Among films, A Clockwork Orange (1971), Carry On at Your Convenience (1971) and Live and Let Die (1973) stand out for sheer entertainment, as well as for some unintentional insights. Alexander Walker, National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties (1985) remains a splendidly entertaining survey, while Robert Shail (ed.), Seventies British Cinema (2008) has essays on virtually every aspect of the domestic film industry at its lowest point. Leon Hunt, British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (1998) is surely the last word on sex comedies. Television in the early seventies, meanwhile, was in a class of its own: for a good survey, see Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. 5: Competition (1995). On DVD the list of delights is endless, from Upstairs, Downstairs to Fawlty Towers and from The Onedin Line to Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? A brave man might start with the adventures of Jason King, while the best and most revealing stories of Doctor Who from this period are probably ‘Inferno’ (1970) and ‘The Green Death’ (1973). Almost unbelievably, you can even buy boxed sets of Love Thy Neighbour, but it is probably best not to leave them lying around.
* The Tories won 322 seats, Labour 287, the Liberals 6, the Ulster Unionists 8, the Scottish National Party 1 and smaller parties 5, giving Heath a 31-seat majority.
* The plays in question were The Death of a Young, Young Man by Willy Russell, Funny Farm by Roy Minton, Just Another Saturday by Peter McDougall, Through the Night by Trevor Griffiths and Days of Hope by Jim Allen, which was directed by Ken Loach. Perhaps the biggest success was Griffiths’ play, which attracted 11 million viewers and launched a national debate about the treatment of women with breast cancer.
* The Eye had referred to Heath as ‘Grocer’ since 1962, a reference to his role negotiating food prices during Britain’s abortive Common Market application under Macmillan.
* Respectively, the Transport and General Workers’ Union, the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, the General and Municipal Workers’ Union, the National Association of Local Government Officers, the National Union of Public Employees and the Confederation of Heath Service Employees. The other common acronym of the day, ASTMS, referred to the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staff.
* The nickname was coined by the increasingly conservative journalist Paul Johnson, after the self-made Caribbean despot in Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones (1920).
* Denmark and Ireland also joined on the same day.
* In the long run, though, the conservationists lost the war, for in the 1990s the M3 was extended through Twyford Down.
* Stephen Poliakoff’s play Strawberry Fields (1977), for example, features a far-right group called the English People’s Party, violently opposed to immigration and pollution, and obsessed with the rape of the countryside and blight of the motor car; one character calls it a ‘sort of conservation wing of the National Front’.
* A definitive figure is virtually impossible, and the official census figure of 650,000 in 1971 is surely too low. The Institute of Race Relations came up with the figure 1 million in the late 1960s.
* East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971.
* Reich was by any standards a very strange figure. Born in the Habsburg province of Galicia, he studied under Sigmund Freud and eventually ended up in New York, where he argued that sexual urges should be indulged, not repressed, and that orgasms were the key to mental health. He later insisted that he could channel a cosmic life force called ‘orgone energy’ (not unlike the Force in Star Wars) with an ‘orgone accumulator’, which he could then fire at the clouds to create rain. Convinced that this was ‘a fraud of the first magnitude’, the Food and Drug Administration ordered Reich to stop selling the orgone accumulator. When he refused, he was imprisoned in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he died in 1957. It seems likely that he was mentally ill.
* Members of the Irish Parliament, the Dáil.
* The hospital seems to have been a typical Poulson masterpiece: the Maltese government later complained that it was ‘the wrong design, the wrong size and in the wrong place’.
* According to the economic historians Max-Stephan Schulze and Nicholas Woodward, for instance, the inflation peak of the mid-1970s ‘was unambiguously influenced by easy monetary conditions’.
* It also speaks volumes about the nature of power in Britain at the time that he had attended the same Oxford college as Ted Heath, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey: it is faintly bizarre to find, in June 1974, McIntosh, Heath and Jenkins having a private chat about the state of the nation at the Balliol College Gaudy.
* It evidently worked for some couples. I was born almost exactly nine months after the beginning of the three-day week.
* Presumably Arthur Scargill; if so, a remarkably perceptive remark, given that Scargill had only just become president of the Yorkshire miners.
* Some sources attribute the Marks & Spencer line to Crosland, too, but Michael Hatfield’s definitive account gives it to Healey, and it certainly sounds like the kind of thing he would say.
* By contrast, issues such as devolution, feminism, crime and immigration barely featured at all. Even Europe was not really an election issue in 1974 – a sign of how little the electorate cared about it.
State of Emergency: the Way We Were Page 97