Like a lot of people, I’m into cars and watches, so I’ve ended up with a few cars – most of which are rubbish – and considerably more watches, some of which are quite good. If you watch Formula 1, you see a lot of the best of both, where Ferrari meets Rolex, for example.
But I prefer to set my sights a little lower, which is why arguably the best car jamboree of the year takes places in a field in Lincolnshire.
Coming second only to the world egg-throwing championships in the panoply of great Lincolnshire sporting events (which is judged – and I am not making this up – by the ‘official tosser’ of the championship) is the Festival of the Unexceptional at Grimsthorpe Castle.
This suitably obscure event is a celebration of the mundane and the ordinary: cars that those of us of a certain age grew up with. Vehicles that ferried us to school, work, or – if we were particularly wayward – the police station.
At the time these Vauxhalls, Fords, Toyotas and Hondas were about as noticeable as an Eskimo in a snowstorm. Now though, with the passing of the years, this equivalent of automotive background noise has transformed into a glorious symphony of preciously rare mediocrity. When was the last time you saw a Ford Mondeo? Or, even better, a Datsun Sunny?
It’s only with hindsight that we can appreciate these models as the popular trend-setters that they really were. We all laughed at my French teacher’s mustard-coloured Austin Allegro (estate, with a vinyl roof) and chortled at the Morris Ital that my mate Phil was given by his grandfather as a first car, presumably as some form of punishment. I’ve no idea why I was laughing at the time as my transport at the time was an Austin Metro. But what would we give now to have those beauties back?
Thankfully, anyone prone to such nostalgia can just head to the Festival of the Unexceptional each year, with one of the distinguished guests this year being motoring YouTuber and podcaster Jonny Smith. He completely gets it, saying:
“I think it’s a beautifully curated event. I’ve always liked the juxtaposition between the grand surroundings of the castle and cars that aren’t grand at all. As well as the tidal wave of nostalgia that people get out of it, and the pride: in a car that’s rare, but nobody cares. But actually, this is a place where they do care.”
And of course, there has to be a winner: an immaculate 1982 Toyota Hilux pick-up truck this year, which has lived almost all its life on a fruit farm. Its owner didn’t rate his chances at first, as he feared that it might be too interesting. In third place was a very fetching Mini Metro, similar to the first car I had, only in pristine applejack green rather than muddy and rusty blue (which was my shade).
Still, I tried hard to make it look the part, most of the gauges on my car didn’t work, so to give it a flavour of modernity, I’d strapped an old Casio digital watch to one of the steering wheel spokes. You could call it an early in-car computer.
So that got me thinking: if there were a similar celebration of humdrum mundanity in the world of watches, what would it feature? And would these previously unloved vanilla watches – the Accurists and Sekondas of this world, if you like – then become cool in the eyes of future generations?
To some extent, it’s already happening with the early generation of digital watches from Casio, as featured on my Metro dashboard. Even the Casio calculator watch, of which there were several iterations, is making a revival. Shop around, and you can get a new one for £25 or less.
Like the cars of the 80s, a lot of these watches were considered to be throwaway utilities at the time. It was normal just to buy any old watch to tell the time, get a few years out of it, then chuck it out and buy another. Brands such as Lorus (a cheaper form of Seiko) were popular and everyone loved a Timex too, although the designs weren’t exactly cutting-edge (having said that, they did produce a watch called the ‘datalink’ in collaboration with Microsoft during the 1990s, which can definitely be considered as the spiritual precursor to the Apple Watch).
A bit like the majority of cars you see at the Festival of the Unexceptional, most seemingly bland watches from the 1980s and 1990s came from Japan. Sensible people like my dad used to wear Citizen watches, for example, which were good value, perfectly reliable, and simply did the job in an anonymously competent fashion, like the Daihatsu Charade.
It took Swatch to change the mood, which is why I would bring the first black and white Swatch to my own personal festival of unexceptional watches. Loads of people had them and the look has since been copied ad infinitum, but the originals were genuine gamechangers that are quite rare now.
There’s a great website for people who are into old cars, called How Many Left which lists the number of examples remaining of different types of cars. Back in 2014, for example, you could find nearly 2,000 Nissan Primera GXs (a former FOTU prize-winner) on the road. Now there are only 18. The numbers will be different when it comes to watches clearly, but it’s sure to be a broadly similar story with the original black and white Swatch, or even more strikingly, the green and red version that started the whole story off. Imagine if there was a website like that for watches!
Just like the Lada Niva, an early Swatch was ubiquitous at the time but has turned out to be a worthwhile investment (the only Niva on Autotrader is currently on sale for nearly £22,000). Whereas there are some watches of that era that are still waiting for their time to re-emerge.
Such as the Seiko TV watch of 1982, which took the calculator watch concept one stage further. Like so many bits of cool watch tech, it became famous thanks to James Bond in Octopussy – although you had to plug it into a device to actually watch any TV on it. As a vision of the future, it’s gloriously retro now but not exactly what you’d call fashionable.
Which is also a fair description of the original TAG Heuer ‘Formula 1’ watch that first came out in 1987, not long after the two companies had merged. As a symbol of its new contemporary appeal the freshly formed brand used brightly coloured rubber straps and fibreglass in the cases, allegedly inspired by Swatch. The first F1 watches were available in 28mm and 34mm case sizes and looked like nothing else, with an enormous, bold, bezel in shades of red, yellow and green.
In fact, what that first F1 watch looked most like, in the car world, was the Volkswagen Polo Harlequin, with only 14 examples of the multi-coloured hatchback currently left in existence, from more than 1,000 that were sold.
Now, if I could drive one of those to next year’s Festival of the Unexceptional with an original TAG Heuer F1 on my wrist, there would be an eye-catching combo.
Author Bio:
Anthony Peacock works as a journalist and is the owner of an international communications agency, all of which has helped take him to more than 80 countries across the world.
Be the first to comment