Yesteryear

FORTY years ago TV presenter Bernard Braden filmed a series of interviews with the top personalities of the day, everyone from pop stars to politicians. The idea was to return to talk to them again at three-yearly intervals to see how they were getting along.

The interviews – more than 300 of them – were never broadcast. Until now, that is. And the makers of Sex, Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll: The 60s Revisited have fulfilled Braden’s original idea by filming new interviews with the participants to make a fascinating then and now series.

The result is not only a nostalgia fest, a chance to relive the Swinging Sixties when Britain ruled the pop and fashion world, but also an insight into the way household names have changed and what they make of their younger selves.

For them, it must be like looking through an old photograph album in which the pictures speak (and how much posher everyone sounded back then).

Their reactions are varied. From “Oh my God, what was I doing with my hair”

(said by a fashion journalist, of course) to Cilla Black’s “To me it might be a relative, a niece, a granddaughter”. Tom Jones thinks he sounds just like his grandson and another Jones – Monkee Davy – goes down the Cilla route. “It’s like the son I never had,” he says seeing his younger self.

These are hardly In The Psychiatrist’s Chair in-depth psychological studies but even brief clips from the Braden interviews can be quite revealing about the hopes and dreams of their Sixties selves.

Lulu wanted everything – “to get married and have lots of kids, not get divorced and at the same time have a career”.

Things didn’t work out like that for her.

Nor for Tom Jones, who said he intended to stay based in Britain. A few years later he moved to the US.

Cilla Black, the former Priscilla White, tells Braden she wants to get into acting (“with my face I have to be a character actress”) but instead became the first female singer to get her own TV show.

She loved being famous and the trappings of fame. She talked to Braden about buying another car, a Rolls Royce. Better than a Bentley, she asserted, because of the little lady on the front.

Her fellow Liverpudlians, The Beatles, helped this country become the centre of pop culture. “We fancied each and every one of them, in stages. I mean your last resort was Ringo,” she says, perhaps a little unkindly.

Some are more realistic than others about what’s happened to them. “I used to be a heartthrob, now I’m a coronary,”

says Davy Jones.

Some of Braden’s interviewees are more famous than others. Sixties fashion pioneer Michael Rainey, who opened a boutique for men in the Kings Road in 1965, and designer Ossie Clark talk about flowered shirts and the demise of the old concept of couture.

Not everyone remembers those days of “flower power” so clearly. Former TV presenter Simon Dee looks at his Braden interview and says, “I like the shirt”, but can’t remember doing the interview at all.

The pitfalls of being Flithy Rich and Famous are familiar enough. Being a relative isn’t much fun either. Just ask Elton John’s brother, Jessie Wallace’s sister and Ryan Giggs’ brother.

Only X Factor Simon Cowell’s older brother, Tony, seems to have come to terms with having a famous sibling. Others have found themselves in headlines for the wrong reasons.

Danielle Mason is the half-sister of Jessie Wallace, alias EastEnders’ Kat Slater, and has ambitions to be an actress like her sister.

You get the impression they aren’t as close as they once were, not least because Danielle’s boyfriend moved on to Jessie.

Glamour model Danielle found herself somewhere other than Page Three over working as an escort.

Elton John’s younger brother, Geoff Dwight, may have found the answer by going for a completely different lifestyle to his famous brother, whose glamorous and extravagant ways are well known – he lives in the shed at the bottom of the garden.