Waiting for my future

My British Childhood is vaguely religious, with strange days spent in the Village Hall, Schools days spent in assemblies wearing Daps. Or haunted rainy days spent indoors watching the dreamy world of TV. Full of, weird French animation with obscure jazz soundtracks,The Clangers,experiments in garden sheds and Spike Milligan’s Q There was even some more bonkers stuff. 

At worst it was slightly creepy and malevolent with certain menace lurking behind next doors curtains. At best it’s very English,with a cultural strain leading from David Bowie to Radiohead, Dr Who to Banksy.

Its a Strange late 1960’s hangover, post hippy, with slightly folked up sensibility and a Punk can do attitude.It seeped into my subconscious, Leading to an amateurish adulthood of Bad Science,Dark Humor and World War Two sensibilities.

Although if the main strain of Television I watched while growing up was correct (as it should be) the vision of that brave new world by now should be here, I would be living in a sexy spandex suit provided by the welfare state on Vulcan,eating food pills and having sex in zero-G with all manner of pleasure droids in a distinctly English way.

When NASA’s Apollo space missions took off for the Moon in 1969, the world was already gripped by science fiction, Not Science tomorrow but Science in 40 years,(where I am now) this white hot vision of the future,fueled Film, TV and books of all types to promote an imaginative vision of the future, whether utopian or dystopian.

By my teenage years,I lamented that I missed out on the swinging sixties,its visions of urban utopias,its teenage revolutionaries, its sex,drugs, and rock and roll.

But hell I grew up in the seventies and men with pointy sticks, flair trousers and side burns were telling me about how good the late nineties were going to be and not only in science programmes.I was going to be laid in the future and it was only a short teleport away. 

My formative decades watching the box promised so much more than today’s 24/7 TV with their 64 rubbish channels, You actually have to be a certain age to remember waiting patiently for the next programme. Waiting for your future entertainment. In between programmes the TV displayed a disappearing clock to keep you occupied or a test card, which could hypnotically transfix me,on  our then new 24inch colour television.

By 1978 I was lapping up a diet of The Tomorrow People, The Prisoner, Blake 7,Thunderbirds,UFO,Dr Who,Space 1999 and Tomorrows World.

My dedication to that tube had a world that included Glowing Alien births, Strange Parallel Universes, Funky Guitar Solos, Groovy Jazz, Perspex Oracles, Exploding Extra Terrestrials, Rigid Hairstyles, Spray on Catsuits (for Man and Women), Holidays in Space, Cars lower than my knee, Rigid Plastic Bras,Strange God like people and Stranger Daemens,Intergalactic power storms and nude kick ass geeky girls all on one electric box in the corner flashing a psychedelic red alert.

This personal and sexual liberation of my technological utopian future, always seemed to be just around the corner when I was 12 , so I mourn it from my porn fatigued present,my adolescent imagination of a post millennium. before all of our pornatopia imagery existed.

My unusual whiff of childhood is now no more than a myth.Knowing that I could never have lived through it, makes it a more of a myth.even with the all cliché Tee-Shirts I see about Jet-packs.