Product Description

The 1970s. Strikes, power-cuts, the three-day week, 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, The Sweeney 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 reached a record high. These were the glory years of "Doctor Who" and "Coronation Street", but the darkest days of the Northern Ireland conflict.In 1978 London Weekend Television launched a new series, "The South Bank Show", announcing that it would 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. And it adds one crucial ingredient: politics considered as one of the 'consumed arts'.This is not an insider's account of the crises that wracked Britain in that decade. Rather it is a viewer's history, a world seen through the eyes of the mass media, in which Enoch Powell, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Benn jostle for space with David Bowie, Hilda Ogden and Margo Leadbetter.This is popular history in the vein of Dominic Sandbrook's "Never Had it So Good" (978031 6860833), David Kynaston's "Austerity Britain" (9780747585404) and Jon Savage's "England's Dreaming" (9780571227204). It offers unique insight into the 1970s, affectionately celebrating the era of camel hair coats, Ziggy Stardust and Blake's 7 whilst revisiting a Britain beset by strikes, inflation, Mary Whitehouse and Enoch Powell. It draws on extensive original interviews with the politicians, rock stars, actors and celebrities of the time including: Tony Benn, Zandra Rhodes, Norman Tebbit, Shirley Williams and James Herbert. It taps into a widespread nostalgia for a much maligned decade - as the 'children of the revolution' have children of their own.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #232151 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Review
"'vivid, brilliantly researched... Turner may be an anorak, but he is an acutely intelligent anorak' --Francis Wheen, New Statesman

'a masterful work of social history... told with much wit' --Roger Lewis, Mail on Sunday"

Review
'entertaining and splendidly researched ... He has delved into episodes of soap operas and half-forgotten novels to produce an account that displays wit, colour and detail.'

Review
'This is not a straightforward political history of the period, though politics looms large. Instead, Turner has interwoven the political narrative with references to the tabloid press, the soap operas, sitcoms, sport and pop music. ... concise, cogently argued and leavened with a dry wit.'

Customer Reviews

The Past is a Foreign Country; They Do Things Differently There
Not only is it a foreign country, but in certain aspects of society, it may as well be another planet. Revisiting 70s Britain, a time ruled by pipe-smoking PMs and trade union bogeymen such as Scargill and Gormley, a time when the nation huddled each evening around 3 TV channels, rubbish mountains piled up in Leicester Square, when the whole country seemed close to collapse, seems like entering a parallel universe and is portrayed well in Turner's book.

Is it true, as has been advanced by many commentators, that here in the early part of the 21st century, we are repeating history and returning to the upheavals of the 70s? A read through of Crisis? will show the reader that the real mood of despair and havoc wreaked by the turmoil of the 70s is still much worse than the current situation (I hope!). But if you think we could be returning to those dark days, then a read through of Crisis? may well be good primer for what to expect.

As well as the political and economic aspects of the decade, Turner takes time to guide us through the cultural life of the 70s, from what was on the box, songs in the charts and the books we were reading. In this respect, one of amazing things I learnt was that Mary Whitehouse's campaign to clean up the media was fuelled by a belief that obscenity in the media was a communist strategy driven and funded by Moscow to ultimately overthrow British society, inspired by what her husband had read in the Old Testament!

The one major shortcoming of the book was that I felt it needed the influencing hand of a good editor - chapters that were supposed to be on certain subjects, started to wander off into other areas, before clumsily returning to the relevant subject matter, rather in the manner of a 1977 Austin Princess skidding about on an icy road!

But after recounting all these negative aspects of the 70s, let me end by recalling one piece of research conducted in 2004 that Turner quotes on his 1st page; namely that people in Britain were happier in 1976 than at any time since. Makes you think, doesn't it?

Excellent
Context is all, and in this much needed reappraisal of the 70s, Alwyn W Turner has managed not only to put it firmly within its context sandwiched between the tectonic social shifts of the 60s and the ghastly me-me greed of Thatcher's 80s but also within itself. It's not another glossy of recycled pictures of Abba, whacky fashions and weird convenience foods - the things drawn out for those inevitable 50 Best shows on Saturday nights - but as Turner says,'an attempt to depict both the high politics and low culture of those times'. And it is a very successful attempt, written in an elegantly transparent style with occasional flashes of sly wit.
Any student of modern social history, anybody writing about the music or politics of the time, and anybody who lived through that oddly uneasy decade should read this book. Context is all.

Nation on the verge of a nervous breakdown
The seventies was a cathartic period for Britain. The economy was in chaos, industrial unrest was at its height, the swinging sixties had left a hangover of moral dilemmas and, with the loss of empire, the country had also seemingly lost its place at the international top table. Many of the debates and issues which still set the news and political agenda in Britain to the present day became established as prominent themes during the decade, making the seventies an essential period to study if one wants to understand modern Britain.

Alwyn Turner's study of the period is perhaps not an 'academic' work but it gives a good insight for the layman into the events, issues and themes of the time. What makes it eminently readable is the wealth of anecdotes and quotes not just from politics, but also from popular culture: television, film, music, the press and fiction, demonstrating how the political and social environemt influenced the cultural output of the period and was in turn influenced by it. In doing so it shines a light not only on the main themes of the book but also on the way they were percieved and experienced by the general public through the media.

A thoroughly enjoyable read.