It is now fifty years since the start of the 1960s – ten years of change, innovation, excitement and creativity that revolutionised our lives. To celebrate this amazing decade, Lulu presents Rewind the 60s - five entertaining programmes that explore all aspects of the 1960s: from where we lived, to what we ate, to how we dressed, and what we listened to. With the help of some very special guests, Lulu shows us how that extraordinary decade transformed Britain and the world forever – and how much fun it was to live through.
In this first episode, all-time comedy great Jimmy Tarbuck joins Lulu in the Rewind the 60s studio. Today we focus on 1960 and 1961, and Jimmy and Lulu recall the beginning of the decade. While Adam Faith and Roy Orbison were topping the charts, Jimmy was working as a Redcoat at Butlins: “at Butlins you learnt your trade”, he tells Lulu, and reveals that even as he was starting out as a performer, his real ambition was to become a professional footballer.
Today Lulu is Rewinding back to the years 1962 and 1963. These were the years when the world held its breath during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and when the assassination of President Kennedy shocked the everyone. Closer to home, the establishment was being shaken by the Profumo affair and the new satirists behind That Was The Week that Was. Today it is Sanjeev Bhaskar, currently starring in the BBC’s 60s period-drama The Indian Doctor, who joins Lulu in the Rewind the 60s studio. Sanjeev explains how his parents were a lot like the characters in his series: economic migrants who came to these shores and experienced a welcome that showed the British at their best and their worst. As we focus on the years 1962 and 1963, we meet Daman and Chand, a couple originally from India who were among the 100,000 people who managed to beat a crackdown on immigration that was introduced in 1962. Together, they made a new and successful life for themselves in Coventry.
British fashion designer Zandra Rhodes joins Lulu in the studio to chat about old times when they were both young, free and single in the mid-60s. Zandra was just finishing her textiles degree in the years this episode focuses on: 1964 and 1965. We hear what it was like to be young and fashion-conscious if you didn't live in swinging London, and Robin Wilson tells how his life changed when his dad was elected Prime Minister in 1964.
Today, Lulu is joined by DJ and broadcaster Tony Blackburn in the Rewind the 60s studio, and the two share their memories of 1966 and 1967. It was the age of psychedelia, flower power, and free love, and for Tony especially these were momentous times. A successful pirate radio DJ, Tony had an offer to come ashore and join a new BBC radio station just starting up. It was to be known as Radio 1. He tells Lulu about the experience of first walking into the BBC: everyone was in hippy gear while he turned up wearing a suit and tie. His stint on the new Radio 1 breakfast show broke new ground in broadcasting, and within a matter of weeks Tony was the most famous DJ in Britain.
It’s our final episode of Rewind the 60s and we’ve reached the end of the decade, focusing on the years 1968 and 1969. On the Rewind guest couch today is John Craven, pioneer of children’s news and now a reporter on the hugely popular BBC show Countryfile. John tells Lulu about starting out in BBC local news in the north east at the tail end of the 60s, and how he got his break as a broadcaster: the newsreader rang in sick one morning, John took the microphone, and a legend was born.
