Saturday August 25th
We start this story in Blackpool, where I am enjoying my annual summer
holiday with my Gran. We went every year for the last week of August from
1976 to 1983, then again in 1985 and 87, each time staying at the Kenbarry
Hotel on Albert Street, which was run by a bloke called Barry. Barry just
happened to be the son of one of my Gran’s next door neighbours, which
meant we were always welcome. I never found out who Ken was. The last
time I went there it was closed for refurbishment and had changed its name
to The Blackpool. I understand it was also once the subject of a reality TV
programme of some kind. But presumably under different management.
This may well have been the same summer that I got an autograph from
Darth Vader. It’s also likely the same week Gran bought me a Palitoy Star
Wars Cantina. I almost certainly visited the Tower, the Doctor Who Exhibition
and the Pleasure Beach. Coral Island was still new, having opened in 1978.
The arcades had Space Invaders machines, but this was still an exciting
novelty. Everything else is a mystery.
Sunday August 26th
OFFICIAL UK SINGLES CHART: TOP 25
No 1: We Don’t Talk Anymore - Cliff Richard
No 2: I Don’t Like Mondays - Boomtown Rats
No 3: Bang Bang - BA Robertson
No 4: Angel Eyes - Roxy Music
No 5: After the Love Has Gone - Earth, Wind and Fire
No 6: Gangsters - The Specials
No 7: Duke of Earl - Darts
No 8: Money - Flying Lizards
No 9: Reasons to Be Cheerful, Pt 3 - Ian Dury and the Blockheads
No 10: Ooh What a Life - Gibson Brothers
No 11: Just When I Needed You Most - Randy Vanwarmer
No 12: Hersham Boys - Sham 69
No 13: Is She Really Going Out With Him? - Joe Jackson
No 14: Angel Eyes / Voulez-Vous - ABBA
No 15: Gotta Go Home / El Lute - Boney M
No 16: Street Life - Crusaders
No 17: Sweet Little Rock ‘n’ Roller - Showaddywaddy
No 18: When You’re Young - The Jam
No 19: The Diary of Horace Wimp - ELO
No 20: Cars - Gary Numan (NEW ENTRY)
No 21: Morning Dance - Spyro Gyra
No 22: If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me? -
Bellamy Brothers
No 23: Love’s Gotta Hold On Me - Dollar
No 24: Lost in Music - Sister Sledge
No 25: Duchess - The Stranglers
Other notable singles in the Top 75 this week
No 32: Beat the Clock - Sparks
No 35: Strut Your Funky Stuff - Frantique
No 36: Spiral Scratch EP - Buzzcocks
No 38: Don’t Bring Me Down - ELO (NEW ENTRY)
No 39: Can’t Stand Losing You - Police
No 42: In the Brownies - Billy Connolly
No 43: Rock Lobster - The B-52’s
No 53: Good Times - Chic
No 54: Breakfast in America - Supertramp
No 56: My Sharona - The Knack
No 58: Bad Girls - Donna Summer
No 59: Silly Games - Janet Kay
No 62: Are “Friends” Electric? - Tubeway Army
No 65: Highway to Hell - AC/DC (NEW ENTRY)
No 70: Getting Closer / Baby’s Request - Wings (NEW ENTRY)
No 74: The Prince - Madness (NEW ENTRY)
OFFICIAL UK ALBUMS CHART
No 1: The Best Disco Album in the World - Various Artists
No 2: Discovery - ELO
No 3: Breakfast in America - Supertramp
No 4: Voulez-Vous - ABBA
No 5: I Am - Earth, Wind and Fire
No 7: Some Product - Sex Pistols
No 8: Parallel Lines - Blondie
No 9: Outlandos d’Amour - The Police
No 10: Highway to Hell - AC/DC
No 14: Replicas - Tubeway Army
No 21: Do It Yourself - Ian Dury & The Blockheads
No 26: Manifesto - Roxy Music
No 28: Bat Out of Hell - Meat Loaf
No 29: The B-52’s - The B-52’s
No 31: Risque - Chic
No 33: Out of the Blue - ELO
No 38: War of the Worlds - Jeff Wayne
No 39: Lodger - David Bowie
No 42: Go West - Village People
No 43: Drums and Wires - XTC (NEW ENTRY)
No 45: The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle - Sex Pistols
No 52: New Boots and Panties - Ian Dury & The Blockheads
No 53: Back to the Egg - Wings
No 56: Tubular Bells - Mike Oldfield
No 57: Plastic Letters - Blondie
No 59: A New World Record - ELO
No 60: Mingus - Joni Mitchell
No 75: The Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd
Monday August 27th
Lord Louis Mountbatten is assassinated by the IRA and 18 British soldiers
are killed in County Down. I remember talking to Gran about it as we walked
round a department store (probably Lewis’s) in Blackpool. Gran explained
that Lord Mountbatten was Prince Philip’s uncle and was therefore a
member of the Royal Family. I struggled to get my seven-year-old head
around why someone would want to kill a member of the Royal Family and
who these IRA people were that I kept hearing about.
Here’s a BBC documentary about it from 2019.
Thursday August 30th
Star Wars Weekly No 80 – features a Green Cross Code Man ad on the back.
The Green Cross Code Man was, of course, played on TV by the real Darth
Vader, David Prowse, whose likeness appears in the ad.
The Spectacular Spider-Man Weekly No 339 - a Marvel weekly published
under the editorship of Dez Skinn, who spent only two years in the position
but had a palpable impact on Marvel’s range of titles. This one has already
been through two rebrandings in less than nine months, having started the
year as Super Spider-Man, before changing to the more prosaic Spider-Man
Comic and, just a month ago, to the more flamboyant Spectacular Spider-
Man Weekly. In another nine months it will change again.
Hulk Comic No 27 - one of the more fondly regarded titles from Dez Skinn’s
so-called Marvel Revolution, this weekly mag managed to forge its own
unique identity, at least for a short while. Most of Marvel UK’s output merely
reprinted strips that had already been published in Marvel’s US range, but in
black and white instead of colour. Hulk Comic stomped all over that by
publishing not one but four new strips by British writers and artists each
week - with brand new stories from The Hulk, Nick Fury, Black Knight and
Night Raven, alongside more traditional reprint material. When I was little
and bought these things regularly, it never occurred to me that the stories
were reprints, but Hulk Comic still stood out as something different. I
remember responding particularly well to Night Raven which, by this point,
has already been dropped from the roster. I wonder if this is why I no longer
read it?
Marvel also published monthly magazines alongside its weekly titles, but
which day of the month they came out is virtually impossible to work out.
They were usually Thursdays, but which Thursday is anyone’s guess. On this
occasion however, there’s a clear date given in ads in several different
comics for at least one new monthly magazine: Marvel Superheroes -
ostensibly a brand new mag, but confusingly also a continuation of Marvel
Comic, which itself used to be called The Mighty World of Marvel, and had
been going as a weekly mag since 1972 - which is why the first edition is
actually No 353. The first of these new-look comics was published on August
23rd, so it’s still brand spanking new when I arrive in Fairburn, and I’ll
assume it’s out on the fourth Thursday of every month from now on until I
hear otherwise. I didn’t buy it at the time though so I’ve no idea why I’m
spending so much time going on about it.
Other Marvel Monthlies around this time:
•
Rampage No 15
•
Starburst No 13
•
The Savage Sword of Conan No 23
Friday August 31st
BBC 1’s Nationwide broadcasts a special film following Kate Bush on tour.
Saturday September 1st
Probable date for return home from Blackpool. I like to think that Mum and
Dad moved house while I was away, and everything was miraculously ready
for me upon my return. No one has any memory of whether or not that’s
true. But Mum told me that, when she asked for time off work to move
house, her boss at the sweet factory refused. So she told him to go to Hell,
walked out and did it anyway. The following week she was sent a letter of
apology and asked very nicely if she wanted her job back. This may have had
something to do with the enormous respect many of those who worked
there still had for her father and grandfather, who had both worked in
senior blue collar positions at the factory before her.
In the evening: an exciting new series of Doctor Who begins with Part One of
Destiny of the Daleks. Written by Who veteran Terry Nation, it promises
thrills galore as the Doctor and his newly-regenerated companion Romana
return to Skaro, the home planet of the dreaded Daleks, where a mysterious
excavation is taking place which threatens to alter the fate of the entire
galaxy. Looking back on it now, this story’s pretty rubbish, but at the time, it
was event television. Not only was it the first story to feature the Daleks for
four years, it was also the first story to feature Lalla Ward as Romana, and
the first story script edited by Douglas Adams, who would become much
more famous for other things as the years wore on. It also introduces the
Movellans, one of the very few species of black aliens in Doctor Who
(though, typically, one of them is a white woman blacked up).
2000 AD Prog 129
Strips this week include Judge Dredd (Battle of the Black Atlantic), Black
Hawk, ABC Warriors, Disaster 1990 and The Mind of Wolfie Smith. The comic
had merged with sister publication Tornado only two weeks before. There’s a
nice blog here which details one man’s mission to read every available
edition of 2000 AD. Prog 129 is about halfway down this page.
Sunday September 2nd
After almost a year of inactivity, the Yorkshire Ripper claims another victim,
his eleventh murder in four years (though at the time it was assumed to be
his twelfth). Barbara Leach was discovered in an alleyway in Bradford in the
early hours of Sunday morning. In context, the infamous hoax letters and
tape were sent over the period of 1978 to 1979, with the tape arriving on
George Oldfield’s desk on June 17, 1979. This threw the Ripper hunt
completely off course, and by August 1979 the police believed the Ripper’s
home town to be Castletown, near Sunderland. They were wrong, but only
two people actually knew that.
OFFICIAL UK SINGLES CHART
No 1: We Don’t Talk Anymore - Cliff Richard
No 53: Slap and Tickle - Squeeze
OFFICIAL UK ALBUMS CHART
No 1: In Through the Out Door - Led Zeppelin
No 2: Slow Train Coming - Bob Dylan
No 73: No. 1 in Heaven - Sparks
Saturday August 25th - Sunday September 2nd, 1979
TERM 1: Week 0
TERM 1 (Sept - Dec 1979)
Week 0 (Aug 25 - Sep 2, 1979)
Week 1 (Sep 3 - Sep 9, 1979)
Week 2 (Sep 10 - Sep 16, 1979)
Week 3 (Sep 17 - Sep 23, 1979)
Week 4 (Sep 24 - Sep 30, 1979)
Week 5 (Oct 1 - Oct 7, 1979)
Week 6 (Oct 8 - Oct 14, 1979)
Week 7 (Oct 15 - Oct 21, 1979)
Half Term (Oct 22 - Oct 28, 1979)
Week 8 (Oct 29 - Nov 4, 1979)
Week 9 (Nov 5 - Nov 11, 1979)
Week 10 (Nov 12 - Nov 18, 1979)
Week 11 (Nov 19 - Nov 25, 1979)
Week 12 (Nov 26 - Dec 2, 1979)
Week 13 (Dec 3 - Dec 9, 1979)
Week 14 (Dec 10 - Dec 16, 1979)
Week 15 (Dec 17 - Dec 23, 1979)
Christmas (Dec 24 - Dec 30, 1979)
New Year’s Eve (Dec 31, 1979)
TERM 1 IN LINK FORM
TERM 2 (Jan - Apr 1980)
TERM 3 (Apr - Jul 1980)