History of England 1-6

Before the Seventies, there had been little native entertainment for children on the television, and none in colour. With the growing availability of colour televisions, parents might have expected a rainbow of wholesome family fun, but it proved otherwise. Instead, the children of the decade opened a doll’s house and found that it was haunted. The Seventies were the heyday of what has been termed ‘shoestring fright’, when horror could be expressed from floodlights and cardboard. However, while the new programmes were not invariably dark – there was much in the way of comedy and whimsy – they had an eeriness that later decades could not emulate. Doctor Who, already perhaps the greatest single influence on this new demographic, entered what has been called its ‘Gothic phase’.

And so in this period the pre-teens of Britain were cowering behind their sofas. The ghostly music of Children of the Stones left even adults reluctant to linger near the television. The Feathered Serpent had human sacrifice and unholy resurrection. In Escape into Night, a young girl’s attempts to recreate reality beget only nightmares. Adults, sitting through the trials of Crossroads, must often have felt a wistful envy.

And the worlds to come could be quite as forbidding. In Timeslip and The Tomorrow People, the future imagined was at once authoritarian and apocalyptic. In Blake’s 7, England’s somewhat straitened offering to the science fiction genre, ‘the Federation’ is a vicious, dictatorial oligarchy that, like the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four, seeks to replace memory and warp identity. And so, caught between these pincers, the childish imagination was offered a homely, if gritty, version of the real in Grange Hill, a series based upon the trials of a suburban comprehensive school. Here we were introduced to benignly anarchic ‘Tucker’ Jenkins, the vicious ‘Gripper’ Stebson, and the long-suffering Mrs McCluskey, high-minded and well-meaning but doomed to grapple with the intractable perversity of adolescence.

On the older medium of the radio, the English were offered a comedy series for adults that could have been sheltered only under the quietly crumbling cliff face of the time in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Arthur Dent had imagined an ordinary day beckoning, before remembering that his house is to be demolished. His friend Ford Prefect, in reality an alien from Betelgeuse Seven, informs him that something rather greater than his house is soon to be destroyed; from far above mankind hears: ‘People of earth, your attention please … As you are no doubt aware, the plans for the development of the outlying regions of the western spiral arm of the galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star-system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition.’ Oh dear.

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The slot machine

The aliens who have come to destroy the earth, the sadistically dutiful Vogons, happiest when disgruntled, could only have been conceived by an Englishman of the Seventies. Later in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, we are introduced to two philosophers who have gone on strike in protest at the creation of a computer designed to solve the ultimate question of ‘life, the universe and everything’. The computer, for them, is trespassing on their territory. ‘You’ll have a national Philosophers’ strike on your hands!’ ‘Who will that inconvenience?’ asks the computer, Deep Thought. ‘Never you mind who it’ll inconvenience, you box of blacklegging binary bits! It’ll hurt, buster! It’ll hurt!’

That last assertion, of course, is somewhat improbable, hence the bite of this topical lampoon. For on the one hand, strikes hurt the people a good deal; on the other, the usefulness of the work withheld was not always clear. At any rate, it was between the two elections of 1974 that the Labour government made peace with the unions, but on the unions’ terms – no other choice seemed available. For this was the era of the Social Contract, by which parliament guaranteed the rights of the working man and received, in theory, the goodwill of the unions. It was never a formal or legal arrangement, and no statute of that name was ever enacted. It was Michael Foot, the scion of Fabian idealism, who prepared the acts with which this high-minded but hazy concept will always be linked. ‘The Parliamentary Labour party and the unions are linked as never before!’ he asserted.