Look at Life - Eating high, 1966
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- čas přidán 31. 08. 2011
- Posted by nostalgoteket.se U.K. Newsreel. An examination of the 60's trend of top-of-skyscraper revolving restaurants. First an overview of Europe's best then it's a detailed look at the problems involved in running the restaurant at the top of London's Post Office Tower.
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As a young Commis Chef at Savoy in 70's, three of us went and had lunch at the Post Office Tower, we were suited and booted it was an amazzzzing experience i have never forgotten. It cost a weeks wages each, worth every penny.
Magical memories of life....
my good old dad took me here for dinner it was something so special RIP Dad xxx
Amazing experience it must have been at the time 😀
Our mother took us there for a meal in 1976. I cherish the memory.
Wonderful!
Sounds amazing how very lucky to experience a place in history 😀
The cover page of the menu looked like it was designed just yesterday. Who knew simplicity could be so timeless?
Not new at all, really. The Swiss did it best, typographically
3:46
@@mreese8764 Thank you so much!
Love the cheery music. Relentlessly positive commentary. And the ladies hat in West Berlin !!
Yes, the hat! wonderful!
Today's "modern" misogynistic Europeans prefer to listen to the Adhan with their "lowly" women unseen in hijabs, niqābs, and the especially oppressive and regressive burqas with nothing but halal meals on the menu.
@@Sanpedranoazul She's smuggling missiles inside it.
The music is apt for the era. It goes well with the film and narration.
Shazam doesn't know what it is though.
I had a short stay in the Royal Free Hospital in '66. I could see the P.O. tower from my bed. I still have happy memories of listening to Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane on my transistor radio.
take me back to them, id love to relive the 60s as a 21yo
Nostalgia overload. Need to sit down
It was opened by Tony Ben, and on opening there was public access. Before his death Tony went back to the Post Office Tower only to be turned away by the security staff as public access had been stopped. He even pointed out that when as Minister for Communication he intended the tower to always be open to the public and it was his name on the plaque behind the security bloke, he was still denied access. When it was shown on the telly he did get an apology from the CoE of BT.
I went for a meal at the restaurant in 1971 with my parents, sister, grandma and one of my parents' friends. I remember the meals worked out at £5/head and to a 10 year old girl this was amazingly expensive!!! Great memory
Wasn't £5 more than a week's wages for many in 1971?
You can get reasonable meal in Wetherspoons today for £5!
I left school in 71 and was earning a tenner a week (£10)..that was considered an alright wage for a 16 year-old then!!👉👜👈
That's nearly £70 in today's money
That works out at £68.22 in today's currency. Using the inflation calculator on the internet. 😀
At 1:43 was Europes’ slowest recorded meteorite.....
People strolled for their lives
Bellend 🙂👍🏻Ha!
In the 1970s I ate in a tall tower restaurant, that slowly rotated, located in Cleveland, Ohio. Then in the 80s, I ate in one in located in Indianapolis, Indiana. It was a real gas, both times. At the latter one, we put a French fry on the slow moving, rotating outer rim, and watched it slowly disappear as it moved out of our line of sight. And delighted when it came back around.
How did you know it was the same French fry ?
@@mistofoles I figured it was,....not too many pranksters were dining there. It was supposedly a "fancy" restaurant.
I love how the narrator says 'restaurann' in the French manner, and dismisses the French Eiffel Tower -- in the British manner.
😂 you're right I love how they pronounced 'restaurant' - like how elderly English people still pronounce "envelope" the French way.
@TheRenaissanceman65 2:02
Edd 1 did you know the English stole gmt time off the French
@@jayh9529 So Greenwich was in France before the Brits took over?
otobotrecords don't know about Greenwich ,but time was calculated from France when they were in charge of things history is all war and lies
I once went to a rotating restaurant in Utah that overlooked a car dealership. Memorable.
I WAS BORN IN UTAH I DON'T REMEMBER ANY SUCH PLACE MAY I ASK THE NAME?? TYVM
@@dallascowboysfanjdg5019 I wouldn't make up a thing like that, but it was about thirty-five years ago, and I can't remember. I drove back and forth between Arizona and Alberta a lot back then. I can remember the visual sitting atop a mid-rise building. You'll have to trust me.
@@coreycox2345 ty for the reply you take care!!
I could see this from my bedroom window in Bethnal Green. I remember my dad taking us up the tower to look at the view probably 1967
The sky always looks so blue in these Look at Life films
its called technicolor
@@yes2truth Contrails*
@@yes2truth okay boomer
@@yes2truth I sniff chemtrails regularly.
@@yes2truth Nah man, I take the heavy stuff, I'm talking dihydrogen monoxide and shit.
Said to the waiter in the revolving restaurant.. "pardon me, I think this fish is turning".
The man who pioneered these restaurants was John Graham, a Seattle native who designed the concept as the main feature of the Space Needle for the Seattle World Fair in 1960. He owned the World Patent.
Lights in the city going out? Strange that the concept sounds so strange. Imagine that... everyday an official break from the hustle and bustle for a few hours in 24. Why does that sound so soothing?
life is devolving
Streetlights should always be on for safety, but the number of shop windows keeping their lights on nowadays is ridiculous.
A safety harness for the window cleaner was strictly optional.
Otto Otto Eisenbrot 🤣
He was wearing his Post Office Health & Safety Cardigan...so he was perfectly safe 😄
@6:54 ... I thought your comment was a joke... until 🤔
totally
Never went there and when I was old enough it was too late! Devastated!
Love these video series, they transport you to another era of wellness and order...
And rickets? Srsly I love them too.
Awesome Documentary About The Post Office Tower Restaurant In London. X
Great film, and a view of the little motor.
We had one in Liverpool too, revolved while you ate.
If only London were still like that.
What a fabulous piece of architecture the Post Office (BT) Tower is! Very futuristic for its time. One of many wonderful landmarks in the greatest country in the world!
All of those groovy decorations and furnishings would be in vogue today.
Eating high is great, really brings out the flavor in the food.
... along with the food in your stomach
I've been up the Berlin TV tower, which was in the East in the 1960s...
Eating at a high altitude was a big "thing" in New York during the 60s too!
Ahh, everyone looking smart and behaving in a civil fashion, instead of the sad sight we have now in London. Who now would want to stare down at that as you tucked into your Filet Mignon
the building all look so dirty. Show's how polluted it was!
Awesome video, thanks for sharing
I used to be able to see the Post Office tower from my nans flat in Barnsbury. At night there were lights that flashed to warn the planes. It’s always fascinated me. I would love to go up it.
Some useful rules of thumb:
- any restaurant that rotates has mediocre, overpriced food.
- the higher off the ground a restaurant is, the worse it is.
Did you ever go there? I did, four or five times and I can vouch for the food. very very good.
Tends to be the case today, not then.
@@GrumpyL5 Disagree. The CNN Tower in Toronto served good food and wine. Not cheap, agreed, but you're paying a premium for the view......aren't you?
@@harrythecod7976 Oh yes it's only fair paying a premium for the view. Ten years since I had lunch at CN Tower - wasn't impressed at all, or by the service. Perhaps it has improved. The food in Berlin is not good, been several times.
Eat in the one in Sydney, cracking food, very high quality, great wine on offer etc
My dad worked at the Post Office Tower as a pastry chef. I went there a couple of times with my mum to see what it was all about and remember looking down at the people in the streets below commenting how they looked as small as ants. I also vividly recall jumping on the revolving platform in the restaurant as it was turning and being told off. Shame the IRA had to go and spoil it all.
Priceless
My parents took me up here for a bite to eat whn I was about seven years old. I remember the view but, sadly, not much else...
Does it still exist? I`d love to visit sometime
@@Sanpedranoazul Not as a restaurant. Only BT employees get up there now.
Remember being taken to the PO Tower in 1968 as a kid for a visit when it was still open.
MY PARENTS WERE INVITED BY FAMILY FRIENDS TO THE RESTURANT AT THE G.P.O. -- LONDON . MEMORIES!!! FROM U.K/ (2022).
Always gutted I was too young to have eaten there. Mad that they've never reopened it or even made another.
One moment you are eating high, another your at a cafe that wont rotate
they have similar ones in north america.
I was just about to look up if it's still around.
Mate it was a state secret until 1993. What’s crazy is that there was a revolving restaurant in it.
Dallas has one.
I want to be a "space flight conductor" when I grow up :)
Four bob to use the lift to the restaurant? Outrageous!!
I went up the GPO Tower with my brothers on either 1st or 2nd January 1967 (can't quite remember which). I was 12 and certainly couldn't afford the restaurant. I've been up the Rotterdam Euromast as well in March 1976.
This must have been one of most exciting and futuristic places to be when it opened.
Though I must admit, the rotating aspect of that restaurant is making me queasy just watching it! A cool idea for tourists but perhaps not the best while trying to enjoy a meal?
Spread love... I love you... Bless you. 😘❤️
3:47 Wow, that menu's graphic design looks so modern even by today's standards.
I worked for a firm who stripped out the telephone exchange of the old defunct equipment in the lower floors , the amount of copper buzz bar and strougher switches and cotton braided cable that came out of that place was unbelievable !
I used to work on that stuff and it's not unbelievable to me! :-) BTW it's "Bus" bar and "Strowger", as if anyone cares anymore. :-)
@@flamencoprof yes you're right, it was bus bar and i wasn't sure how to spell strowger ok smartarse, i know the amount of equipment used in those exchanges because my firm dismantled the whole lot of them....
@@rockypup1968 Cheers. I wasn't trying to be a smartarse, just trying to contribute my old knowledge to the pool before I cark it I hope you made lots of money out of it.
@@flamencoprof i didn't , but the bosses did , loads of platinum, palladium , gold , copper came out of those exchanges .
Best deal in these towers is to go up for lunch. In Seattle at the Space Needle it costs $15 to go to the observation deck, $25 for lunch including the deck afterwards, been a few years prices may be higher. Food is plenty and good, service good as well.
Atlanta has one on the 73 floor of the round tower, also great for lunch and to spend 2 hours plus going around.
I’ve done the Eiffel Tower and the Plutonium Restaurant in Brussels, If you don’t speak French you are screwed and service is slow and very rude. I’ll say that was back in the mid ‘70’s. Also did non rotating restaurants in the Intercontinental Hotels in Tehran Iran and Cairo Egypt also in ‘78-79 when I was 11-12 years old. Dad always took us to great places!
the music so 60s
Ah..the way Britain used to be.
Closed now by privatisation and only used by BT executives.
I wish it was just like back then when things were actually better
TheRenaissanceman65 well think about it? You ever gotten the chance to eat 200m high in a revolving restaurant in the UK in the last 20 years?
@@taiterobinson793 You see all the dirt and grime on the buildings below, London's air quality was lousy in the 60s. The quality of life in the Southeast has significantly improved with time.
TheRenaissanceman65 no the way we shopped the way we enjoyed ourselves and basically the fact that government was willing to spend money for the better
Remarkable how low-rise London’s architecture was then, and that a 600-foot tower could have been considered something of a wonder.
On the other side of the pond, the Empire State Building was twice the height and had been completed more than thirty years earlier. And it wasn’t until 1980 that London got a tower taller than this one.
London is in a river valley and is built on consolidated mud. Manhattan is a rocky island. The technology to erect tall, heavy buildings on not-so-good foundations didn't exist until recently. In addition there are laws about views of St. Paul's Cathedral which apply over part of the region though i do not know the details.
@@Palifiox that's interesting info about the type of land - I did not know that. Thank you! As for preserving views of certain monuments, you are of course correct, and long may there be some consideration of that. But we're certainly building plenty of tall buildings now in some areas.
Taller doesn't mean better. Lost of sunlight in the streets & the higher, the more dangerous.
Similar when the Tower of London was constructed. Small by todays standards but would of been HUGE and menacing to the surrounding population in the era
@@Palifiox That is incorrect as much of Manhattan was swampland as recently as 1900. The only reason the US had towers before anyone else is because their cities did not have regulations about style, value or height while European cities did.
There is a similar thing in Vilnius, Lithuania. Still works.
Super Newsreel. Thanks Mate. X
my boi at 3:52 was left hanging
Love the revolving restaurant here in Cape Town, albeit a few years since I was there.
I remember the lift was really fast and my ears popped. Still got the receipt for lunch: a coke was 90p in 1979…🙄
Not a Sooty in sight in Sixty-Six!
I was in the area earlier today and it was almost impossible to find the entrance which was deserted and unwelcoming.
So strange to see a view of London without all the tall office towers you see now. It all looks so flat!!
Today it’s quite easy to miss where the BT Tower is amongst it’s (almost as) tall neighbours.
For anyone who wants a similar style retro meal with silver service waiters, check out Oslo Court.
3:50 Haha! NO HANDSHAKE FOR YOU!
SHADE !!
Awkward!
Scott Warrington you blew my mind!
I notice how well dressed everyone was back in the day. Even at 1.37 into this clip the lady is wearing a hat to eat her meal. WOW
The good old days ☺🙌👌👍
0:24 "resturaaaaunt" no. 1 of 55
We had carpet like that in our house in Dagenham.
This is not my idea of eating while high.
3:52 someone got ignored...
nice one.
Good eye.
@@daphne4983 Nope, he was introducing the guests, not looking for a handshake.
I worked in Seattle many many years ago and met a girl from DC, working in a Seattle management organisation who showed me the city. One of the places we went to was Space Needle. I guess it's like being in the Post Office Tower but it rotates in imperial, rather than metric :D
I'm glad that 23 years later, we are still friends. I could've been married to her by now if I'd stayed longer, no doubt.
Even though the rotation is very slow, one has to be aware of their footing when exiting the moving area, to the stationary area. If one were to linger, with one foot on the moving area, and the other foot on the stationary area, loss of balance can occur.
@Davett53, it wasn’t the rotation that made one fall over. It was the three Martinis before lunch 😘
@@leslyjmoore Ha!...funny thing about that. In the 1990s, there was a martini craze. A renewed interest in drinking martinis, in the USA. I was finally the right age. In my 40s, I would go out with friends and try them. I was a Scotch drinker, by then,....so I began sampling martinis. I was shocked how quickly I became inebriated, on just two. They are usually pure vodka. Two on an empty stomach,.....and Kablam! I laugh thinking about how businessmen routinely drank them in the 1970s, at lunch time, and went back to their jobs. That was insane.
So proud of the our spinning restaurann
Snoopdogg disliked this video 23 times for confusing him
Ha! In 1990s Auckland NZ the previously Govt Dept Post Office's newly Corporatised telephone network operator Telecom wanted to show how Corporate they were by building a luxurious 13 floor HQ office block with a revolving restaurant at the top.The "conveniences" were in the immobile central core. If you availed yourself after a few drinks you would come back out to find yourself lost, or lost your table and had to find it.
the legends are true: there have actually been ladies and gentlemen on this planet, dressed and acting accordingly. The legends are true...
The legends are unfortunately just as true that there have allways been just as many, if not more, sharks in the world. They won't show you the bad parts in the films 😂. And allways keep in mind that the definition of "gentleman" and "lady" has changed radically over time. Just 20 years before this, eating in public would have hardly been considered honorable.
@@sharronneedles6721 shanks now wear gymshark whilst taking family strolls
How cool ! Does this place still exist? We have one here in St. Petersburg Fl at the top of a very old beach restaurant. It is sooooo cool!
It does but it’s not been open to the public since the mid 70s due to being bombed. It then went corporate and charity event only.
Access to the observation deck closed in 1971 after an IRA bombing. The restaurant closed in 1980 as Butlin's let the lease expire. It was never a profitable venture, and patronage only decreased after the string of bombings throughout London in the 70's made people afraid to be caught 35 floors above the ground in case the IRA decided to do it again. There was talk of reopening the restaurant for the 2012 Olympics but, as with so many things connected to the GPO/BT, it came to naught.
The GPO was changed to British Telecom in 1980. It was privatized in 1984 and has been a series of general disasters ever since. Narrowly avoiding bankruptcy several times, all its attempts at international mergers and purchases either didn't happen or were not successful. The mobile network suffered from inadequate capitalization and, as a result, BT had one of the most obsolete systems in Europe, It spent over $30 billion pounds acquiring 3G networks in the early 2000's at a time that most telecoms recognized the 3G was quickly going obsolete. It finally bit the bullet and spent another £201.5m in 2013 to acquire a 4G license, finally rolling it out in 2015, long after most countries in less advanced areas already had 4G. The history of BT, from the tower until today, has not been a happy one.
errm no not quite right. Here is an example of why you shouldn’t get your information from social media.
Everyone knows it was actually knocked over by a giant kitten!
Lol I’m eating high while on the ground, welcome to the future
The scene with the built-in trip. London's Heaven threatener.
Bow tied silver service waiters, where do you see that these days? The restaurant closed in 1980, but apparently reopened for 2 weeks in 2015 for the tower's 50th anniversary.
it’s open fairly regularly but not for the general public. I had a buffet there in 2018.
@@THEWIGMONSTER does it still rotate?
03:50 that was one of the worst cases of leaving someone hanging ive ever seen!
all old fashion Brits in these nostalgic flics ...a past era
Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta is still around.
20k a year rent. Today something like that would probably be 60-90k a month.
Eating High, then also see the Christmas on Acid video.
6:56 no way!lol
The guy looking out the window at 2:42 is saying, "hey, that guys is stealing my car".
The lunacy of the 60s! Why the did her majesties postal service build a tower?!
The old Post Office also ran the newer telephone network It was built to hold microwave transmitters and receivers at the top, which carried telephone connections. Microwaves are pretty much line-of-sight, so the higher the further you can connect.
The restaurant and the offices below were just an attempt to make the building pay for itself
"Pa-perback wri-ter (pa-perback wri-ter)..."
good video
Terribly sad that the revolving restaurant. closed. Another victim of the mishandling of Northern Ireland by successive British governments. The Revolving restaurant in the TV tower in the former East Berlin is a great experience!
The woman @1:35 had a stolen bottle of champagne hidden under her hat.
The voice of Jason in the Jason and the Argonauts film.
I used to know Tim Turner's brother in law (Jerry Herendeen RIP) He told me Tim was paid so well for the Look At Life voice-overs he was almost embarrassed !
@@misyd72 Good on him. He was obviously very good at lip syncing . . . I didn't realise it was not Todd Armstrong's own voice as you just can't see any mismatch. The film was on only a few days ago and, as we all know, it still holds up well. Great childhood memories and a voice that evokes a chirpy, confident Britain in the sixties.
Yep.
1:34 OH YEAH! Someone got to dip their pencil in ink that night!
That hat tho...
It still is, only nowadays the pollution is invisible.
the humor is more discrete then in modern programs. often narrators draw attention to the fact that they are making a joke by acting childish but not the case with old timely footage.
Im a 66 hippie baby, ... I'm always happy,.......i don't know why 😂
I wish I had a brain that would have let me be a hippie, blade runner.
Eating high in the 60s', not the video I was expecting....
Anyone else old enough to remember how much 4 shillings is in new money? Blimey, I'm getting old.
20p
The "new money" was introduced 50 years ago!
1:26 shall we not mention the slip road in the middle that goes no where 🤣
*up in the diner*
IT'S FUCKING MOVING RICH
darling calm down
IT'S FUCKING MOVINGGGG