"Granny Gets The Point" PIF - Full Version - UK Decimal Day (1971)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.พ. 2025
- British Public Information Film made for Decimal Day, February 15th, 1971.
Since today is the 50th anniversary, I thought the full version should be online.
It’s hard to believe that British society has changed so much since then , like a memory of a different country.
Finally! I've been waiting so long to watch this! Never got the chance to watch this back in 1971 as I was only 4 years old! And finally after all these years I'm watching what I have been waiting 50 years for!
And Gran's still in the bedroom.
you're *67* and you have a minecraft profile picture ?
@@TauGeneration My grandson made my account eight years ago.
@FlyingMonkies325 Think yourself lucky they didn't use ITA (Initial Teaching Alphabet).
@@MrDuncl I was brought up with ITA. ie hav collected a few books in ITA
As an American whose knowledge of English money prior to adulthood was from older movies and shows, this video was amazing in understanding the old and new money. I'm so used to decimal and couldn't wrap my head around it.
This aired constantly on ITV in Britain during 1970 into 1971. Usually airing at the weekend, kicking off their Saturday schedules at 11am and usually airing on Sunday lunchtimes.
"Someday, you'll be old too." Doris Hare was 66 when she played Gran in this film. 66-year-olds today look and act much younger today than they did in 1971.
That's because we live longer and healthier now than 50+ years ago, so people will look younger and more fit today. Even at 50 back then, folks looked more granny-like.
@@LarryFleetwood8675 Not forgetting back then second hand smoke was everywhere. Buses, trains, office staff were allowed to smoke at their desk, town halls when wrestling was on and the factories floors allowed smoking depending on circumstances.
@@LarryFleetwood8675 Let's also not forget hairstyles, fashion and make up can all help us look younger.
Madonna is currently 66
@@jameskvo She looks like she's in her 80's trying to look in her 60's.
I'm just glad that grandma didn't hurt herself or anyone else.
😂
@@richardh8082😂😂🤯🤯😑
I turned seven the week before 'D-Day' & remember it very well. A birthday gift costing 50 new pence at the time (a book) was also shown as ten shillings in the shop, which my mum explained to me. I was fascinated by it all, great memories from half a century ago! ☺
Absolutely brilliant, thanks for taking me back 50 years in an instant. Although I was only 6 years old when decimalisation came I still remember those days so well.
I invest in .999 silver bullion coins, the only way to beat hyperinflation and the digital currencies being imposed on the world. Precious metals and food are the future.
Did people go around with devices to convert new money back to old money
Oscar, there were little personal conversation leaflets for people and most shops had posters displaying the changes. As far as I remember the transition was completed very quickly and everyone adapted to decimal easily.
@FlyingMonkies325 Wow, you're a real idiot aren't you. With no physical money, you'll technically own nothing and thus can be 'switched off' in no time by the powers that be, great fun, eh... lol
@@TheMercianMetalDetectingMy paternal grandfather helped out with Decimal Day in London that was before he moved back to his ancestral county of Cork.
Peter gets it. Be more like Peter.
What a fantastic bit of history.
Granny is Mum (Mrs Butler) from On the Buses - Olive and Arthur could have been her family! I really enjoyed this - thank you!
Also in there are Glyn Houston and Norman Chappell. I recognise the milkman, but can't remember the actor's name.
@@sambda Bunny May. The policeman who got screamed at in the ear in The Rutles. He played a total nut job in The Gentle Touch as well.
"I shall write to the queen". Omg, HM was there quite a long time.
at that point in history she had already reigned for 19 years
This video helped me understand the old money I hear referenced in old TV shows. Thanks!
Astonishing time-capsule at the dawn of the decade.
On the 15th of February 1971, I was coming up to my sixth year (6 on the 07.04.71)... at school we were being being pre educated on decimalisation. As others have said, its good to see all of this public information film ... it really takes you back to the early 1970s!.
Did you go fuck my money knowledge is obsolete
@@oscarosullivan4513 Air Head
@@merseydave1 Hardly
Except that changing to new money was a swindle because the coins were rounded up in tens. By doing you were paying more for your money than you were used to
@@paulchristopher8634 I have no doubt that buisness made a provit out of the re-set ... however the system we have now is far better than the old system.
That Milkman at 11.00 is like a pre-decimal David Tennant.
David Tennant hadn’t been born yet when this was made.
He wasn’t even in existence
He was Born in 1971
David Twelvant
🤣
Have to admit, wasn't initially sold on having this whole teledrama for the first 10 min or so (maybe there's a simple value that just splats the conversions on screen), but when the granny gets the point -- along with converting all the prices at the boutique, that was satisfying
I remember ‘D Day’! Luckily I was young enough to pick it up right away and realize how much simpler it is than the old system.
Thanks for sharing! Been looking for many years for this as I remember it from my childhood - and my aunt was one of the schoolkids in the classroom!
Thank you for posting this full version. I’ve only ever seen the short clip before.
This was fascinating!
I was 10 years old when the change happened (so about the same age as the young boy) and I can relate to the attitudes of the various people in this film very well. The excitement of the young ones and the fear and apprehension of the older generation!
My grandfather was born in 1907, so he was 63 by the time the change happened. He'd retired early due to ill health so he'd never actually earned anything in decimal currency. He died in 1981 and he never did get used to it! If he owed you some money he used to just take a handful of change out of his pocket and say "Take what you need out of that"! Good job it was only his family that he used to say that to 😀
The only difficulty when the new currency was introduced was the constant need to convert to the old money. People had to do this as it was the only system that meant anything to them - just in the way that we all have to convert foreign prices to British money when we go abroad.
Most people got used to working in decimal only within a year, but it was sad for the elderly.
The Revell Lunar Module the kid gets for £1.22 (and a half) at the end now costs £49.99 (recommended retail price). Mind you, an average week's wages in those days was about £28.00
And the Tamiya Lotus 49B for ,£3.75!
There was intense inflation of the pound in the 70s and 80s. It's incredible how much a pound bought, even compared to the US dollar at the time. $1 in 1971 is about $6.75 now. £1 in 1971 is £14.46 now and a pound is STILL more than a dollar.
that £1.225 would be equivalent to £19.41 today
@@matthewhopson964 .... and the equivalent today would be £49.42.. So a total of £68.83 for both !! Granny was a bit flash or the boy knew she wasn't quite sure of the actual value !!! lol
I suspect they have gone from being a child's toy to an Adults hobby. The local Post Office used to carry a large range of Plastic model kits (mainly Airfix). In contrast if you wanted a calculator it would have been £100s and only available at a specialist business retailer (a bit like a cash register today).
Great show! Love history. And the jingle you guys had in 71 is quite catchy.
I remember that we had to sit exams in primary school on converting £ S and d to decimal. Understanding decimals at the age of 10 was easy. But converting from the old system was a nightmare. Each system was easy to understand in isolation. I was used to buying my sweets in shillings and pence. I could buy a lucky bag for threepence, and would have a whole 9d remaining out of a shilling pocket money.
Absolute luxury, we used to get sixpence (2 and a half new pence I think) spending money and live in a cardboard box in the middle of the road….
Did people go around with devices to convert new money back to old money
@@oscarosullivan4513 they would if they could 😀 have.
@@paulnicholson1906 I looked it up and calculating devices that is mechanical for conversion of decimal to LSD
It was a swindle because you got less for your money when D - Day came about. The Government of the day rounded everything up in tens so that you were paying more for what you brought
This is brilliant! Thanks for uploading.
Lovely to see Maid Marian again, I used to Watch with Mother after she put away her Picture Book.
I never saw the point of decimal money!
Been looking for this for ages - thanks so much for posting it!
I was 10 in 1971 .
I remember being taught about decimalisation 2 years before in 1969 ,The school had a card with the new money on it to show us kids what was coming
Here on 15 February 2021.
Wow - a Revell 1/48 Lunar Module for £1.22 1/2 p and the 1/12 scale Tamiya Lotus 49 for £3.75. The Tamiya Lotus 49 is well over £130 today.
I do love them discussing there being LSD shops charging LSD prices. In America that would've been interpreted very differently.
Think of them as drug stores... 😎
LSD as in money, not drugs.
I van remember watching a documentary about decimalisation in 1970. Me and the others watching laughed ourselves silly whenever they mentioned lsd shops and led money.
I think the best way to explain how the new coins worked would've been if they had said to think of the new pence as a percentage of a pound. For example, 23 new pence is 23% of a pound, 67 new pence is 67% of a pound, etc. That would've helped people quickly visualise how much 23 or 67 new pence was worth, rather than by converting it to old pence in their head.
I don't really remember actually using the old money, though I was 9 on D Day. We had a shop set up at school to practise using the new money, but I don't recall ever having a problem with it. A 9 year old easily addapts though I would think. I loved getting the new shiny coins, and I still love new shiny coins to this day.
I was 9 on Dday 71 and all this passed me by.
Certainly were some interesting times in Great Britain concerning their currency, eh? 💷
This makes me glad I live in the US which decimalized from the start. That's not to say that we didn't somewhat follow a similar pattern to Lsd: the dollar is divided into 10 dimes, and the dime into 10 cents (which is why the ten-cent coin in the US says "one dime").
1792 was when the US currency went decimal. We have a simple style to our coins, 1 cent, 5 cent, 10 cent, 25 cent, 50 cent and of course unlike Britain who have a £1 coin, we have one dollar bills. In Britain they got rid of their £1 bills in the mid 1980s apparently.
@johnking5174 1983 was when the pound coin came in, and 1984 was when they stopped the half penny coin. As someone born in the UK in the early eighties I find the half penny an odd quirk in a decimal world. It didn't quite work in that section where the kid puts the pounds and pence in decimal columns. I guess half pennies were soon inflated out of existence.
@@johnking5174that’s correct the pound notes (bills) were replaced with pound coin in 1983 I remember them coming in I still have a pound note though
@@carlpollington5059I am around your age and remember the half pennies well and still have one they are about the size of a modern 5p
USA used British pre decimal currency prior to the dollar in 1793
And today you can go around Poundland trying to find the items that are still a £.
That's the same as trying to find a friendly member of staff in the stores. All got faces like wet weekends.
Sodding inflation. 😡
Lovely!
Grandma looks like one of the Monty Python Pepperpots.
My parents ran a post office at the time. I remember my Mum saying it would’ve been a nightmare going the other way! She was right in her prediction of mental arithmetic becoming poorer.
3:37 - Notice how that in 1971, most homes, the TV set never took pride of place in the main room. Here it was placed in an out of the way position, unlike today where most flat screen TVs take up a large amount of room, sometimes hooked into the wall. Different era.
Well, it was placed in the corner diagonally, as the placement of the sofas reflect. Of course, sticking an old CRT box diagonally in the corner made as much as sense back then as sticking the flat screen TV flush with the wall (or on it). Especially given the 4:3 screen ratio on the old box: it is essentially a cube compared with the rectangle screen with barely anything behind it that we have today. Our family used to even put small ornaments with a doily on the CRT TV. Try that with an OLED display today.
@@KaleunMaender77 Same here. Our family did the same.
@@johnking5174we did as well
This is the full version of granny gets the point.
10:09 "And there will be LSD shops charging LSD prices and giving old money in the change." 💀
£sd worked fine when used in mercantile transactions. 12 pence to the shilling, how much by the dozen (pencils)? 20 shillings to the pound, how much by the ton (coal)? A guinea was 21s, £1+5% (tipping). There were plenty of handy conversion short-cut across all the various measures, I was taught them until I was 15 and 'got the point' :D
not pound, cwt :D
Oh my god, it must have been a nightmare for a while … And I thought going from Belgian francs to euro’s was hard !
Twice here did shops keep for a while prices in new money and old money
I went from franks to pesetas to Euros and have since moved to Morocco and Vietnam.
Just imagine how hard it'll be going from Euros to rubles.
Luckily you've got a few years yet.
@@gastonbell108Russia won't exist anymore by then
As a school boy i used get lead out the old houses before they demolished them..i could twist just about 10 bobs worth on my bike but at this time the scrap dealer gave me 50p so "NO i want me 10 bob note" not some dodgy foreign florin!! Its the same boy"..."Fuck off you add me over!! And so on!
What kind of houses
Some Oscar worthy acting there 😂
Considering the garbage they churn out these days better, I'd say.
17:10 wait, people didn’t use dots to separate the old money?! Mind blown.
It was never really about the method of counting. It was more of an historical problem. Having all the old coins and their nicknames were so ingrained into the British culture, it was very hard to get used to not having shillings, sixpences, ten bob note, half a crown etc. It all had a very historical, warm, British feeling. Pounds and pence just seemed cold. That was the problem.
"It all had a very historical, warm, British feeling."
Could have skipped that whole apologetic and simply said "Little Britain types didn't like it because they don't like any form of change whatsoever."
I worked on an ice cream van 12yrs old got the job so I could explain the change to customers mostly older ones, sold cigarettes as well😂
Seems like a very upper middle class family to be living in a tower block? Also Sandra is old now haha
I remember decimal day! And eing thought in school about the new decimal coi system!
I still have nightmares about them decimals - such a confusing system. Don’t think I’ll ever get the hang of it. Still, I’m on TH-cam mind
It was a nightmare for me too, as mars bars nearly doubled
What caused it
Absolute swindle. All the new money was rounded up in tens. Disgraceful and people of the day told the Government so.
@@oscarosullivan4513 23% inflation in 1975. Today (2023) Andre Bailey is trying to beat that.
Granny got it on with the milkman
ive never heard of old money being called lsd before, thats quite cool
Libra pondo denari!
Recommended retail price, like he needed to add that in hahaha!
Mary Maude, who played Sandra, was one of the hostesses on "At Last, the 1948 Show". The running gag was that, each week, there would be one more hostess joining Aimi MacDonald, who was the ostensible hostess of the show.
Granny was Princess Leia before Princess Leia.
Tell it to That Junkman!
“All alone I see? What will the neighbors think?”
NICE TO SEE PATRICIA DRISCOLL AS MUM WHO PLAYED MAID MARIAN TO RICHARD GREENE,S ROBIN HOOD BACK IN THE FIFTYS
Doris Hare seems to have been typecast as a moaning old witch, as she played the same type of character in On the Buses, in their TV series and in the three films.
2:35 I'm betting that it's where Scarfolk used this scene for that TV hijack clip of theirs.
I need some LSD to make sense of this new money!
It did rather make me laugh that they could say 'LSD shop' with a straight face.
The kid's getting a lunar module _and_ a Lotus 49? Lucky SOB.
Last time I priced a Lotus 49 model in that scale, it was about $200 here in the US.
If he hadn’t unwrapped them and sold them now, he’d be quite well off !
Yes to get all that little lot for under a fiver is an amazing bargain, unboxed it will be worth a small fortune today. Maybe this film should have been called ‘Toy Store owner gets the shaft’
I can't see how anyone could have trouble understanding how the new coins worked, I think the biggest difficulty was converting between the old and new coins. They probably should've just introduced the new coins, and scrapped the old ones, both instantly at the same time, like countries did with switching to the euro.
The euro was helped along by cheap pocket calculators (and many were given as gifts) with builtin currency conversion.
@@Fridelainalso for the euro it was switching from one decimal currency to another, as opposed to non decimal to decimal currency
I like the sound of LSD shops @10:09
The old system involved New Math. New Math used bases other than 10 (the basis of math). So, pence were base 12, and shillings were base 20.
The confusion of the transition wasn't with the math itself, but the value the prices represented. How do you know you aren't being cheated? Hence Gran's rebellion. And the shops showing prices in both £sd and decimal.
thanks for the explanation
Yes for older people who spent their entire lives believing that the pound in their pocket was worth 240 pence only to be told that on the 15th February 1971 the pound was worth only 100 pence. Most probably thought that they were losing 140 pennies out of every pound of their savings.
That was fun with all the stereotypes. The format of the cheque looked a bit strange with no "p" on the end.
I'm still looking for the Scaffold track in which the lyrics go "One pound is one hundred new pennies. One hundred new pennies makes a pound." over and over again.
They all sound too posh to be living in a high rise council flat.
I remember my grandma had a card that showed the old money when you looked at it at one angle then new pence when you looked at it a different way. I just remember that she told me sixpence is 2 1/2 new p since she used to give me sixpence when we visited.... Sixpence seemed more money though.
Top 10 saddest anime deaths number 7: Florin Coin.
This is not a sentence I expected to read today.
Are these the flats on the led zep 1v album
That granny's attitude was typical of older people at that time - still clinging on to their attitude of empire and that Britain was the best. The rest of the world had mostly adapted to decimal long before the British. Much simplier system.
It did cause some inflation at the time. I think it got worse in the late 70s.
Is that a young Beverly Callard running the boutique?
Nobody today in the UK under the age of 60 would liiely have any idea how the old money worked.
I thought all news medis was ALWAYS full of it! I'm with gran on one thing, You get raised and live for 5 decade's using pounds ounces, Feet and inches and it's your instant visualization in any situation or discussion .
The one I still have difficulty with is cars always specifying MPG (different from America to confuse things further) but petrol being priced in litres.
@@MrDuncl There are two problems (and they are costs). Road distances and speed signs remained in MPH because of the financial costs of changing them to metric.
Secondly was the petrol pumps themselves. At the time, delivery units could be changed between litres and gallons; the pricing had a limit of £1.99 per unit, meaning once the price of petrol had increased beyond £1.99 a gallon, the pumps would need to be replaced. So, the industry asked for the units to be changed to litres, extending the life of the pumps by 4.5 times.
I wouldn’t mind showing that teacher my decimal point
Glyn Houston playing the father.
24:36 this guy's face made me burst out laughing lmao
Mrs Butler
This is for itv aka independent television uk.
This wasn't made exclusive for ITV, but was also shown in cinemas too. It was a "Public Information Film" and could be used by anyone. Produced by the British government's treasury ministry.
@@johnking5174 I meant mainly but it's a pif aka short screening.
15:54 You're an old lady! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
odd that we decimalised but had a half new pence...
0.5 is perfectly fine in decimal. decimal doesn't mean you can only use round numbers up to 10. what is weird about a half penny? We have half Euro coins now (50 cents) or half pounds (50p) that is just the same as a half penny
Take this with a grain of salt because I'm a 20-year-old yank, but I think it's because sixpences were allowed to used as 2½p coins until the early 80s. If you used one of them to buy something priced at 2p, your change would be ½p.
@@EnigmaticLucas Correct. According to Wikipedia there was even a proposal to have a 1/4p coin but instead they withdrew the old threepenny bit (worth 1.25 New Pence).
So old people in Brittain didn't learn decimals in school?
If you left school in 1955, decimalisation was more than a decade away so you learnt £/s/d
@@Keithbarber I'm talking about the kind of decimals that you use in simple arithmetic. It just seems like anyone past primary school would have already known how to add and subtract to two decimal places.
Just as younger generations didn't learn how to spell in school. Britain.
Yes but decimals (as in Pi) weren't thought to have had anything to do with currency. If granny had been taught about PI they might have approximated it to 22/7.
Why do they keep talking about getting money at the post office? Does the post office act as bank in Britain?
Possibly increasingly so. As banks do not want small value older customers and are closing down branches
@@johnd8892 this was in 1971
@@jeremybarcelo6486 it was well underway in 1971.
Surprised that post office banking goes back over one hundred and sixty years.
To quote the World bank site :
Using the postal network to deliver financial services is not a new idea. The first postal account was opened in 1861 when in the post of the United Kingdom established a postal savings bank to encourage poor people to save.
Continued on from then.
I can get postal money orders at the post office in the US, so...
Probably could've avoided confusion by calling New Pennies, something else,.
It actually said New Pence on the new coins
Granny is having an organism.
The fact that it’s a very even 100 pence to the pound rather than 12 pennies to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound is a much easier concept that wasn’t understood back then mind boggled me lol
It was never really about the method of counting. It was more of an historical problem. Having all the old coins and their nicknames were so ingrained into the British culture, it was very hard to get used to not having shillings, sixpences, ten bob note, half a crown etc. It all had a very historical, warm, British feeling. Pounds and pence just seemed cold. That was the problem.
@@johnking5174 If the Boutique had been really posh they would have been pricing in Guineas 🙂
13:48 It’s all money? Well it’s £89.55
What the hell am I watching
UK finest. the only country in the world that uses a sitcom format to educate the public.
A woman nostalgic for empire
@@oscarosullivan4513 that’s not a woman! That’s a man!
@@jeremybarcelo6486 Didn’t notice
@@oscarosullivan4513 People in Hong Kong might be too.
My country never used LSD.
They all talk rather posh considering they live in a tower block!
Peter though sounds like something out of grange Hill!
good job, gran, now give me some sugar
Ahrrrr doris hare ,
It's still confusing! lol
At ~7.20 that kid must be dumb or too young if he thinks when buying tea, 8.5 old pence (not even a full shilling) is equal to 8 new pence (1 and three 5ths of a shilling or roughly 19.2 old pence). No wonder the granny/parents were panicking, thats over 100% inflation lol.
7:20 He's not talking about old pence at all there, he's saying if the same tea is 8.5p in one shop, 8.0p in another, and 7.5p in the last one (all new pence) you can easily tell which place sells it cheaper, even if you don't know how these prices compare to the old one.
Now I am wondering if it was a 100 teabags, 25, 20 or loose leaf that they sold for under 10 new pence, today that would get you a couple teabags at best.
Inflation helped it along. In the old days a few shillings would buy most personal bits, and we seldom counted higher than that
Lol classic video
Oh my goodness, how BORING! How can 100 pennies in a pound be so hard to compute?!
Amazing, she lives in a brutalist tower block but accept decimal currency. Hopefully she passed before gangs of Beresfords and Alis turned the blocks into crime factories or were demolished in 2010s.