The 1970s were a Bad Thing—A BAD THING—whatever Dominic Sandbrook may say.

So, a few afternoons ago I was sitting in my armchair reading my Radio Times, with my cup of tea and my toasted tea cake to hand, and my slippers on my feet *, when I noted with interest that Dominic Sandbrook is hosting a new TV series starting this week on BBC2 about the 1970s.  Here’s a link to information on it on the BBC’s website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ghscj [* I once mentioned to my mate Nick Davies that I read something or other in the Radio Times and he went into a quite hilarious extended riff at my expense about me drinking tea and eating toasted tea cakes in my slippers etc, but you probably had to be there.]  Anyway, according to Dr. Sandbrook’s RT preview of his series, and according to TV previews I’ve seen since, the programmes aim to debunk the popular conception of the 70s as a deeply desperate and dismal decade.  Now, hmm, now, yes, hmm, now, I was born in 1965, so I was four when the 70s began and I was 15 when the albeit arbitrariness of human constructions of time brought the era to an end.  As opposed to young Sandbrook, who was 5 when the long and literally dark decade ended.  Of course that by no means means that Sandbrook is unqualified to comment on the 1970s, or else I’d have to declare myself unfit to comment on the 18th century, which I do, as my job.  Nor does it mean he is less qualified than me to talk about the 70s: I don’t doubt for a moment that his extensive research makes him much better qualified than me.  But I can’t help thinking that, well, yes, and indeed OMG, I remember the 1970s, and, yes, well, OMFG, I have to say that I am a trifle sceptical about Dr. Sandbrook's claims.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I like Dominic Sandbrook.  What I’ve read of his work strikes me as fascinating, provocative, beautifully written, informative, and popular in a good way.  And I’m also not jealous or in any resentful of the popular and commercial success he has achieved while he was in and since he left academe.  I’ve criticised popular historians before (Steve Sarson's Blog: David Starkey: what the ****? and Steve Sarson's Blog: Niall Ferguson, Niall Schmerguson.), but I did so because of what these guys said, not because of what they do.  These people and their many counterparts play invaluable roles in spreading historical knowledge and in generating interest in history among audiences way beyond what I and most academic historians can hope to reach.  And that keeps the likes of me in work.  This can be characterised as a Good Thing. 

Yet I can’t help thinking that the claims that Dominic Sandbrook claims to make represent a bit of revisionism gone a bit too far.  Sandbrook has form for this kind of thing, writing in White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (2006) that the 60s were not really all that swinging and were, contrary to popular belief, a bit rubbish.  Ironically, considering what he says of the 70s.  But, while wondering whether the imperatives of writing for a wider audience encourage a bit of over-egged but commercially friendly controversialism, I have to admit that it happens in academic history too (by “academic history” I mean history produced for a largely academic audience; I don’t mean that Sandbrook’s work is not of academic quality), and academic publishers need to make money as much as what I’m calling commercial ones do, and nowadays we UK academics exist in a marketplace where we must prove the “impact” of our “outputs”.  Even before the days of the “impact agenda,” though, we had historians making counter-intuitive and therefore attention-grabbing claims.  Such as medieval historians claiming that medieval artwork was just as good as renaissance art.  But, Oh, come on!  I mean, come on!  I mean COME ON!  COME! ON!!!!!  Have you, you who make these claims, BEEN to Florence and seen room after room after room after room after room of Madonna con Bambinos?  Those stupid and ridiculous mono-dimensional pictures, with no light and no shade, just one pan-faced Mary and one 30-year-old baby Jesus after another after another, all exactly the sodding same, and all with backgrounds of kingy-blingy gold and blue, when the whole point of this “king” is that he was born in a rickety, stinky old stable and was surrounded in his infancy by hay, mangers, mud, wood, and donkey droppings.  You’re seriously saying that this crap is comparable with a Caravaggio?  You’re seriously suggesting that these tinctured turds measure up to a Titian?  If you’re saying that then I’m saying that I’m J-Lo’s bum double.  Or, for another example, how about those who claim that the Vikings were simple peaceful farming folk?  Well, maybe some of their descendants were.  But the ones who first left their shores in longboats were long-bearded axe-wielding bastards named Harald Hard Ruler, Sweyn Forkbeard, Eric Bloodaxe, Stenkil, and Cnut, and they terrorised, pillaged, enslaved, raped, and murdered their way through the populations of these British Isles and beyond, leaving nothing in their wake but death, destruction, and half-eaten and thoughtlessly discarded chicken legs.  These can be characterised as Bad Things.

So, anyway, it seems to me that maybe Dominic Sandbrook is trying to do for the 70s what some aesthetically-challenged medievalists did for art history and what some cranially-challenged Viking skolurs did for Anglo-Saxon history.  Like I say, though, I like Dominic Sandbrook and I’m going to give his show a go.  I’m sure it’ll be fascinating and fun.  It may even convince me.  His ideas certainly, admittedly, sound more plausible than those of the medieval revisionists I’ve mentioned.  I may well write about the 1970s afterwards, one way or the other.  But beforehand, at the risk of sounding like I’m barfing up a Stuart Maconie script written by researchers for I ♥1970-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 or 9, here’s a list of Bad Things about the 1970s.  Some of them are general Bad Things that many of you will recognise, others were more personal Bad Things that I experienced myself, though you may recall similar sorts of experiences, but all of them are Bad Things.  Afterwards, in the interest of balance, however specious that concept is, I will mention some Good Things about the 70s.  But then I will conclude that overall the 1970s can be characterised as a Bad Thing.  So, here we go.

* Endless, endless, endless industrial inaction.
* Blackouts.

* Red Robbo.

* The election of Margaret Thatcher and the birth of hegemonic neo-liberal politics in the UK.

* The IRA.

* Astrid Proll, though 70s terrorists sounded sexier than the Abu Hamza types we have now.

* The oil crisis. Which, thank goodness, is now long over with.

* Pol Pot.

* Idi Amin.

* Plane hijackings, on a daily basis.

* The later stages of the Vietnam War, without the really cool soundtrack that the earlier stages had. 

* Glamorous Rock.

* Disco.

* Discos.

* Johnny Cash’s tragic “Cheese Period.”

* Chopper Bikes.
* The Ford Crapi, the Dagenham Ferrari, nuff said.

* Flares.

* Trim phones.

* Douchebags.

* Douchebags who could—and would—imitate trim phones.

* Douchebags who could, would—and did—imitate trim phones on That’s Life.

* Dogs who supposedly could say “sausages” but who could actually only growl “ghshsughshsughsh” on That’s Life. If their owners forced their jaws open and squeezed their arses hard enough.

* That’s Bloody That’s Sodding That’s Bloody Sodding Life.

* The Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Wisdom affair.

* The cutting edge of sexual liberation being represented by Sid James, that gurning geezer off On the Buses, and that quivering erection-on-legs who was in Man about the House.

* Racial politics, as represented in Love Thy Neighbour, Bernard Manning, Jim Davidson etc etc etc and et bloody and unbelievably cetera.

* TV presenters on Pebble Mill at One and Midlands Today who spoke a posh foreign language, tyelling ass for exaarmple thet aarfter the knews there will be a progremme about the potaarto femine. (That was before they invented “regional” accents in the 80s.)

* Summer-holiday-time children’s TV schedules made in That London for Them Southerners, so that the Banana Splits started two weeks after the summer holidays began in the Midlands and, even worse, ended two arse-aching and bitterness-inducing weeks after we went back to bloody buggering school while Them Southerners ponced around on their sofas or couches, or whatever they called their settees, in their mansions eating foie gras, caviar, and foxes, while enjoying the Banana Splits and talking to each other in their non-regional accents. The bastards.

* The vandalisation of the Blue Peter Garden.  By a bitter provincial.  But I can’t say who it was.  Or I’d have to kill you.

* White dog poos. What was that about? as comedians like Peter Kay say.
* Watneys Red Barrel (with not even a redeeming apostrophe).

* Double Diamond “beer”.

* Babycham “?”

* Working Men’s Clubs that smelt impossibly glamorously of darts and of beer- and urine-soaked Axminster.

* Convenience foods whereby granulated carcinogens could be turned into pooey puddings by just adding lime-encrusted tap water, and that are to this day busily concocting cancers in the intestines of everyone over the age of 32.

* Mince.  Every night.  Every sad and sodding night.  For ten years.  For ten desperate, depression-era fucking years.  

* My mum deciding that, after Egon’s barber shop closed, the hairdressers cost too much, and so she began cutting my and my brother’s hair herself, giving rise to the famous Lutterworth “Knife and Fork Job.” Pic below.

* The Queen’s Silver Jubilee, when everyone gathered for street parties and ate jelly and wore paper hats in communal rituals of moronically happy obeisance to a millennia-old harbinger of death and bringer of oppression that even the most primitive Amazonian Head Hunter would point and laugh at and that... oh... er... Diamond Jubilee....  

* The summer of 76 that was so sunny and hot that everyone had a fucking headache all the time, which was made worse by the fact that you had to talk to and be all chummy-chummy with your horrible, boring, sweaty neighbours at effing standpipes, as if we were all gruel-eating Dickensian grotesques, and yet still all happy and chipper and keep-calm-and-carry-on and make-do-and-mend and community-spirited and shit, so that photographers could take photos of us to fool future historians into thinking that, in contrast to the popular belief and indeed the very real reality that the 70s really were a Bad Thing, and despite being gruel-eating Dickensian grotesques, 1970s people were all happy and chipper and keep-calm-and carry-on and make-do-and-mend and community-spirited and shit.

Okay, so there were some good things about the 70s, and in the interest of pointlessly balanced argument I’m going to list them now.  All of them.

* Tiswas: a partial compensation for Noel Edmunds’s Multicoloured Swap Shop (why was it multicoloured? Why? Why?).  
* The Rockford Files, a more than sufficient compensation for Petrocelli, but not for Petrocelli and Starsgay and Butch combined. 
* Hill Street Blues, and the birth of the modern US police drama.
* M*A*S*H, Cheers, and the birth of the modern US sitcom.
* A Tory Prime Minister, Red Ted Heath, who talked about “the unacceptable face of capitalism,” while today no “Labour” Party leader would dare much less desire to utter such heretical words.
* And, er, that’s it.
* And anyway, even if the list were longer, one Lindisfarne Gospel does not cover a million Madonna con Bambinos.   

  The famous Lutterworth Knife and Fork Job c. 1976