The 1970s – By One Who Was There

Fifty years ago this summer I left school. I’ll never forget that moment as I walked out that midsummer morning in June 1976 after my last A-level exam. I had never felt so free and had my whole life ahead of me. Well, most of it. What could possibly go wrong?

Actually, it already had. Thanks to an influential history teacher who thought I was rubbish at history, I hadn’t been allowed to apply to university. Since two of my A-levels were History and Ancient History, this was mildly disastrous – though at the time I wasn’t unduly worried. Instead, I had a clerical job at Norwich Union insurance lined up for that autumn and was set to move to the City, where I lived in a dreary bedsit from 1976 to 1977. In the meantime, I sat down for the last six weeks before the exams and taught myself, using past papers and textbooks I’d bought.

Before the results came through, though, I had the golden summer of 1976 to come first. I found a temporary job at Ladbrokes Caister Holiday Centre in Norfolk running the ‘Kentucky Derby’. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The early 1970s were a tumultuous era of adolescence for me. Growing up in Wimbledon, I hurtled around on my bicycle and regularly cycled to the West End, entirely unfussed by the thought of any danger. As were my parents. They never tried to stop me.

It was an exciting time, at least to start with. Men were still going to the moon. Apollo 13’s triumphant catastrophe came in 1970, to be followed by Apollo 14–17, the latter three transporting a battery car to the lunar surface. I was completely galvanised by all that and bombarded NASA with weekly letters begging for promotional and publicity materials. I still have a box of the booklets, posters and photographs they sent me.

As an RAF cadet at school, I was lucky enough to fly de Havilland Chipmunk trainers. At camp that year we watched Concorde being test-flown from Bristol, which was a thrilling sign of the future.

I was already self-funded. I was up every day at 05:30 to embark on two paper rounds. This paid for all sorts of diversions. My first LP was David Bowie’s Hunky Dory, which cost a couple of quid from Woolworth’s. Back then, buying music was a major event: a large LP in its specially designed cover, sometimes with a sheet of lyrics, then dashing home to sling it onto the turntable.

It was, among other genres, the age of Glam Rock – a glitzy world of mostly naff bands dressed in tin foil. But then there was Marc Bolan and T-Rex. In the summer of 1977, I managed to see him perform live at a place called West Runton Pavilion in Norfolk. I’ll never forget that moment. He was explosively exciting on stage, an eruptive presence in front of vast speakers that hummed with electricity. A few months later he was dead. Of course that world now seems forever tainted by people such as Jimmy Savile gurgling on Top of the Pops.

There was plenty more to 1970s culture. TV, restricted to BBC1, BBC2 and ITV, was mostly shabby and hard to watch on sets lit up by cathode ray tubes which projected images in 625 lines across flickering screens. The thing is, it all seemed quite normal at the time.

I suppose one mostly remembers the comedies. How could one ever forget Dick Emery’s Mandy and her expressions of bewilderment at the questions from straight man Gordon Clyde (as it happens, a friend of my father’s): “So he [your boyfriend] knows where to put his hands on a big plump bird?” “Pardon?” “With luck he’ll give you a nice goose for Xmas.” Cue audiences asphyxiating themselves with guffaws at the relentless implicit seaside pier filth.

How we used to cry with laughter. But not as much as when Fawlty Towers hit the screen. One of the greatest moments of the 1970s was the first episode, A Touch of Class, which aired on September 19th 1975. My incredulous father, who had been expecting a second-rate Monty Python spin-off, was left shuddering and howling.

But there was also Dallas, an unintentional comedy in its own way. With a cast of caricatures from JR Ewing to Lucy Ewing – whom Clive James called the “poisoned dwarf” – it was compulsory viewing, with the endless fights at the oil barons’ ball and relentless feuding. When Larry Hagman’s JR was shot, the whole nation was paralysed until the culprit was revealed.

It was just as well, really, that we had all that escapism, since the backdrop to the 1970s was often an era of total despair. The endless strikes, Ted Heath’s three-day weeks which left us creeping round the house carrying naked flames in the gloom. Inflation was rampant and the news always seemed terrible.

Everyday technology was primeval. 1970 was only 25 years after the end of the Second World War. I remember my father buying a new black-and-white Bush TV in 1972 to watch the Munich Olympics. That’s about £1,300 today – a staggering sum of money for a wooden box with a few valves and a lot of wires.

Most cars in the 1970s looked, and sounded, like they’d been made out of scrap recovered from Lancasters. They also fell to pieces, partly because they were so badly made, but also because the avalanche of salt chucked on roads during the grim, freezing, snow-laden winters rotted them in minutes. Hand-wound windows, heaters that made the interior seem colder than it already was, oil drips on the drive and condensation pouring down inside. That’s even if they worked – though they could usually be repaired, unlike today’s cars, which are impossibly complex. They might be more reliable and a good deal more comfortable but are much harder to fix if they do go wrong.

Everything was bought with cash or cheques back then. Almost. Credit cards existed but had made little inroads. The money was bigger too. No £1 coins – just £1 notes. Large 50ps, and 10p and 5p coins that were still the same size as the florins and shillings they’d replaced from pre-decimal times. My Norwich bedsit rent was £8 a week. That’s only £75 in today’s money, or £300 a month – incredibly cheap, though in fact it was still one-third of what I earned before tax.

My recollection is that there were far fewer obese people back in those days. But people looked sallow. Few had foreign holiday suntans. We were a pasty bunch in the 1970s and we ate a lot of fried food. Realistically, though, if you look back at the death figures you can see that had COVID-19 arrived in 1976, no one would have noticed – especially the Government. So many more died in their 50s and 60s than today, though one curiosity was that, with the exception of hay fever, allergies had not yet been invented.

But women looked like real women. Naturally, like most boys of my age, I was mildly obsessed. There was a sensational perfume some wore called Revlon’s Moondrops. It was an iconic smell – so ravishingly erotic it made me feel dizzy. Of course, it isn’t allowed today.

Social media? The idea didn’t even exist. Communications were by letter or telephone. The phone cost more in the morning, so you had to wait until the afternoon. But even then, only sparing use was made of it. If you wanted any privacy you had to find a phone box – always running with condensation and reeking of cigarette butts, with a queue of people waiting outside.

The smoking back in those days was horrendous. It was everywhere. Most adults smoked and you could smoke anywhere. The cinema projector lit up clouds of blue smoke before the light ever reached the screen. People smoked in their cars – ash tipping out of the ashtrays onto the floor – at work, in the street, in pubs, on trains, buses and planes. One forgets how revolting it was.

When my A-level results came through they were immeasurably better than the history teacher had predicted. I got As in both, outclassing all his star students. What a wonderful moment that was. Up yours, Mr Milward. He was incredulous. I applied to university a year late from my grotty Norwich bedsit and in the autumn of 1977 set off for the University of Durham.

Durham in those days was still a mining town. Not far to the northwest was Consett, still a steel town and covered in red dust. I drove around on my Honda CD175, a legacy of what had turned out to be a gap year, exploring what I didn’t realise were the last years of the industrial north.

I met my wife at my Durham college. It had a bar and the single most sophisticated piece of equipment in the college resided there. It was a Space Invaders machine, housed in a box the size of a large filing cabinet and permanently surrounded by students. There was one student who had a typewriter, which I borrowed occasionally. But for the rest of our lives, we’ll remember that time as the era of Saturday Night Fever and the days of disco that brought the decade to a close.

Not forgetting Star Wars (1977) and Alien (1979) of course. They changed science fiction movies forever. What a privilege it was to have seen them when they came out. I emerged a changed person from the Dominion Tottenham Court Road at Christmas 1977 after having seen Star Wars.

There’s a million other things I could have included here, such as more from Clive James’s phenomenally funny TV reviews to the way every house had leaking sash windows and garish wallpaper in horrendous colours, to say nothing of Arthur Scargill’s flapping roof-rack hairdo. But I’d be here forever.

We graduated in the summer of 1980, married in 1981, and left the 1970s behind us. Or did we? Put on Night Fever or Metal Guru and I’m back there in an instant. And a few years ago, I found a bottle of Revlon’s Moondrops on eBay and bought it for my wife. She is kind enough sometimes to wear it. Nonetheless, apart from that I’m happy to leave the 1970s in the past and I hope Andy Burnham will too.

Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer with over 30 history and archaeology books to his credit. His most recent is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations (Abacus 2025). His next is Brief Lives of the Ancient World (Yale, September 2026).