Video transcript for Looking back

[Music]

[A cartoon tree grows from the bottom corner.]

['Looking back … Toys and games.']

[A photo shows an old fashioned wooden toy train.]

Looking Back – Toys and games

[A young girl sits in a living room facing an old man. She asks questions and listens to his answers.]

Girl: What toys did you have when you were six and seven?

Man: I did make some things myself but I remember especially I had some Matchbox toys, little toy cars and I have some here that are a little bit like the ones I used to have,

[He shows two small toy cars.]

although mine weren't that fancy but I'll just put them down there. I had quite a collection of these little cars and I played with them a lot. I used to take them to school. I remember playing with them at school but I also played a lot with them just by myself at home and made little townships and drove my cars around. I even had a collection of them that I sealed inside an ice cream container and buried under the house as a time capsule. We moved on from that house before very long and years later I went back and I was thinking about going into this house to see if they'd let me dig up my time capsule and get all my favourite matchbox toys back, my little cars, and I discovered an extension had been built on that house and it was right over the top of my time capsule so I thought, hmm I don't think they'd want me coming in and asking if I could dig under their house. So it's probably still there.

Girl: Tell me about a favourite toy you had. Do you still have it?

Man: One favourite toy I had was a little red pedal car

[A photograph of a red pedal car is shown.]

that I loved very much as a little boy. It was very heavy, I can remember that, because toys then like that were made of metal, not plastic and I remember sometimes it was hard to pedal if I was going up a bit of a hill, but I didn't go too far and it was just around the garden on the footpaths we had around our house or maybe on the street outside.

Another thing that I enjoyed doing was my father was very keen at making model aircraft and he involved me in that as well and I remember spending many happy times with him and we would set up on the dining room table and build model planes together. We used to make them out of balsa wood. Every little bit of timber would be cut and glued down and we'd make a frame and then cover that with paper and then that would be painted. I made one that I remember, this beautiful plane that I made and it was rubber powered. It had a big rubber band through the middle of it, connected to a propeller and when I had this plane all ready to go we all went out to the back garden. We had a toilet that was in our back yard and I climbed up on the toilet roof with my brand new model plane and I looked proudly down at my family and the instructions were, turn the propeller 200 times and then release. Well I stood there proudly turning the propeller on my rubber powered plane and I got to about 40 and the plane just went 'phut' [claps his hands together].

smashed to pieces – and I just dropped it off the toilet roof, very disappointing.

Girl: What games did you play?

Man: When I was young we played board games as a family. I can remember when we would go on holidays that was what we would all do together. We'd often go away and stay somewhere with other family members, our grandparents or our cousins and at night time, again we didn't have television, we would sit and play board games together like Monopoly. Monopoly is the one I remember most. We had Snakes and ladders but I don't remember playing that with the adults. But we played Monopoly quite a lot as a family so that grandparents were there, parents and children as well. And I played with my Matchbox toys. I read a lot. I sometimes played with my sister and I played with my dog.

Girl: How have toys changed since you were my age?

Man: They have changed a lot. Even for my own children they had games that would run from batteries. We didn't have computers in those days so that's a very big difference where I see now lots of children of all ages are sitting in their rooms playing computer games or doing all sorts of things, doing their homework on computers. We didn't have anything like that. So that's a very big difference, I think these days, it's just how many toys, and how much time children spend connected to electronic devices.

Girl: Do you think the toys you played with when you were my age are better than the toys today?

Man: I think that children always enjoy the toys that they have. I mean if we look at television now and we see children playing in other countries, they're often playing with very simple toys – whatever they have nearby becomes a toy for them. I don't think it's a matter of better or worse or who's lucky or who's unlucky. I think children will always play with whatever they can find to amuse themselves. Children are very resourceful, as you would know, good at making up games for themselves, good at finding toys to play with.

Girl: What's different about how children play today?

Man: I think that we were a lot freer when I was young. We were allowed to roam fairly widely, even as quite young children and that's different now. I think parents are much more wanting to know where their children are at all times. My parents, like all parents at that time, weren't particularly concerned. There wasn't a feeling that children were in danger if they were away from home. I think that's changed quite a lot now. I think a lot of parents now have concerns about their children and that their children are safe so they always want to know where they are. That's very different.

Girl: Thank you.

[A long view shows the girl and the man sitting in the living room.]