Daily Mail {Main} Edition: Date: Thursday 17, October 2019 Page: 17,18

Media: Daily Mail {Main} Edition: Date: Thursday 17, October 2019 Page: 17,18

A study claims 1978 was Britain’s unhappiest year. What rot, says ROGER LEWIS – from Brucie on the box to seven-pintp tins of beer it was... NineteenNineteen seventyty GREAT! by Roger Lewis Few ventured far for their holidays. Weymouth, Margate and Bridlington HAT strikes me is had yet to be eclipsed by the Balearics. how innocent it all Eating out meant scampi and chips in was. If we drank a basket, an egg burger at a Wimpy with the squeezy, tomato-shaped ketchup Mateus Rose, the dispenser and somehow cake tasted bottles were turned different when it was called Black Forest WWinto lampshades.W Gateau at a Berni Inn. Few ventured far for their holidays.

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Gateau at a Berni Inn. I remember Valerie Singleton in I’m talking, of course, about 1978, the the early Seventies dressed up as year a new study tells us was the most a Bronte to show us around miserable for two centuries. Professors Haworth Parsonage. at Warwick University seem to base There was no loudness and brash their findings on the fact that dwindling f silliness, as today on CBeebies. post-war euphoria had finally given up There was an assumption that the the ghost in the Winter of Discontent . audience was intelligent and with its strikes and piles of rubbish. curious,N before the medium was What rot! 1978 was beyond question wrecked in the modish name of the greatest year of my life, and not only accessibility and inclusiveness. because I passed my A-levels and went - There was, however, foolhardi- off to university, for free, on a full grant. l ness. John Noakes climbed In 1978 I was 18. My friends were all 18 Nelson’s Column without a har- that year, too, and there were dozens of ness, nor did the BBC pay any life birthday parties, held in the British or accident insurance premium. Legion Hall, Bassaleg, in South Wales, I never could stand Noakes’s washed down with Watneys Party - yapping dog Shep, however, but Sevens — the tins holding seven pints - wass sad when John left the show that you opened in fear because you in . . . 1978. always got sprayed with beer. People owned only one telly and When I describe 1978 to my children, there weren’t any video recorders, they think I may as well be talking so the nation watched the same about 1878. (As it happens, that’s programmes at the same time. This around the time the research profs say made for a sort of social, cultural we were happiest in the UK — despite . cohesion, with 20.5 million people the child cruelty, gruesome mortality regularly watching Coronation rates, bone-chilling poverty and an Street and 28 million watching absence of any cure for gout). Morecambe And Wise at Christmas. It is impossible now to conceive of a s Dallas began in 1978 and Bruce It is impossible now to conceive o G society without mobile phones, f Forsyth’s Big Night starred him society without mobile phones, and wife Anthea Redfern. computers or the internet. In 1978, - The colour on TV was hit-and- we had to look things up in ency- miss: newsreader Kenneth Kend- clopaedias in libraries. We com- - all was always bright orange. municated not instantaneously e We also all knew the advertising with texts and tweets. We wrote jingles. Smash, the dehydrated letters, went out and bought s potato mixture and those weird stamps; we exchanged postcards. t robots (‘For Mash Get Smash’); People of my generation were Nimble Bread, with its blonde who not put under pressure from ‘flies like a bird in the sky’ in her infancy to pass exams. Teenagers balloon. And Cadbury’s Flake, weren’t on medication for stress. , with the lass in the field behaving Teachers weren’t worn to a frazzle saucily in slow-motion (‘Only the with league-table nonsense, they s crumbliest, flakiest chocolate’). were brilliant people — to whom I l It was still the age of sauciness, owe so much — with proper titillation, suggestiveness, embod- degrees from real universities. ied on screen by beautiful angelic They wore gowns and introduced us to things that had nothing to blondes such as Judy Geeson, do with any syllabus — the films of Susan Penhaligon and Judi Orson Welles and Fellini, Salvador Bowker, without a great deal of Dali, Swedish chamber music. actual mucky action. , Even Robin Askwith, in the And I went to a comprehensive in ‘erotic’ Confessions films, kept up Newport — very far away from the the slapstick by falling over his benefits of private education. bucket in Confessions Of A Children had childhoods. Every- Window Cleaner. thing was less competitive. We all When I stayed with my future . watched Crackerjack!, Blue Peter wife Anna, for example, at her and Magpie, which were very parents’ house, it was definitely wholesome. I still have the Blue separate rooms. I returned to Peter annuals, the hardbacks Wales a few days early, so my . issued at Christmas, with step-by- father laughed and said: ‘Her old step instructions on the deploy- man sprinkled tin tacks on the ment of sticky-back plastic. landing, did he?’ I remember Valerie Singleton in

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landing, did he?’ He had indeed, more or less, and was on the alert for creaky floor- n boards. Very Victorian. OHABITATION was unheard of — hard to credit now, but prudery prevailed with our parents’C generation. Engaged couples were expected to remain apart until after their wedding, as in Victoria Wood’s play, Happy ty Since I Met You, where Julie Wal- ters and Duncan Preston shock their families by getting a flat. When Anna’s folks came to see us at university, we had to temporarily rent another flat, down the road, to keep up the pretence that we weren’t together. It is no wonder a great deal of the popular culture of the Sixties and Seventies was about sexual frustration. Benny Hill ogled the ‘birds’ (as they were cheerfully ! called) and they angrily chased him off. s. Bob and Terry, the characters in ce Whatever Happened To The Likely m Lads?, sit in the pub lamenting their love life. Harold Steptoe is d- always romantically thwarted. d- In Rising Damp, Rigsby — the creepy landlord who is as g prepossessing as John Christie, d the serial killer in 10 Rillington rd Place — spies through the key- ’); holes on Richard Beckinsale and o Frances de la Tour. Frankie How- er erd in Up Pompeii! is surrounded e, by slave girls with big boobs — but g the concealed joke there is that e big boobs were never going to be Frankie’s cup of tea. s, If we were pre-Aids in 1978, it’s d- lic TURN TO NEXT PAGE

Article Page 3 of 5 A23794 - 1 Media: Daily Mail {Main} Edition: Date: Thursday 17, October 2019 Page: 17,18

Happy days (clockwise from top left): Dallas, Morecambe and Wise with The Sweeney’s John Thaw and Dennis Waterman, Rising Damp, John Noakes and Shep, party beer, Brucie and Anthea, and Smash

Article Page 4 of 5 A23794 - 1 Media: Daily Mail {Main} Edition: Date: Thursday 17, October 2019 Page: 17,18

FROM PREVIOUS PAGE haircuts — at least we didn’t was all TV, listening to go around in collar and tie borrowed LPs in friends’ fairer to say we were mostly like our buttoned-up fathers. bedrooms, surreptitious pre-gay, too, particularly in Nevertheless, blame for our snogs and going about like Wales, where the chapel pre- prattish attire may be put on well-behaved hippies, that is vailed. Same-sex marriages the pop groups who were all because, for me, it was. I was and civil partnerships were the rage, whom everyone unaware of the wider world. inconceivable notions. aped: Mud, Wizzard, Slade, Jimmy Carter was in the Homophobia was rampant. Showaddywaddy. White House and James Nevertheless, flamboyant I did like going into town on C allaghan was in Downing figures such as Kenneth a Saturday and looking at Street. Beyond that nothing Williams, Liberace, Charles records (what today’s young- impinged. There were loads Hawtrey and Larry Grayson sters call ‘vinyls’) with the of industrial strikes, the trades were beloved entertainers. bright pop-art album covers unions were in uproar, but For despite the sneers, the — Mott the Hoople, Blondie, the Winter of Discontent Seventies were actually the The Stranglers, Buzzcocks, simply passed me by. heyday of camp. Quentin Jethro Tull. Today, with every- On the horizon, though I Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant, thing available all at once on never knew it, was Margaret was turning from a pariah a smartphone, there’s Thatcher, privatisation, free into a national hero, and another ritual gone. enterprise, self-reliance — David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust In the afternoon we’d go as having to be a grown-up, himself, was covered in glitter a gang to the Odeon to see t aking my place in society. and feathers — and my rugby- Grease, released in 1978 with That’s when things changed. playing pals all loved it. John Travolta and Olivia But in 1978 we were blessed If our fashion decisions were Neutron Bomb; Animal House, with innocence and remained embarrassing and garish — with the great John Belushi; in blissful ignorance — and we blue velvet flared trousers, or Superman, with its had a ball. I think my platform platform shoes, chiffon primitive special effects. shoes are still in the loft. But I scarves, tank tops, mullet If I make it seem as if 1978 no longer fit into my flares.

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