Beautiful Birmingham… ah, the Inner Ring Road. Yes, it’s my kind of town…
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13 thoughts on “Telly Savalas Looks at Birmingham”
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One of my favourites: appalling camera work; of even worse views and a voice over by Kojak based on zero personal experience of said city.
…..”this is the view that took my breath away”…………….Classic.
Yes there’s a few of these including Portsmouth and, magnificently, Aberdeen, all of them with the obviously untrue conceit that Telly has recently been there on holiday. “When I visited it was the Aberdeen Spring Fair, that really knocked me out…”
hmmmm…..currently sitting here in Birmingham, apart from the bullring it hasn’t improved much from when the video was made…
I thought this would be good for a laugh but it actually affected me quite strangely. Not many things make me want to be 15 again, but this did: up in B’ham from the sticks (none much stickier than South Somerset mid 1970s), marvelling at the ultramodern sophistications of the Bullring and goggling at real live Black people (for some reason the sight of two rastas eating Mr Whippy sticks in the memory). “Like being projected into the 21st century!” thrills Telly, but his saying so only makes it clearer that for us who need no such projection this little film is a version of pastoral; the over-40s disco dancers might as well be skipping round a maypole. Bad haircuts, clunky cars on strangely empty motorways, a somewhat kinder somewhat happier world perhaps, possibly, perhaps, where adults had pubic hair and no one had heard of alternative comedy, X-Factor, globalization, social media, structured finance, sovereign debt, information overload, or ‘postmodern irony’.
A great post in itself, that comment.
Are the disco dancers really over 40s? It’s hard to age people in 70s films.
His undying admiration for the Bodanigal gardens spoken in pure ersatz Bowery.
Kojak single handedly responsible for the shiny pate craze that has today’s males looking like the occupants of the 1950’s Siberian Gulag. Also the habit of wandering hither and yon with a mitt full of coffee cup. Kojak totally interchangeable with Hawaii five-0, both series keeping the youth of the period partially occupied.
But which do you prefer Malty, the gulag look or the full ‘Terry nutkins’ ?
Brilliantly bullish! I was squinting to try and see the date of this film… definitely my kiind of (curiously vintage) year.
According to IMDB it was actually 1981, so not technically the 70s but more or less.
Can’t resist adding a link to further evidence of that somewhat kinder, somewhat happier world that was Birmingham at the turn of that decade!
There was always something accidentally Potemkin about the post-War city centre rebuilds. I don’t think Birmingham was anything like the worst – but at the heart of all of these places, there’s a hard truth, that improving housing and the urban environment generally is a lot harder and more nuanced than people once hoped.
(What did I do wrong there? The link doesn’t work. Let’s try that again.)
I get why they would have him use some Britishisms (motorway, for example). It makes it more comprehensible, and might even convince someone that Telly’s been in Birmingham at some point. But making the poor man say, “whilst”? That’s cruel.
Lol! He should have closed with “Birmingham: Who loves ya baby?”