Thatcher...

I don't want to sound like one of those "Is it just me, or is everything shit now and weren't things much better in the 1970s" Stuart Maconie/Danny Baker types, but...well, it's kind of true isn't it? Up to a point at any rate. It can surely be no accident that things started to take a severe turn for the worse around 1979. Just when things had been looking up too - children, don't believe all you hear about The Winter of Discontent. It wasn't *so* bad. And there weren't *really* rats - and anyway, even if there had been, they'd have been *much* better than horrible, synthetic, antibiotic-resistant *modern* rats...

Yes, 1979 was pretty much the fulcrum year, really. The best of the post-punk stuff had pretty much been done by then. We still had Concorde. Arsenal beat Manchester United in the Cup Final. You still needed to be vaguely literate in order to be able to read the NME. And then Thatcher came along and ruined *everything*.

Perhaps I've missed somthing and have been doing the woman (she was, I've been assured, a woman after all it seems...) a great disservice, but without overstating the case too much, she is surely the most repellent creature ever to have stalked the planet and has been exclusively responsible for *every* *single* *evil* in the world. *Ever*. Has she not? And Pinochet. And if you don't believe me, compare the world as it is now with the way it was then. For instance, had you been foolish (or drunk enough) to want to experience the England cricket team spinelessly capitulating to India (or indeed any other former colony without the good manners to remember that we taught them the bloody game in the first place, didn't we?), you'd have had to do so by tuning your crude (probably Pifco-made) transistor radio to Short Wave and hearing the dulcet tones of John Arlott ebbing and flowing like a Lee Scratch Perry dub effect all the way from the subcontinent. At three o'clock in the morning. And if you turned the volume right up and pressed your ears vigorously into the speaker grille, you might even be able to make out the occasional word he was saying. Of course, *nowadays* the whole humiliation is beamed out in deafening quadrophonic sound with high definition and stats and reverse camera angles/slo-mo fan zone alternative commentary at the delicate impress of a digit. That's why they call it digital, you see. So there you are - if you wanted to follow the cricket nowadays, you wouldn't have been able to miss a thing. Some improvement.

In constructing this argument, I'm trying to think of areas where I might have to concede that, yes, love or loathe her, in all fairness I have to hold my hands up and admit that, yes, much as it pains me to say so, she did at least... I dunno....make the trains run on time or something. But no, she didn't even manage that. Trains were shit then, for sure. But they're shittier now. And more expensive. And Richard Branson's involved somewhere along the (excuse the pun) line, isn't he? I rest my case. Radio 1 is rubbish - so much so that even Radio *2* is *much* *much* better now. Now that would never have happened in the seventies, would it? John Peel's gone (killed whilst on an innocent walking holiday in South America, by Thatch, obviously. And Pinochet - did you not know that? I told you she was evil. And him.) Arlott? Gone. The mines? Long gone the way of those endless Laurel & Hardy and Norman Wisdom re-runs. One off talent and exemplary professional Chippy Brady has made way for Samir Nasri - a player as erratic as he is overpaid and a man with so much class he saw fit to trip up Newcastle's Joey Barton for no apparent reason, off the ball and in a manner that can only be described as 'like a lickle gurl'. The most challenging aspect of the modern day NME is distinguishing between the adverts and the advertorials. Gone are the Special A.K.A. to be replaced by some gurning, brushed-down-by-your-mum-bog-brush-hair-styled young simpletons whose idea of radical pop engagement is fondling their charity labrador puppy stuffed toys and stuttering over their autocued monosyllabes. And all the while, that sleek, white arrow stands proud but disused, on permanent display outside the service hangar.

And don't get me started on Blair...


L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

Subscribe to Faith, Hope and Charity Shop...

Podcasts

Erotica

The 70s...

Younger readers will, I trust, indulge another mincing sashay down Memory Lane, but my thoughts are ineluctably tugged back to those halcyon days when life was young and everything and anything seemed possible. It was a simpler time back then: men were men, women were an amorphous, sexually ambivalent ball of gender confusion and you wouldn't have put *anything* past Jeremy Thorpe.

It was into that world of three-day weeks, 7 pint tins of Watney's red barrel, burning bras and freshly minted decimal currency that I emerged onto the previously dank and denim-clad pop scene; a luminous lepidoptera, a bright beacon of glamour to light our way through the bleak, power-cut stalked evenings and inspiring the youth of the nation to 1001 new uses for a roll of baco foil, some copydex and a set of crocheted place mats.

Of course, the technology was so different in those days. We had none of your wi-fi enabled blue teethed solar powered wiki-waki-woo-woo nano-nanu-technology in those days! The closest we got to Googling something was watching Googie Withers in 'Within these Walls' - and even she was liable to shut down abruptly at 5.30 if it was a weekend. That and the mechanical bird on 'Going for a song'with Arthur Negro, was about as high tech as it got in those days. Nowadays you couldn't even *say* Arthur Negro on the telly, let alone watch him - so I suppose the changes haven't all been for the worse...although that mechanical bird must be getting on a bit. By crackee she was a goer...The height of technology back then was a pen with a digital watch built into it. Oh, we can laugh about it now, but don't forget that the Soviets got within an ace of landing just such a craft on the moon. They'd have done it too, those Ruskies, if only they'd been able to develop a cosmonaut two millimetres high with a massive tolerance to Quink navy blue ink...

Elsewhere we had OPEC, BOAC, BEA, Spacelab, Stagflation - you name it, we'd find an acronym for it or conflate two completely separate words into a new one. Britain's long awaited entry into the Common Market got us all excited. Enoch Powell stopped moaning about immigrants from the Commonwealth for long enough to start having a go at our continental neighbours across the English Channel. But sadly his warnings about 'Rivers of Ouzo' went unheeded, even though the portents were there for all to see. Take the commemorative football match at Wembley between England and a specially selected European All-Stars XI that was arranged to mark the occasion and which was marred by ill-feeling, mistrust and cynical gamesmanship; although, to be fair, team spirit wasn't much better in the European All-Stars XI changing room either... In a bad tempered and spiteful game, three players were sent off before a Norwegian trawlerman escasped his marker to nod home at the far post. Despite his having clearly been several miles inside British territorial waters, the goal was allowed to stand, sparking an unecessary bout of net-snipping that culminated in an ugly brawl in the centre circle over fishing quotas.

But it wasn't all Fray Bentos steak & kidney pies, Stork SB and 'Runaround' with Mike Reid, oh no... We had Steve Austen in The Six Million Dollar Man too - although with all that stagflation, you'd probably have had to shell out nearer £400,000 for him by the end of the first series, only to find his left arm only worked every other day and he could only do the bibbibibibibib noise whilst running in slow motion between the hours of daylight on Saturday and Sunday. John Arlott's voice booming out of the transistor radio could still reassure that God was an Englishman and all was well with the world, and there, just visible above the sun-dappled rooftops was the sleek silhouette of the prototype Concorde on a test flight, nosing through the blue into an impossibly exciting future where anything - soda streams, Breville's toasted sandwich makers, etch-a-sketch, you name it - seemed entirely possible.

Of course, it couldn't last. The signs were there, if only we'd been able to tear ourselves away from sticking in our Green Shield Stamps for long enough to see. Thatcher the Milk Snatcher was lurking in the shadows. Not content with depriving the nation's poor and needy young folk of their unhygienically sun-addled miniature bottles of state subsidised silver top milk, she'd soon be back to close down all the mines, sink the Belgrano and sell off the family siver. Then, in one final act of betrayal, she brought down the curtain on that glorious, sunny era once and for all. A man can stand for many things, but it was a dark and treacherous day when they changed the name of the Post Office Tower....


L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

Subscribe


Podcasts

Music