The Conservatives have warned that Labour would return us to the 1970s and they are right to warn us against that decade. It was, to my mind, the decade in which everything changed, and changed for the worse.
The 1970s, for example, saw the first immigrant (Derek Griffiths, of TV's Play School) and the first homosexual (Quentin Crisp). Despite our hopes, he would not be the last. It also saw the rise of full-frontal nudity in the bedroom, as documented in the Confessions Of A ... Window Cleaner series. Fortunately, all else was proper in the bedroom. Married couples still slept in separate beds (Basil and Sybil Fawlty), while double beds were only occupied by male best friends (Morecambe And Wise). Nudity would change all that, however.
1972 saw the first swearing ("Up yours"), and this rapidly developed into even worse obscenities ("a--e". "c--p"). People spat for the first time. It became impossible to tell which were the men and which were the women - I myself once got Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle mixed up with one another, with excruciating consequences.
The invention of the jet engine by Mr Freddie Laker brought us face to face for the first time with Americans. Chewing gum was suddenly commonplace while radio presenters such as David Jacobs abandoned formal evening dress when broadcasting in favour of trashy gutter slang such as "Hi there!" The Three Degrees and The Village People left many of us feeling confused.
1976 saw the first sunshine in Britain, a novelty at first which seemed charming enough but soon wore off when the nation's youth went feral producing "punk rock", clearly the result of sunstroke. It could have been nipped in the bud simply by jailing its ringleaders but sadly, the 1970s also saw the rise of liberalism, embodied by the all-powerful Lord Longford. Our hands were tied. mother of groom dresses summer 2019
Finally, the 1970s saw an epidemic of "bra-burning", thanks to provocative figures such as the notorious Sally Thomsett. At one point in the 1970s, so many bras were being burned that the fire brigade could no longer cope and the army had to be drafted in to assist. This was the beginning of the Winter of Discontent. Fortunately, in 1979 Mrs Thatcher was elected to office by the last three or four people in the country with their backs against in the wall in the face of all this frightful horror and the whole nightmare experiment of the 1970s was brought to an end.
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