The Seventies

My first clear memories of watching news, or being aware of what was going on in the world, stem from around 40 years ago. This was from vaguely, selectively, almost subliminally absorbing images and words from television news, and occasionally the radio. I don't remember seeing many newspapers in our household in those times, other than the painfully parochial local publications.

It is a time popularly associated with economic stagnation, industrial strife, terrorist outrages, global instability and general misery. But did the reality match the retrospective perception?  There is plenty of "retro" newscast footage online, from several countries, and I have been studying some of it from that period, to try to obtain a genuine flavour of what was "going on", divorced from what we see through the opposite of rose-tinted spectacles.

If those old news bulletins are to be viewed as representative, then Europe circa 1973/74 was indeed a depressed and insecure place. It was as if somebody somewhere had decreed that the Sixties would indeed be primarily swinging, and that all the anger and unrest would be bottled up and then compressed into the early-to-mid 70s. One of the clear recollections of my early years is of one or two candle-lit evenings in '74, prompted by power cuts...

Matters economic appear to have been very corporatist and nationalistic in Europe back then. The impression is of more talking and posturing than genuine activity. It is little wonder that while the parties were sitting around tables in smoke-filled rooms, people in other parts of the globe were just getting on with the job, making things and influencing people. There were also signs of an obsession with inflation and the cost of living generally.

It is amusing, in the light of its subsequent development and expansion, to see an EU (EEC in those days) with membership still in single figures. The leaders seemed to have summits or get-togethers every couple of weeks!  Easier to arrange things more informally with a small roll-call, clearly. And of course, the range of topics deemed worthy of discussion was very limited, mostly to do with agricultural quotas and the like. Compared to today's behemoth, it was all very quaint, and that is not meant as a criticism.

It is fashionable to assert that the 1970s was a decade which most who experienced it would like to forget. It lacked the conventional "dynamism" of the decades either side of it, but its grimness and its traumas imbued it with a vitality and rawness which is still compelling and intriguing, particularly for those who see the 60s as too-good-to-be-true, and the 80s as soulless and synthetic.

A truly enigmatic decade, the 70s, and endlessly fascinating. In spite of the shrill and gloom-ridden headlines, people who lived through those years simply got on with life, and felt that they were living in the best of times, which many felt were simpler and more caring than what we have today. Another reason why I sometimes feel that I was born twenty years too late....