Hurry, hurry, step right on in

Well, my dears - it's our first "timeslip moment" of 2017...

Our rusty old TARDIS has wheezed its way down to January 1977 - the Silver Jubilee year - an era when Punk was supposed to be "the big thing", but in reality things had not really changed a lot: big hair, big flares, big lapels and double-denim were all still very much in evidence, and the closest we came to "anarchy" was an outraged complaint letter in The Spectator expressing "dismay" that the magazine had begun "to give space to advertisements which serve to promote homosexual purposes"...

In the news this week forty years ago: IRA bombs hit the West End of London (thankfully with no fatalities); EMI sacked the Sex Pistols for saying the word "fuck" on ITV's Today Show (the presenter Bill Grundy was also dismissed); the (remarkable at the time) new Sinclair two-inch screen television set went on sale; there was a breakthrough in science as a previously unknown bacterium was identified as the cause of Legionnaires' disease; in the ascendant were Apple Computers (newly incorporated), the new Ford Fiesta (which became the most popular car of the year in the UK, and remained so for several years) and incoming US President Gerald Ford, but Home Secretary Roy Jenkins (the man who a decade earlier had steered the legalisation of homosexuality through the UK Parliament) resigned to take up the Presidency of the European Union; and devastating 40-mile-an-hour lava flows erupted from Mount Nyiragongo in the Congo, killing seventy people. In cinemas: Sweeney! (the film spin-off from the TV series), Carrie and King Kong. On telly: Wings, Children Of The Stones and Robin's Nest.

And in our charts this week in January 1977? The lovely David Soul was at #1 with Don't Give Up On Us, and following in his wake were (the recently-deposed) Johnny Mathis, Abba, Showaddywaddy, 10CC, Julie Covington, Tina Charles, Mike Oldfield and Smokie. But the highest climber of the lot was this (almost) "one-hit wonder" - Mr Barry Biggs [Whoooo?] with his Sideshow:

Barry Biggs - Sideshow

So let the sideshow begin
Hurry, hurry, step right on in
Can't afford to pass it by
Guaranteed to make you cry
Let the sideshow begin (hurry, hurry)
Hurry, hurry, step right on in
Can't afford to pass it by
Guaranteed to make you cry

Indeed.