In about 1970, in one of my final years at primary school, we were all encouraged (or more likely told) to keep a diary as some sort of English homework. At the time I lacked the ability to write at length about nothing (a faculty that I am sure you will have noticed I have developed in the interim), so I started to look at the TV news to get something to write about, as it seemed that my existence was just too humdrum to form a diary of any interest (“Fed the dog. Went to school. Scored a goal in games”).
The result of all this TV news-watching was to completely depress me, aged 10. All was doom and gloom. The IRA kept blowing people up, the country was sliding down an economic chute, no one had any idea about anything and Britain seemed far from Great. I might have been young, but I wasn’t stupid. Things definitely seemed to be getting worse rather than better. Pretty much the whole of the 70s was like that, with Britain making a loud gurgling sound as is spiralled down a plughole, though I did very much enjoy the games of Racing Demon by candlelight we had at home when the power cuts curtailed the TV.
I have been reading Francis Wheen’s “Strange Days Indeed” which takes a look at the 70s through the lens of the ambient paranoia and I have been completely fascinated. It really did feel like this. I think people sometimes think that I am a bit hard on the UK and always bigging up Switzerland. I can see how that could be annoying if you still live in the UK. So I found this book really useful as an insight as to what caused me to leave the place and to organise my life so that I wouldn’t have to go back. It is enlightening when you hear that Thatcher herself was pondering sending her kids to Canada as the UK just seemed so hopeless (admittedly this was before she grabbed hold of it by the neck and worried it half to death). Emigration looked like a smart move in the 70s, but I was still at school. So I got the project under way as soon as possible in the 80s when I wasn’t.
If you grew up through the 70s, this is a book for you. Not only does it detail just how ghastly the 70s were, but it pretty much tells you why and then has a good chuckle about it. By far the most wholesome way of looking at the whole period. This will then set you up for understanding the 80s. You knew all of this, of course, but Wheen’s brilliance is to shape it into a cohesive whole that makes perfect sense – or at least as much sense as it is ever likely to make. And with an election looming you can see just what sort of progress Westminster has made in the previous three decades – and decide that the answer is none.
