At the beginning of 2007, a musician writing an article in an English music magazine worried that ‘London Calling’ by The Clash was the last rock record. This particular long playing record - a double album - was released on vinyl in 1979. In this year, in Poland, Karol Woytyla - John Paul II - returned home as the first Roman Catholic Pontiff to visit a Communist ruled country, Boney M performed at the Sopot Festival (on the Polish Baltic coast, popular with luminaries such as Demos Roussos) and a strike at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk started a protest that became the free trade union movement Solidarnosz.
In England, we seem to be recalling with some fondness this golden age of 1979. Ah, remember Joy Division - who, as a band, first called themselves Warsaw - Manchester, Factory Records, the Hacienda - the good old days! (Me too, of course…) Though 1979 is now marked as a year of significant change everything is remembered as not black and white, but just a little bit brown, as the novelist Jonathan Coe memorably described Seventies Birmingham in ‘The Rotter’s Club’ – to him everything, absolutely everything about this time period, was brown. Clothes, cars, carpets, tables, walls, ceilings. “These were brown times.” Nothing more, nothing less.
In 1979, on Polish television you could regularly find episodes of ‘Zero Siedem’, a film kryminalny, featuring a decent Polish cop in an indecent world, chasing criminals and subversives around Warsaw in his Polish version of a Fiat. Porucznik (Inspector) Slowomir Borewicz - in the traditional of hero - is often described as the Polski James Bond, but I think this is a bit too much. He works in the Milicja Obywatelska (Citizens’ Militia), which was the state police institution in People’s Republic of Poland. This TV series was first premiered on Polish television on 25th November 1976, the day before ‘Anarchy in the UK’ by the Sex Pistols was released in England. I first was introduced to this TV series in a basement of the Institute of Polish Culture, alongside icons of Polish Culture such as Violetta Villas (Diana Dors crossed with Petula Clark with a Bardot fondness for dogs) and the Cabaret of Old Fashioned Gentlemen (Imagine Morecombe and Wise meet Gilbert and George). It was a seminal moment. I was, as you might expect, entranced. I began to make a cartoon strip of 07, interpolating contemporary scenes and acquaintances with frozen fragments of the original series. Here then, taste a slice of Polish cake. See what you think.
101 episodes in total. 1-48 currently online.
