48. The Rolling Stones (1964)

Here's something I've often wondered: if I travelled back in time to 1964 with a copy of The Times from December 2003, would people be surprised?

I suggest most would be somewhat taken aback, yes. I shouldn't imagine it would make a large difference if you were holding a copy of The Times or the head of the editor in a plastic bag, the very fact that you'd popped back in time would cause all but the most hardened to exclaim a measure of surprise to some degree. Is this query related to The Rolling Stones in some way or is it more of a general musing on your part?

Mick Jagger was knighted in December 2003.

Ah.

And I've often wondered how that news would have been taken by anyone watching him on TV in 1964. 

I see. I can honestly say that if I was gathered around the television set with my own family and we were watching The Rolling Stones in action, and I was to suggest that the gentlemen with the microphone might one day kneel before royalty and arise as a knight of the realm, they would declare me bereft of all my senses. Although the very suggestion that we should watch a televised broadcast of a rock and roll performance would have members of my family calling for me to be taken away before I had the opportunity to shock them with implausible predictions.

I'm trying to get my head around the way Rock and Roll was viewed by the older generations in 1964. It had been around for too long to be considered a passing fad but it definitely wasn't accepted in any way. 

I'm not sure if you've ever tried to remove red wine stains from cricket whites.

I haven't, no.

I think the practice provides a suitable analogy. Like rock and roll, the stain persists and refuses to go away and nobody has any idea how it actually came to be there in the first place.

So they saw Mick Jagger as a bottle of claret upended on someone's cricket pants?

Essentially yes. And the idea that someone would give such a stain the highest honour in the land is not one that anyone was willing to countenance in any way, shape or form.