Britain in the 1970s
Alwyn W Turner
Rigsby: 'This country gets more like the boiler room on the Titanic every day: confused orders from the bridge, water swirling round our ankles. The only difference is they had a band.' Rising Damp (1977)
'Goodbye, Great Britain. It was nice knowing you.' Wall Street Journal (1975)
The 1970s. Strikes, power-cuts, three-day
weeks, inflation, Paki-bashing and the dead
left unburied. Or, from another perspective, a
period dominated by Morecambe & Wise,
glam rock, detective fiction, club football, Get
Carter and The Good Life. It was the best of
times and the worst of times. Wealth
inequality was at a record low, but industrial
disruption was at a record high. These were
the glory years of Dr Who and Coronation
Street, but the darkest days of the Northern
Ireland conflict.
In 1978 LWT launched a new series, The
South Bank Show, to cover 'the consumed
arts - cinema, rock, paperbacks and even
television.' It was an acknowledgement that if
you wanted to understand modern Britain,
you had to look at popular culture. Crisis?
What Crisis? follows that lead, telling the
story of Britain in the 1970s through the
soaps and sitcoms, the music and movies, the
fiction, fashion and sport of the time. It was a
culture that reflected a turbulent political
reality: a Tory prime minister asked 'Who runs
the country?' - and lost the subsequent
election; Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood'
continued to dominate the immigration
debate; and the Wilson era gave way to a
period of economic crisis and industrial action
that by the end of the decade had given birth
to Thatcherism.
Meticulously researched, this confident,
engaging and well-argued history of the
1970s features dozens of original interviews
with contemporary politicians, rock stars,
actors, designers, as well as drawing on the
books, films, sitcoms and media of the time.
This is not an insider's account of the crises
that wracked Britain in that decade. Rather it
is the consumer's version, a world seen
through the eyes of the mass media, in which
Tony Benn, Mary Whitehouse and
environmentalists jostle for space with David
Bowie, Hilda Ogden and skinheads.
Crisis? What Crisis?
Britain in the 1970s
by Alwyn W Turner
to be published by Aurum, 8 May 2008