Jubilee Party Sidmouth Style

I'm not a huge fan of the Sopranos but I think this sums it up quite nicely

Yes, Jon, I watched the Seventies series and thought it was well written and presented. I agree with Barton's assessment that the days of our 'youth' tend to be regarded as golden days simply because we were young and knew how to enjoy life! And, as we all know, the 70s produced the best music ever!

The other excellent TV series that took me back was '56 Up'. For the un-initiated this programme is shown every seven years and has followed the ups & downs of a cross-section of people since their seventh birthday. The older one gets the quicker the gaps between each series seems to pass!

Indeed. Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep will never be bettered.

I found the series fascinating because I thought I knew about the 70s because I lived through them and can remember them vividly.

I could talk you through the goals of all the 70s Cup Finals and name all the teams and what they all had for breakfast.

I probably know all the lyrics to every top 10 hit of the 70s.

But really I knew buggar all about what was going on in the adult world.

The series was nostalgic for me on one level but extremely educational on another.

I might not have enjoyed the decade so much had I been twenty years older.

Hughie Green always had his own insight into the world around him:

How inspiring to hear the late great 'Sir' Hughie Green urging the British to come to their senses again.

I found Hughie's 'Land of Hope & Glory' to be particularly rousing and although he was looking ahead to 1975 his call 'For God Sake Britain Wake Up' was eventually heeded by 1979 when the Socialist rabble were overthrown & sanity started to return.

What a pity that Hughie's own daughter didn't wake up & listen to the good sense of her dear old Dad. Instead of cavorting with Geldof who perpetually looked as though he'd just spent a week at Sidmouth Folk Festival, with neither soap nor shampoo for company.

Moving on to drug addled Hutchence was jumping from the frying pan into the fire for her.

Although we can forgive Hughie the occasional dalliance, he knew that good traditional British values, the ones often exemplified by the upright (except those suffering from rheumatism) citizens of Sidmouth, were what was needed to get the country on its feet again.

That theory came up in the TV series.

I’ve read Seventies: The Sights, Sounds and Ideas of a Brilliant Decade by Howard Sounes mainly because I was less acquainted with the cultural aspects than I was with the politics. Then I hesitated when Dominic Sandbrook’s series of post-war books first appeared and found myself instead following the social history trail of David Kynaston (Austerity Britain and Family Britain). Unfortunately his output appears to have slowed and it’ll be some time before the paperback versions of anything beyond 1957 appear (perhaps he’s been diverted by Aldershot getting back in the league?). Then there’s Andy Beckett......

Yes, keep the academic flag flying but – for us oldies – it’s more likely to be the more popularist stuff that retains our interest these days.

Although, funnily enough, I was sniffing around a few of my old student haunts recently. This made me realise that the manner of the teaching of politics and history in the mid 1970s is probably, well, ancient history itself by now. How are the Maoists doing these days in the universities? Struggling a little I’d imagine.



Ah yes, Gilbert Head-Rapson......not that I’d have placed him in the neo-Marxist category (or was he on the quiet?).

No doubt Mr_W will shortly oblige with full room details, third year timetables and historic exam papers.



Without seeing either the article or the TV programme I can only surmise what he may be arguing.

My reading would be that devolution didn’t fail in the late 1970s because of the shambolic campaign in Argentina. It’s more complex than that. Maybe to do with, at that time anyway, a relative ease with a dual British/Scottish outlook and identity. Perhaps too, because politics was actually rather bogged down and stodgy in the 1970s, many Scots may not have fancied an extra layer of government. Furthermore, from memory, I think the offer from the Callaghan government was rather tepid.

But, had the Scots done well in the 1978 World Cup, a momentum could have gathered to create a desire for devolution that might have embraced a wider cross-section of the electorate. In this way I’m sure the devolutionists and nationalists understood the potential importance of football.

As it happened, in football terms anyway, there was a massive gap between the dream and the reality. It was a bizarre business really because, helped by Ally MacLeod’s enthusiasm – and a decent squad of players – the Scots genuinely believed they could do well even to the extent of winning the whole bloody thing. England not being there – for the second time in succession – was another dimension although, in fact, there was considerable goodwill from the English public and the London media. Naturally this followed the old “British when they win; Scottish when they lose” pattern and there was soon the opportunity to cheer and mock in equal measures.

So maybe, after building their hopes so highly, failing so bloody dismally in full view of the sodding English dissuaded some Scots from devolution idea?

Years later, as it happens, you have to ask what would have been the fate of a Scottish assembly (or whatever was on offer) during the time of the Tory government? After all, look what happened to the GLC, in particular, and local government in general.

Oddly, even though Scotland were still getting to tournament finals when Labour re-floated devolution in the late 1990s, it’s been downhill for Scottish football (national team and club sides alike) since the establishment of the Scottish parliament. Perhaps, at least, that illustrates there’s more to being Scottish these days than supporting eleven blokes on the football pitch.

Mind you, it’s easy to get tied up in knots when attempting to make linkages been football, politics and identity in Scotland. Just how do you reconcile the British identity of Rangers (jubilee tea parties at Ibrox this week, I see) and the Irish culture surrounding Celtic with political allegiances and voting patterns? I wonder if there’s been some research into this with regard to the development of a Scottish parliament? Not that I'm encouraging James to re-consider his MA proposal.....