At Last, the 1973 Society
Inside the head of Trevor Strang as he prepares the inaugural lecture.
I suppose I should organise my thoughts. Quite an honour, after all. Don’t forget the small things. I remember ‘Players No 6’ and occasionally switching to ‘Dunhill Consulate Menthol’ in their cool, green and white packets, to impress Angie King. And having four buttons on my bags.
But you can’t underplay the tat and the grime and the smoke and the seedy, inky papers that smeared your hands, sort of rubbing your face in it. I remember that 1973 story. News of the World guy, hiding in a wardrobe in Maida Vale to catch some posh gent called Lord Lambton at it. And she, Norma something, said she voted Tory because they were her best clients. He went off in disgrace to live in a beautiful villa in Tuscany for the rest of his life. Lord Lambton that is. Not the photographer. Anyway, need some sort of structure.
It’s an odd thing when you realise you can comfortably look back on half a century. Seems like a heavy block of time. Too much time really. But it did set me thinking, as inaugural speaker, the ‘73 should promote itself a bit more. For a start, it was in 1973 that Britain joined what used to be called the Common Market. Part of what Conservative Central Office called something like – a better tomorrow. Yes, “A Better Tomorrow”. Emphasise that. And pause.
Let me see. Good evening, bla bla bla, er… The conventional wisdom is that the 1970s were pretty awful, sort of shoddy, tatty and tasteless. Typified by the design disaster of the Austin Allegro and all the wintery discontent and so on.
So, crap design, bla bla, bla…slides? But that’s not quite right, is it? Take the England shirts that October. No bloody tat on the kit. No Adidas ads. No bloody logos. No stupid lozenges or fade-outs or pyjama patterns. And no replica kits for fat blokes and their fat kids. God, can’t say that. Just plain white shirts. Navy shorts. Plain white socks. Classy. And Sir Alf. Most certainly. Most certainly. Most certainly, we will beat Poland. And all live on the telly. On ITV with the ads. “For Mash Get Smash”, interrupting the tragedy of Norman Hunter.
Trying to make sense of it, I venture to suggest that the seventies was a complex sort of mess of a decade. “Venture to suggest?” Maybe not. Take Edward Heath, the Prime Minister ‘70 to ‘74. Widely distrusted because he preferred pianos to women. Not a proper bloke and all that. But here is an odd fact. Heath came under machine gun fire in Barcelona when he went to help out the Spanish Republicans against the Fascists. Obviously, as a much younger man. In his twenties. Heath, who took on the miners in 1973, fought on the side of the people in 1937. He lost. And therein, lies some of the peculiarities of the Heath era. He wanted to modernise Britain and the European market seemed to offer that. And now, we sit on the other side of that broken dream. Nobody really remembers lonely old Heath.
But must avoid pure nostalgia, a pretty useless sort of emotion. But the strange thing about the 70s was that it was itself nostalgic. Take Elton John. He hit the big time because he remembered when rock was young. And Suzie left him, or something. Maybe because he was gay? Jeepers, don’t say that. And Karen Carpenter, with that heartbreaking voice, told us it was yesterday once more. Where did you go Joe DiMaggio… and that song, Angie, by the Stones. Angie.
And 1973 saw the first of the Last of the Summer Wine. On telly… the first of the Last of the Summer Wine. That awful snob, Allan Clarke, on his return from the Tory conference, back in his bloody castle, commented in his diary that Blackpool was “loathsome, dirty, squalid… with primitives loitering.” Even Tony Benn talked about “morons ruled by crooks.” But they weren’t primitives or morons really. They were the lads. The likely lads. Where am I going with this? Where am I going?
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