Nice to see news just being reported from the studio without it being duplicated over and over with "live" broadcasts by someone on the scene stating nothing different apart from what already has been said.
I remember that weekend so well. Stinking hot summer and freezing winter. Had a massive snowball fight outside of my mates Mum's house and there was an abandoned Toys R Us lorry on the Radford Road in Coventry. Over a foot of snow dumped in less than two hours!
I feel sooooo sorry for the couple who had to settle for baked beans rather than roast pheasant. They must have been in therapy for years after that trauma!
A very simple and quick, but powerful BBC News intro music here, as composer George Fenton said, it consisted of eight beats. Count them and you will see.
I was only 3 months old when this was broadcast - my mum remembers we in Killamarsh (near Sheffield and Chesterfield) went without electricity for about 6 days, my family had just a small battery-powered radio, and she had to cook my baby milk on the gas instead of using the kettle (formula milk). A work colleague of mine, who was about 16/17 at the time remembers walking through Mansfield around 5pm and even at that time because there were no streetlights, it was odd because you would (just) see someone in the distance, but not recognise them unless their face was just a few inches away from yours! All in all that winter sounds like it was a horrible one for the Midlands and the North - areas that are usually not used to power cuts because of adverse weather like this.
I was about 7 in Mansfield at the time, I remember being without power for days, a not being able to go anywhere for a couple days. At least the gas stayed on.
I had stopped at my grandmothers in Kirkby in Ashfield that Friday night, had to walk home only a couple of miles but I’ve still never seen it snow like that since then.
This was the first of two major cold spells that winter the second came in February 1991. A lot of the winters in the 80s and 90s had real bite to them that we just don’t see now.
TV today is filled with people shouting and constant loud music - and it all seems so cheap and tacky! Maybe I'm an old fogie, but the TV 30 years ago was such better quality and you don't feel like you're falling into a brain dead coma when you watch it.
Well, I was just twenty and at the start of my working life in 1990. Now aged 54, I see what you mean about the quality of TV programmes. That makes me a comparative seasoned veteran!
