its finest.
Overcwoding more likely
I was 7 in 1975 , oh wish I could go bk to them lovely days of the seventies, it sucks now and starmer is making it even worse !!!
I remember Fife and from today's perspective his insight is quite profound. UKUK
I think he could see the positive & negative in all our times !
11:58 look at Nottingham before enrichment ❤