From the Bury Times October 15, 1974.

BAND: Adrian Walmsley, 14, covered himself with glory at the 1st Hillock Scout Group's party with his one-man band. It consisted of a drum, two tin plates, a harmonica, a toy budgie in a cage and a sparking whirligig - all mounted on a go-kart.

NEW FACE: Bury's own Victoria Wood appeared on TV in New Faces, singing and playing her own compositions. Meanwhile, a Granada Reports team filmed Summerseat Players as they rehearsed their next production, Rookery Nook. Pictured were Stuart Birtwell, Stephen Phillips and Ida Parker.

CENSORSHIP: Screening of the film The Exorcist at Bury's Classic Cinema was held up. Although it was showing at five cinemas in \Manchester, Bolton and Rochdale, Bury's Environmental Health Committee decided they would have to see it first. They said they were concerned about the film's effect on young people. The cinema manager said: "It already has an X certificate, which excludes the under-18s. This sort of thing does not help the cinema business at all." BEES: Bury College of Further Education hosted the north western bee-keepers' annual show. There were 60 bee-keepers in the Bury area, it was reported.

AM DRAM: St Joseph's Players put on the comedy Fool's Paradise - and revealed that they were struggling to find a new venue because the parish hall had been condemned.

THEFT: Someone forced the back door of a house in Dawson Street, Bury, and left by the front, taking along a three-piece suite, gas cooker and fridge.

EXPORT: A Stubbins firm, Traditional Leather Upholstery, scored a hit in Japan by exporting its goods scaled down by a quarter to suit Japanese stature.

CASH: New Society magazine ran an article on inflation - and chose Bury as the featured town. The writer said that some families were actually better off, and the town's employment record was holding up. More wives were going out to work to help with family budgets. The effect was to improve living standards at the expense of less leisure. Building and farming were worst hit.

RATS: The council declared war on rats. They planned to lift sewer covers from one end of the district to the other and drop in paper bags of special strong poison, designed to kill the new "super rats".

JOBS: Although a question mark hung over Barker & Dobson's Blackpool works, jobs at the Bury factory were safe, said group m.d. P.B. Lambert.

TV: The Armchair Comment spot on the TV page asked: "How about a channel just for repeats?"

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.