State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  One thing that had changed, though, was that more and more middle-class couples liked to entertain friends and colleagues to dinner in their own homes, partly as a way of showing off their perfect lawns, three-piece suites and collections of china figurines, but also as a chance for the (almost always female) cook to demonstrate her mastery of the new culinary trends. Previously a habit reserved for the rich, the dinner party was the supreme suburban ritual of the 1970s and the ultimate test of a wife’s organizational skills, which is why women’s magazines spent so much time advising on everything from the best pre-dinner drinks – Campari and soda, say, or Bacardi and coke – to the ideal books to leave on the coffee table. As for the food, many cooks turned for inspiration to the highly elaborate recipes of writers like the Anglo-American television chef Robert Carrier, presenting a waist-expanding selection of pastry crescents, heavy cream sauces, stuffed vegetables, lobster soufflés, sweet and sour meatballs or veal goulash, served with a chilled bottle or two of Mateus Rosé. Contrary to popular belief, however, there is no evidence of people swapping partners on these occasions; in any case, the average housewife would have been far too worried about the state of her sherry trifle to contemplate a quick tumble with Terry from Accounts.24

  By far the biggest influence on the suburban cook was a pretty young woman who first appeared on television in September 1973, presenting simple ten-minute recipes in a converted BBC weather studio and coming across, in the words of the Telegraph’s reviewer, as ‘a friendly, unaffected young housewife at home in the kitchen’. The daughter of a Bexleyheath ironmonger, Delia Smith had left school in the late 1950s without a single qualification, and spent the 1960s working as a hairdresser, shop assistant, washer-up and waitress. After becoming interested in cooking at her workplace, a little Paddington restaurant, she began taking notes on popular dishes, and even visited the British Museum’s Reading Room to bone up on recipes from the past. In 1969, she landed a job writing recipes for the Daily Mirror’s new lifestyle magazine, and three years later she moved to the Evening Standard, where she stayed for twelve years. By this point her first book, How to Cheat at Cooking (1971), had already done well, and she was on her way to becoming a publishing phenomenon. The Evening Standard Cookbook, Frugal Food and Cakes, Bakes and Steaks soon followed, but her biggest success was Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, published in three annual volumes from 1978 onwards to accompany her BBC series. Often lampooned, not least for her deep Catholic faith and vociferous support for Norwich City, she could not, however, be dismissed. No other British cook, not Elizabeth David, not Fanny Cradock, not Marguerite Patten, had more influence over what ordinary people had for dinner.25

  The key to Delia’s success was that her recipes, unlike those of other cooks, were designed for real people too busy to worry about elaborate sauces and time-consuming marinades. Her very first cookbook, the aptly titled How to Cheat at Cooking, encouraged readers to use packet sauces and Smash, and not to be afraid of ‘tarting up … tinned, packet, frozen or dehydrated goods’. Frozen Findus ratatouille or Birds Eye baby onions in cream sauce, Delia advised, could be ‘poured over chops or steak to give them an edge’. And she even suggested that busy hostesses serve ‘Baked Fish Fingers’, a concoction of tinned tomatoes, mushrooms and grated cheese poured over fish fingers, which would be unlikely to fool even the least observant guest, even if, as Delia recommended, there were ‘plenty of top-drawer cook-books placed on full view’. Later, of course, she played down the cheating element, and by the mid-1970s Findus ratatouille had disappeared from her repertoire. But her recipes always catered for nervous, insecure and busy cooks – in other words, the great majority of the population. She was a ‘down to earth sort of cook’, reported The Times before her first television appearance, adding that she called herself ‘the poor woman’s Elizabeth David’, was not ashamed of never having studied at cookery school, and practised at home in ‘a pair of old jeans that I can get dirty’. As Joan Bakewell remarked seven years later, Delia was in the vanguard of the changes brought by ‘the fast-food revolution, freezers and working wives’, but ‘not so far ahead as to be freaky’. Her recipes were simple and reliable, always a little behind the latest trend, reassuring viewers that ‘nowadays’ olive oil was quite acceptable instead of salad cream, or introducing them to such novelties as ‘cream, bacon and onion tart’ (actually quiche Lorraine) or crusty brown bread as an accompaniment to main courses. Her sets were semi-rustic and suburban, her style democratic without being patronizing. ‘We live in homes like Delia Smith’s, among people like Delia Smith,’ Bakewell wrote, ‘… or so she persuades us.’26

  While Delia Smith presented an image of the perfect suburban housewife, polite, pretty and endlessly competent, there were other, rather more caustic visions of the domestic hostess. No suburban social event of the 1970s has been more celebrated than Abigail’s party, even though in Mike Leigh’s Play for Today we never meet the teenage Abigail or hear anything but rumours of her notorious gathering. Instead we are confronted by the ghastly Beverly Moss (Alison Steadman), whose suburban drinks party, complete with faux-brown leather sofas, beige wallpaper, bowls of nibbles, plenty of Bacardi and coke and Demis Roussos on the record player, turns domestic entertaining into excruciating black comedy. Beverly is of course a monster: a middle-class social climber, a sexual vulture, a snob obsessed with liking, having and saying the right things. She is the prisoner not only of her insecurities but also of her ambitions: we are meant to laugh at her suburban pretensions (‘Is it real silver?’ ‘Silver plate, yes’), just as we are meant to laugh at Laurence, her overworked estate-agent husband, with his leather-bound volumes of Shakespeare (‘Not something you can actually read, of course’), his L. S. Lowry prints and his efforts to impress guests with Beethoven’s Ninth. This is a vision not merely of social climbers desperately trying to impress their neighbours, or even of families falling apart in an age of cultural change, but of all the vices of Metro-land, combined and exaggerated: its materialistic one-upmanship, its sexual voraciousness, its lack of community and feeling, its aggressive individualism. As Bernard Levin wrote at the time, it is ‘a study of the mores, attitude, conduct and speech of Affluent-Yobbonia’, of people without roots, ‘torn loose from history, faith, spirit, even language, because they are torn loose from themselves.’27

  Mike Leigh was not, of course, the only dramatist of the day to unearth what he saw as the insecurity, loneliness and sheer misery behind the façade of contented middle-class affluence. Although Alan Ayckbourn’s plays invariably made audiences howl with laughter, the bard of Scarborough was a master at picking apart the seams of marriages and families, uncovering the gruesome hypocrisy beneath the ritualistic Sunday lunches and housewarming parties of suburban life. There is surely no better scene of the decade, for example, than the famous Sunday evening dinner in Table Manners, part of his trilogy The Norman Conquests, in which the anxieties and unhappiness of Ayckbourn’s characters – the fussy, pedantic Reg, the angrily buttoned-up Sarah, the dowdy, frustrated Annie, the bumbling, awkward Tom, the dryly waspish Ruth and the outrageously needy, predatory Norman – are mercilessly but hilariously laid bare. ‘Come on now, don’t cry,’ Norman tells Annie at the end of a disastrous family weekend. ‘I’ll make you happy. Don’t worry. I’ll make you happy.’ But happiness seems impossibly distant. For all their obvious affluence, their Home Counties lifestyle and their protestations of contentment, all six characters end the trilogy as they began: deeply lonely, frustrated, resentful people, victims of their own expectations, and of each other.28

  And yet, for all their comic brilliance, The Norman Conquests and Abigail’s Party were misleading guides to suburban life. For although writers liked to imagine that suburbanites were selfish, unhappy, lonely people, forever teetering on the brink of some terrible Reggie Perrin-style breakdown, the fact is that most people found life in Metro-land warm, sociable and thoroughly enjoyable. As early as 1960, researchers had comprehensively de
bunked the caricature of joyless, atomized social climbers (a cliché first coined by sneering upper-class intellectuals at the turn of the century), reporting that suburban couples were ‘friendly, neighbourly and helpful to each other’ and enjoyed a rich life of clubs and societies. In the much-mocked New Towns, too, friendliness and contentment tended to be the rule, not the exception. To the working-class couples with small children who moved to the New Towns, they represented privacy, security and comfort: one Hemel Hempstead woman, for instance, burst into tears on her first day there because she was so happy. ‘We had a garden for the children to run in,’ she recalled, ‘we had a house, a home of our own and we could shut the front door and we didn’t have to worry about anybody.’ And even the most derided new settlements had their fans. When researchers visited the forbidding concrete blocks of Cumbernauld in 1968, they found that eight out of ten people (most of whom had come from the Glasgow slums) were pleased with their new homes, while nine out of ten liked their neighbours. Cumbernauld was ‘a happy town’, reported The Times. ‘The people are friendly, more of them have cars and telephones than Glaswegians do, there is no teenage problem and there are more than 100 clubs and societies in the community … So much for “new town blues”.’29

  Despite all the travails of the economy in the next few years, the bloodshed in Northern Ireland, the battles between governments and unions, the headlines about crime and decadence, the talk of crisis and national breakdown, there is no reason to believe that this picture changed. Of course many families were deeply affected by the major events of the day, from soaring food prices and petrol shortages to public spending cuts and job losses. For those lucky enough to be in steady, well-paid jobs, however, life was good, especially as they watched their mortgages disappear thanks to inflation. Provided that they could ignore the newspaper stories about British decline, there was much to enjoy: a brand-new company car, next year’s foreign holiday, a trip to the new shopping centre or even a lazy afternoon tending the garden and watching The Big Match. Even the terrorism expert Richard Clutterbuck, writing in a book entitled Britain in Agony: The Rise of Political Violence (1978), reflected that in late 1974, one of the lowest moments in the country’s modern history, a Labour activist had reminded him that ‘despite the almost permanent atmosphere of economic crisis, Britain was at that moment more prosperous in real terms than at any point in our history and that the majority of us, especially at working level, had the highest standard of living we had ever had’. Despite all the problems, indeed, most people still enjoyed affluence, mobility and opportunities of which their parents could never have dreamed. Perhaps it was not surprising, then, that in 1977 a major survey found that a staggering 82 per cent of people were satisfied with life in Britain, compared with only 68 per cent in France and 59 per cent in Italy. For many people, in short, life was good.30

  For one social group in particular, the political and economic shocks of the seventies hardly registered even as distant rumbling on the horizon. Unless their parents were unusually political, most children were barely affected by the major news stories of the day, which is perhaps one reason they later remembered the 1970s so fondly. As one schoolboy of 1973 later put it, while the news programmes were ‘crammed with bombings, mass strikes, unemployment and financial ruin’, he ‘happily sat … swinging my legs, enjoying the candles’ intimate light, reading comics [and] picking my nose’. And although a 12-year-old Essex girl recorded on New Year’s Day 1974 that ‘as the power & energy crisis is still on, it looks as if we’ll soon be using candles and riding bikes everywhere’, her other diary entries during the national crisis were taken up with camping expeditions, trips to sweet shops and Chinese takeaways, the purchases of records and bubble bath, and the compilation of David Cassidy scrapbooks. Only the weekly editions of Top of the Pops (‘Dear Me, It’s been a good day today. Top of the Pops was on at 7.55pm. Suzi Quatro was on and Bay City Rollers, Barry White, Alvin Stardust, Gilbert O’Sullivan, Hollies, David Bowie, Queen. I can’t think of any others’) marked the passing of the seasons – as well as the inevitable but never less than sensational transfer of her affections from one spotty youth to the next.31

  Children in the 1970s were obviously fortunate to be growing up in an age of free state education and national health care, but they were also lucky to be growing up at a time when, thanks to the boom in living standards since the 1950s, affluence had gently trickled down the generations. Very few had to put up with the outside toilets, cold running water and shared tin baths that their parents had known, and many took for granted the space hoppers and chopper bikes that later became clichéd emblems of the decade. Even working-class children could expect to get pocket money from their parents: a survey of sixth-formers at a very mixed north London comprehensive in 1974 found that most got about £2 a week, while many took part-time jobs at the weekends, earning between £2 and £6 for a day’s work. The working-class Essex girl we met earlier was too young to have a job, but her older sister earned £3 every Saturday at Littlewoods in Romford, while the 12-year-old diarist regularly bought new clothes, records and make-up. And although class inequalities meant that children from very rich and very poor backgrounds had very different life chances, British children in the 1970s arguably had more of a common culture than any generation before them. Rich or poor, all but a tiny minority had a stake in the world of Action Man, Star Wars and Scalextrix, yo-yos, roller-skates and Sindy dolls, Uno, Mastermind and the Magna Doodle.32

  What dominated children’s cultural lives above all, however, was the small screen. While Blue Peter, Jackanory and the excruciating Why Don’t You? aimed to educate and uplift, most children preferred the colourful adventures of Mr Benn, Ivor the Engine, The Wombles and the gloriously melancholy Bagpuss. For slightly older children, meanwhile, Doctor Who was at its peak in the 1970s, pitting Jon Pertwee and then Tom Baker against an imaginative if rather unconvincing range of foes from Daleks and Cybermen to man-eating plants, giant slugs and a giant rat – the latter one of the worst-realized monsters not merely in the show’s history, but in the history of human entertainment. Moral campaigners fretted that the Time Lord’s adventures were too frightening for children: his encounter with plastic policemen in ‘Terror of the Autons’ (1971) was discussed in the House of Lords, while the Church of England’s consultant psychiatrist blamed Pertwee’s swansong ‘Planet of the Spiders’ (1974) for ‘an epidemic of spider phobia among young children’. An internal BBC report even claimed that Doctor Who was the single most violent programme on television, although, as The Times pointed out, comparing Doctor Who’s violence with real violence was ‘like comparing Monopoly with the property market in London: both are fantasies, but one is meant to be taken seriously’.

  In any case, children clearly liked to be frightened, and viewing figures regularly topped 10 million. It is telling that after one particularly violent adventure, ‘The Seeds of Doom’ (1976), children wrote in to express their appreciation. ‘I think it was one of the scariest ones of all, I liked the bit when the plants were taking over, and I also liked the monster,’ was a typical comment, while another young correspondent commended the producers on their ingenious ways of killing people (strangled by tendril, crushed in compost machine, and so on). Sadly and foolishly, however, the BBC eventually yielded to parental criticism: in 1977 the programme’s horror content was toned down and the production team, which soon included Douglas Adams of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame, struck a more comic note. But by that stage the moral campaigners had a new target, for the fuss about Doctor Who was as nothing compared with that surrounding Grange Hill, which began in 1978 and horrified many parents with its boisterously realistic portrait of comprehensive school life.33

  One reason that children’s television aroused such alarm was that even the producers themselves thought youngsters watched far too much of it. A typical weekday afternoon schedule in February 1978, on the day Grange Hill’s first episode appeared, began at 1.45 with Mr Me
n, with the pleasures of Play School, Jackanory, Screen Test and Grange Hill to come before Paddington rounded things off at 5.35. Even Shaun Sutton, the BBC’s head of drama, worried that parents were allowing their children ‘to watch too much and so denying them much of the rich diversity which should be enlarging their developing years’, when there were ‘books to be read, arts and crafts to be learnt, and games to be played’. And yet there is no evidence that television destroyed children’s appetite for reading. The Puffin Book Club, founded in 1967, had 50,000 diminutive members by the early 1970s, each receiving a copy of the quarterly Puffin Post (or The Egg for very young readers), and membership eventually peaked at a staggering 200,000 in the early 1980s. By this point, Puffin were selling well over 3 million children’s paperbacks a year, while more than 3,000 new books flooded annually into the marketplace. Many of these broke new ground in children’s fiction: writing in 1980, the critic Elaine Moss predicted that a twenty-first-century historian would be interested in novels that were ‘beginning to reflect the multicultural nation … [and] contemporary situations that cut across class and colour’, such as Jan Needle’s story of an immigrant Pakistani family in Bradford, My Mate Shofiq (1978). There were deliberately anti-sexist books, such as Gene Kemp’s celebrated The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler (1977), in which naughty, athletic Tyke turns out, in a surprise twist, to be a girl; there were also ‘social realist’ stories revising the cherished myths of the Second World War, such as Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War (1973) or Robert Westall’s The Machine Gunners (1975). And there was even a revisionist account of the most cherished childhood fantasy of all, thanks to Raymond Briggs’s grumpy, working-class Father Christmas (1973) – who still has an outside toilet.34