A recent e-mail came winging my way from Gaynor in Brighton. She said: "I always prefer recalling pop culture as it actually happened. What fads we were in to in which decades. As the BBC and 70s fans spend so much time telling lies about 1970s pop culture, please can you prepare an accurate list of fads of the 60s, 70s and early 80s as I am trying to get a clear picture?"
The BBC, Wikipedia and others certainly have spread a lot of nonsense about the 70s - although I don't think most of it has been intentional fib-telling! People are just desperate to be nostalgic, and as the 60s are a little way behind us now, and the 80s are tarred as totally greedy, a lot of 60s and 80s pop culture has been wrongly celebrated as "70s".
I will do my best to unmuddy the waters and spread some 1960s fun and information on this blog - http://space-hopper.blogspot.com/
I recommend that 1970s fans do not take too much notice of the BBC's "I Love..." TV programmes or websites, which have been responsible for a great deal of misinformation, or the Toy Retailers Association, which has sadly followed the BBC's lead and altered accurate information on its website to inaccurate! When last I looked, Clackers had been replaced as the craze of 1971 by the spacehopper. The Toy Retailers site states that the hopper arrived in 1971, which is in line with nonsense on the BBC's "I Love..." site. The fact is, our orange friend was featured as a trend in British newspaper advertisements as far back as the late 1960s!
The spacehopper, the Chopper bike, the Stylophone and flared trousers did NOT first become part of British pop culture in the 1970s.
Whilst we're at it, certain other items vaunted as 70s pop culture were actually 80s pop culture! See my 80s blog for accurate 80s info - http://80sactual.blogspot.com/
At the end of the day, nostalgia should be fun, but I can't help thinking that the fantasy 1970s recently created is not a healthy thing at all, as so many youngsters seem to be living in an era that actually did not exist.
This blog aims to celebrate and bemoan the 1970s as they actually were - in England primarily (I have access to a large archive of English provincial newspapers of the era), but people in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, and beyond, will hopefully find that many memories are stirred for them, too.
This is not a boring anorak blog (hopefully), it will be fun as well as informative. But I do aim to be tediously nitpicking about facts and dates. I'm fond of the 1970s - the decade saw me grow from four to fourteen, and whilst it was no picnic, it certainly had its moments.
But the fantasy 21st Century version of the 1970s has outstayed its welcome and should be put to rest.
So, Gaynor, and anybody else who would like a glimpse of the real 1970s, please keep reading - and I'll do my very best!
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REAL '70s news - no rosy coloured specs...
INTRODUCTION
This is one of a series of three blogs - the other two cover the 1960s (Spacehopper), and the 1980s ('80s Actual).
After all the '70s hype of the last ten years or so, this is a chance to relive the decade as it really was in England, through newspaper and magazine clippings and memories.
This is the REAL 1970s, not the BBC or Wikipedia's versions, which hype the decade to death and bolster it up with 1960s and 1980s pop culture.
The '70s were often grim, far slower moving than today, and saw the '60s hippie spell rapidly fading to be replaced by economic gloom and a glut of anger - which manifested itself in the Punk era.
It's the decade where we liked the Wombles, chucked frisbees, watched Upstairs, Downstairs and Starsky & Hutch, and witnessed the gloriously tacky but hugely danceable rise of a type of music called "Disco" - a new soundtrack for the discotheques, which had been established before the decade began. With its rich influences, including Soul and Pop, Disco was a wow. Though not with everybody.
Very few people had a video recorder (only 5% of UK households had one by 1980), there were no mobile phones, and although colour TV had been around in this country since 1967, they didn't come cheap and many of us poorer folk stuck to black and white.
Tristram of George & Mildred got "Pong" at Christmas 1979, but nobody I knew had a TV games system, which became available, at a price, late in the decade.
Many of us were dirt poor, inflation rocketed, in 1979 interest rates soared to 17% - the highest since records began in 1694, decimalisation (the coins were designed in the late '60s ready for "D" day in 1971) was controversial - was it bumping up prices? - and the Queen's Silver Jubilee Day saw the Sex Pistols in the pop charts with a song which certainly did not express loyal greetings...
Come back to the REAL 1970s, no rosy coloured specs, no rewriting of the decade to include pop culture belonging to the '60s or '80s, but as clear a view as I can possibly give of the decade!
This blog is largely based on English magazine and newspaper clippings and my memories, but I hope that it will also be useful and enjoyable to those living in the other UK nations - and much further afield.
After all the '70s hype of the last ten years or so, this is a chance to relive the decade as it really was in England, through newspaper and magazine clippings and memories.
This is the REAL 1970s, not the BBC or Wikipedia's versions, which hype the decade to death and bolster it up with 1960s and 1980s pop culture.
The '70s were often grim, far slower moving than today, and saw the '60s hippie spell rapidly fading to be replaced by economic gloom and a glut of anger - which manifested itself in the Punk era.
It's the decade where we liked the Wombles, chucked frisbees, watched Upstairs, Downstairs and Starsky & Hutch, and witnessed the gloriously tacky but hugely danceable rise of a type of music called "Disco" - a new soundtrack for the discotheques, which had been established before the decade began. With its rich influences, including Soul and Pop, Disco was a wow. Though not with everybody.
Very few people had a video recorder (only 5% of UK households had one by 1980), there were no mobile phones, and although colour TV had been around in this country since 1967, they didn't come cheap and many of us poorer folk stuck to black and white.
Tristram of George & Mildred got "Pong" at Christmas 1979, but nobody I knew had a TV games system, which became available, at a price, late in the decade.
Many of us were dirt poor, inflation rocketed, in 1979 interest rates soared to 17% - the highest since records began in 1694, decimalisation (the coins were designed in the late '60s ready for "D" day in 1971) was controversial - was it bumping up prices? - and the Queen's Silver Jubilee Day saw the Sex Pistols in the pop charts with a song which certainly did not express loyal greetings...
Come back to the REAL 1970s, no rosy coloured specs, no rewriting of the decade to include pop culture belonging to the '60s or '80s, but as clear a view as I can possibly give of the decade!
This blog is largely based on English magazine and newspaper clippings and my memories, but I hope that it will also be useful and enjoyable to those living in the other UK nations - and much further afield.
Links
- '80s Actual - the 1980s - the true story
- Avenues and Alleyways - interesting and friendly blog
- Cambridge Back Chat - local history snippets
- Coronation Street - Back On The Street - Recollections From The 1960s To The 1980s
- Man Hating Abounds
- SpaceHopper - 1960s fun, news and fads revisited - including flares, lava lamps, hippies and the spacehopper!
- The Beckindale Bugle - Emmerdale In The '80s
- Twentieth Century Ads - 1900 to 1999 in newspaper and magazine ads
- Why I Don't Love The 1970s - is 70s nostalgia based on facts or nonsense?
The Real 1970s...
REAL '70s news - no rosy coloured specs...