Did anybody grow up in the 70s?

[floraloctopus]

The 50s and 80s threads are fascinating. Can anybody shed light on the 70s please?

I had the opposite experience @Ellmau, reading the basics before school was common and school dinners were so good.

Family photos at Christmas, with me and my girl cousins all wearing identical corduroy Clothkits outfits.
Learning to swim with heavy plastic floats.
Multi-coloured Swap Shop on Saturday mornings.
The big switchover from sheets and blankets to "continental quilts", with brown abc orange flowery colours.
Doing Music and Movement in the school hall in our vests and pants.
Prunes and custard for school lunch.

Anyone remember Sunny Smiles and Tropical Fruit drink?

Sitting in the boot of estate cars and being really chuffed if motorists waved back to you.

Ice on the inside of your windows

Everything brown and orange, including our Allegro

Cars didn’t start in the winter

Snow

No uniform at primary school

Angel Delight for pudding at school

Never had pasta, rice, noodles or cous cous

No eating out

Milk in little bottles at school

No computers or television at school and we used to rush into the hall on Fridays because “Come and Praise” was on the radio and we’d sing along to that!

Older years sitting the 11+ (stopped in about 1981 here)

I remember having two different alarm bells at school, one for fire where you just left the building as quickly as possible and left everything, and the other for bombs when you had to bring your bags with you so that there was fewer items for the bomb squad to search.

Mashed potato in powdered form that you added boiling water to. It was an indulgent treat to have that with baked beans.

No seat belts in cars

TV adverts about no seatbelts in cars.

Green cross code adverts.

Playschool , rainbow tv show.
Worzel Gummage and the muppets on a Sunday after bath &
Tv only on at lunch time then tea time.

Sunday grandstand sports on a Sunday, then a cartoon.

Crossroads then bed on a week night.

Going to the shops for my mums fags and a newspaper

50p pocket money which bought a bounty bar, can of coke and packet of crisps... with change remaining.

Playing out all day every day only returning home for a jam butty at dinner time.

Corner phone boxes, my mum queuing with a bag of old 10p pieces every week.

No bike helmets.

Walking everywhere for miles.

Doing pe in knickers and vest.

I got my first job aged 9
My second Saturday job aged 13
My third job (full time, £17 a week) aged 15

Green Shield stamps
Silver jubilee street parties
Punk
The Test Card on TV
My DF watching snooker on the black & white TV - somehow he knew which colour the balls were.
Blancmange

The pips going in the phone box, so you had to shove another coin in or you’d be cut off in a few seconds. There was a slot for 2ps and one for 10ps.
No school uniform at our primary, except for the PE kit of navy shorts and green t-shirts. We always longed for the apparatus out in the hall but it rarely was - possibly someone realised the risk of kids falling 15ft on to a hard floor from the frames that were attached to the wall.
We had indoor toilets at school but at playtime or lunchtime you had to use the outdoor toilet block and that was grim. It also had hard toilet paper that was like tracing paper.
Children’s clothes were quite formal compared to today. I was bought outfits for best ie Sunday school which eventually I’d wear to school. Jeans were only allowed at school on swimming days.
Our village had several shops that sold women and children’s clothes, and there was an independent shoe shop that also did shoe repairs. The nearby town had M&S, British Home Stores, an independent department store, and Woolworths of course. Woollies has gone, of course, along with the department store and BHS, and Marks’ as my mom called it has moved to an out of town mall.
I just about remember a Spar opening in our village when I was about five, as part of a new precinct with a chemist, hair salon, newsagent etc, and adjacent library, community centre and health centre. And the first supermarket - Asda - opening a few miles away. We went on an evening presumably because dad had to take us in the car to get there so it was doubly exciting!
Babies were sometimes left in prams outside shops. The librarian tried to make mom leave my pram outside but it was a very steep hill and mom refused. Librarians were strict and told you to hush if you spoke in more than a whisper. We had little cardboard tickets and when you borrowed a book they’d be filed in long rows, and given back to you when you returned it. I loved watching the books being stamped.
No pubs served food. Meals out were very rare, for occasions like an 18th birthday maybe. We occasionally went to a pub and sat in the beer garden on a sunny evening. Very few had a kids’ play area so I used to be bored.
Holiday was usually two weeks in Newquay, which was like a different world with the little gift shops open on an evening. We’d set off in the middle of the night to beat the traffic, and during the whole fortnight we’d maybe have one drizzly morning.
There was very little choice for anything. Life seemed so much simpler then...

Does anybody who was a teenager in the late '70's remember the clear lipgloss in a rollerball tube which had flavours like bubble gum and chocolate?

Miners blue eye shadow

Anne French cleaning milk and Bonnie Bell 10-0-6 cleaner for your spots

Starskey and Hutch

Charlie's Angels

@shinynewapple I remember the rollerball lip gloss. Bonne Bell cleanser was so harsh. It used to strip my skin and leave my face and my acne bright red.

Yes, I remember Sunny Smiles! We used to be given a little book of photos of smiling children, and went door to door selling the pictures for a charity donation. We were given them at Brownies and I remember going out to sell them, including to people I didn't know. Certainly wouldn't be done now! I used to love looking through the pictures at all the children though.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f8/e0/f8/f8e0f8badcffd4688c0ef8e74ed1d51c.jpg

Being furious that decimalisation meant my 6d pocket money became 2.5p - one old penny was equated with 0.5 new penny. So my 6 penny chews on pocket money day became 5 overnight. What a swizz.

Haven't RTFT (I usually would - apologies!) so I'm sure others have said my things already, but in no particular order from someone born in the middle-late 60s and in primary school/early secondary school during the 70s:

Lots of clothes in brown, yellow and green
Clothes made by my mum (also in yellow and green!)
Sheets you could make spark in the dark
Realising colour TV was a thing
Interesting (yes, that's a euphemism for hard-on-the-eyes!) wallpaper and carpet patterns (tbf, may have been leftovers from the 60s, but I remember them in the first house I lived in)
Phone numbers that only had 4 digits
No sun cream - Factor 2 was 'out there'
Findus crispy pancakes
Flares

There's probably more, but that's my off-the-top-of-my-head-list!

Home made clothes, including my brown school uniform. Choosing a pattern, and Mum picking the material from the market.

Ice inside the windows.
Waiting for the back and white telly to warm up.
Watching a black screen until the countdown clock came on for Playschool
Power cuts
The washing machine being dragged out into the middle of the kitchen on a Monday, and playing in the bubbles
Strap on rollerskates
Ice cream from the Walls van coming in blocks, and cutting it out onto square"cones"
No freezer, so eating the ice cream block quickly!
Ice lollies costing 5p
Taking 5p to the corner shop, coming back with a bag of sweets
No supermarket, so individual shops each day.
Supermarket opening, great excitement!
Bring allowed to stick the Green Shield stamps in the book
Going home at lunch from school, Dad coming home as well, eating mince and carrots with mash, then going back to school.

I was born in 1963,so the 70s was when I was growing up. I can remember:-
Chopper bikes (always wanted one but my parents wouldn't let me)
The Bay City Rollers (having a crush on Woody )
Going sledging on nearby Haste Hill in the winter (we seemed to get snow every year back then!).
3 TV channels (BBC1 and 2,and ITV) and no remote control.
The long,hot summer of 1976.
Bell-bottom trousers
Dial-a-disc.
Saturday Night Fever (my best mate and I managed to get in to see it at the cinema at the age of 14,despite it being an 'X' certificate {18 is today's equivalent}. Heaven knows how we managed that!)
Red phone boxes that had phone directories in!

So many of these!
Smash with everything instead of potatoes. It was never mixed properly and I hated it.
Bay City Rollers
Maxi dresses
Blue eyeliner and mascara
Awful swirly carpets and flock wallpaper
Transistor radios
The top 40
Platform shoes
Vesta curries
Great TV programmes that were actually worth watching
Three TV channels on a rented TV set
No central heating
Baths once a week
Arctic roll
School discos
Milk in a bottle with cream on top
Telephone boxes
Chatting to your friends on the landline
Cheesecloth tops
So much better then.

We had individual armchairs in the lounge, mismatched in style and probably colour, rather than a three piece suite.
There was a trend for coloured bathrooms - yellow, pink, olive green, turquoise etc. We had a boring white one. By the time we had changed it to a creamy beige, white suites were about to come back into fashion!
I had twice weekly baths, I think. Not sure if parents bathed daily. We certainly didn’t get a shower till the mid 80s.
Can’t remember wearing any deodorant until the mid 80s either.
Did we all stink back then?

Poldark with Robin Ellis, the lovely Angharad Rees and her smiling eyes, and Ralph Bates as George Warleggan.

@ALongHardWinter my 14 year old friends also got into see Saturday Night Fever but they wouldn't let me in. I was devastated and cried all the way home and then had to confess to my parents who I'd told I was going to see Star Wars!

I remember my mom watching The Onedin Line, The Brothers, and When The Boat Comes In.
Everyone watched the same thing. Saturday night was Jim’ll Fix It (ugh), Doctor Who, then maybe some sort of variety show.
By the late 70s I think I was old enough to watch Dallas and was devastated that the Who Shot JR episode clashed with a family occasion which merited a rare meal out, as we had no video recorder or catchup.
On Christmas Day there was always the big film, something like Bond.

I remember having the day off school for Princess Anne’s wedding to Mark Phillips and then on the Queen’s 25th wedding anniversary (which was also my birthday!).
Power cuts and spending whole evenings in the dark.
Mars bars and packets of crisps cost 2.5p (must have been early 70’s).
The hot summer of 1976 and the plague of ladybirds which accompanied it.
The huge guillotine (for cutting paper) in our classroom when we were 7-8. Health & safety was not that hot. Likewise the big rusty climbing frame on tarmac in the playground.
In the school summer holidays we’d spend all day playing out in some fields and woods a couple of blocks from our houses. Adults would only get worried if we didn’t turn up for tea.
There was also a building site we played on for a while when they were building a small block of flats - it was left completely open and unsecured when the workmen went home, damp cement and all.
There was no telly on during the day except school programmes. And no breakfast telly!
If we went to a hotel or posh-ish restaurant, you’d get orange juice as a starter. And a sweet trolley at the end. (No one does sweet trolleys anymore do they?)

School closed for weeks on end due to an oil shortage.

ladybird summer