For the third time here we go, back through ‘The Time Warp’,
To early adulthood, and school, but it’s a blur
The speed things change…Oi, you! Don’t laugh, don’t mock, and don’t gawp –
What you’ll read about here really was ‘The Way We Were’

The pubs would close at three, and not reopen then till seven;
The shops were closed, they never opened, not on Sundays;
The Epilogue closed down TV, at just past half eleven,
Saved electricity, so beneficial, some ways

We’d rent TVs, we didn’t buy them, fewer properties
Were owned, so we’d pay rent at the front door;
We got our cash from banks, building societies,
Where we’d queue to get it out an hour or more

No lottery for us, we did the pools,
Vernons, Littlewoods, and also little Zetters;
‘Perm any 8 from 10’, those were the rules;
’10 Homes’ and ‘4 Aways’ were bets they set us

There were no breast implants, no breast augmentations,
So no ‘Jordan’s’, though there was Samantha Fox;
Blokes had it easy, for to hide size limitations
We’d but to shove a strategically placed carrot down our crotch

Striptease was so looked down on, the province of the men’s clubs,
Dodgy decor, seedy feel, and house lights dimmin’;
Since when it’s quite come on, to theatres, and body rubs,
And now, of course, is fashionable, most, for women

We’d try our best to bump into the person
That we fancied, a laughing matter, if they caught us;
How’d we imagine things could change, and suddenly worsen
To the extent today we’d all be labelled ‘stalkers’?

Every weekday Andy Capp was in the paper,
Pigeons, beer and dole, poor wife Flo couldn’t win;
But he didn’t match the trite, middle class capers
Of the perpetually semi-naked George and Lynne

There were comics for to buy, out every Wednesday,
A parade of naughty, cheeky individ’s
Who’d run riot through the Beano and the Dandy –
Dennis The Menace, and Gnasher, his dog, and the Bash Street Kids

Ah, the adverts! How they brightened up our lives,
‘Man At C & A’ clothes really did look rather natty;
Metal robots chortling on about metal knives,
And women licking flakes, or performing ‘Hai Karate’

I suppose you were a Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut case?
The Hovis errand boy, poor lad, struggled on up
The cobbles, pushing his bike, puffed in the face,
Could have done with a glass of R Whites pop to sup

It was crisis time for males, with intolerable fails,
There were two World Cups where ‘only'(!) Scotland played;
George Best went off the rails (a tad too many ‘fit’ females?),
But there was Wimbledon triumph, at last, for Virginia Wade

There was Kevin Keegan’s perm, a real trend setter
(This was long before Chris Waddle and his mullet);
Footballers, by and large, all knew no better
(Remember the trailing dreadlocks of Ruud Gullit?)

We’d no access to printers, had no laptops,
For entertainment, business, commerce or for hobbies;
Our greatest innovation was but shops
With a Xerox, where we paid for malaligned copies

There was bugger all technology in the car,
No dash cams and no sat navs, DVDs;
Each A To Z had but a fairly limited repertoire,
Windows were wound, and we all had manual keys

Far fewer ring roads yet, to route us past town centres;
No automatics; no speed cameras; but more dysfunction
Than we knew no amount of roadworks could engender –
The famous name, on everyone’s lips? Spaghetti Junction

No leaflets for our tablets, just brown bottles, hard to see;
You’d go to the dentists, and you’d still have gas and air;
But you could actually go along, get in, same day, see a GP,
So A & E really was kept free for emergency care

The Likely Lads were inseparable Teeside mates,
Years before Tyneside Ant and Dec, on ‘I’m A Celebrity’;
The Two Ronnies’ punchlines piled up at inimitable rates
Whilst Crossroads spawned Miss Diane, and the oh so imitable Benny

Michael Aspel was the most ubiquitous host,
Urbane, suave, and with professionalism to spare;
Robin Day, the commentator who was most
Likely to grill our politicians live on air

This was before Countdown’s frustrations, but we’d still cuss
At incongruities on a quiz show now long gone;
Dusty Bin helped set what really was beyond us –
The ridiculous set of clues on ‘3-2-1’

New Faces, Opportunity Knocks (forerunner of BGT)
Showcased acts just setting out, and still quite new;
Ken Dodd and Roy Hudd starred, at the Leeds Variety –
‘The Good Old Days’, with good old Danny La Rue

TV content was surprisingly well charted,
Men’s magazines were relatively fay;
Page 3 itself had only, barely, started,
But we did titter a lot, at ‘Up Pompeii’

You’d go and search through all the specialist record shops,
Scour the market stalls, and catalogues through the post,
In an attempt to find the old song top of your pops,
That now you’d download in one minute to your host

But isn’t that why it meant so very much more
To track down what you wanted on its perch;
And what’s heralded the demise of the department store,
‘Cos now we’re unwilling to do much more than a Google search?

So we’ve lamented past times, a la Gloria Swanson,
Our third time around the block, now we return;
We’d Maggie Thatcher, then we got us Boris Johnson –
It’s not true, the adage, ‘Well, you live and learn’!