Mumpolski
In today's room, with today's view
Posts: 5541
  
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posted 06-04-2010 12:54
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I've had my head stuck in this one for the last couple of nights. Excellent accounts of Maplins and Saltley.
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posted 06-04-2010 15:13
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I recently completed this and very much enjoyed it.
It was certainly leavened by a lot of the first person stuff, which was at times very funny (Goldsmith's brother, in particular), and the contrasts between key sites of conflict, etc, in the 70s, and the state of them today. It probably made the book more of en engaging read as opposed to adding to the stock of information - it felt televisual in that respect - but it did help the book as a whole go down.
I came away with the feeling that there was more 60s idealism sloshing about in the 70s than the "me" decade is often credited for, that things still felt very much up for grabs and that there was nothing absolutely "no alternative" about the election of the Tories. A parallel history of the UK along more European lines would have been perfectly feasible. Things didn't have to be the way they panned out - sometimes, narratives of "inevitability" are devised and applied retrospectively.
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posted 06-04-2010 23:01
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The seventies clip on Panorama's How To Win An Election were good (see iplayer). It's said on there that political television was never better. There's a clip with a chap standing next to 8 different graphics with various types of inflation and the like on it.
On the Money Programme though there was one stat that jumped out at me. Each Toyota worker produced 101 cars. Each British Leyland one produced 5.8. Whatever the complexities of the underlying issues, you can kind of see why stateowned unionised manufacturing wasn't popular among much of the public.
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Last Edit: 06-04-2010 23:01 By Tubby Isaacs.
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posted 03-08-2010 16:22
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So, just up at the family cottage for ten days, where among other things I chanced upon a book of Giles cartoons from the period of the '74 minority government.
I realised while flipping through it that much of the image I have in my head of the period actually comes from Giles cartoons. Strikes and power failures feature heavily, and overall, it gives the impression of a society enduring something akin to wartime rationing and hardships.
But of course, it was the Express, so you'd expect it to be biased (although I never knew it was the express at the time...and now I want to know why my very Old Labour grandfather always had them around). Was there a Steve bell equivalent in the 70s? I should probably read that for balance.
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posted 03-08-2010 16:29
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If you want to know the true bile of the Daily/ Sunday Express of the time, find some Michael Cummings. There's some on t'net...
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posted 03-08-2010 21:05
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Was there a Steve bell equivalent in the 70s?
Gerald Scarfe? Although he might have lost his mojo a bit by then.
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posted 04-08-2010 09:26
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Cummings was revolting. Giles professed not to agree with the Express's politics and started off writing for a left-wing mag before he was poached in the 1940s. His characters tend to regard events of the day with a wry, apolitical shrug. The nearest he could come to causing offence was in, say, a cartoon of a bunch of black geezers reading a newspaper article loudly announcing Enoch Powell's controversial plans to offer immigrants a cash sum to return home. "Try me," says one to the other.
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posted 04-08-2010 14:23
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I remember that cartoon too - though for added context, the men were standing at a bus stop on a dismal urban street, and it was chucking down with rain too.
I used to buy my dad the Giles annual for Christmas every year, and he had them going back to the early 60s. I loved the detail he usually managed to cram into a single frame.
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posted 16-09-2010 17:39
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Just finished the Beckett book - absolutely excellent throughout. I loved him popping back to places 30-odd years later to see what was there now, and the research and the interviews were really illuminating, now that everyone's prepared to talk with the distance of three or four decades. And there were so many people, movements and incidents I only had the vaguest memory of that he fleshed out in a careful, balanced fashion.
A good companion book - its sub-cultural sister, I'd say - is Howard Sounes's Seventies. I also have Alwyn Turner's Crisis? What Crisis? but I'm too Seventied-out to tackle that right now. Anyone read it?
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posted 28-09-2010 16:11
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The otf discussion from 2006 referred to in the OP.
And reading that in bed last night (yeah, that's how I roll) made me want to re-read Michael Crozier & Samuel P Huntington's "Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission" as I suspect it may answer a few questions in that thread.
He's done well, old Hunto, since then, whilst poor old Crozier only managed to knacker the FA & Post Office.
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posted 27-10-2010 12:40
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This is an good lecture on this theme - not as political as Beckett, but many of the same points are made.
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posted 28-10-2010 10:25
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Picked this up in “The Works” today for £4.99, result, eat my goal etc. but with a Dennis Waterman voiceover.
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posted 11-11-2010 01:26
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I'm about half way through this now. Well written, extremely readable, subtle, measured, thought-provoking, and seems very well researched.
My only quibble with it is the author's excessive fondness for the word "entropy", on which I am starting a separate thread.
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posted 17-11-2010 08:11
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Thanks to all who have receommended. This was my third purchase for the Kindle and the years are rolling back.
At the time my abiding memory was the impact on football as I was just discovering the brilliance of midweek games.
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Taylor
No fan of LiveJasmin
Posts: 2941
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posted 30-12-2010 17:19
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Got this for Christmas and have just reached the halfway point. Very, very enjoyable, and while I already knew a fair bit of this stuff, there's usually some kind of fascinating surprise every couple of pages.
The interview with Teddy Goldsmith is one of the funniest things I've read this year. Particularly the bit about his eco-campaigning in East Anglia, with the hippies dressed as Arabs and the hired camel: "I used to harangue the local farmers. 'Have a look at this camel. In twenty-five years' time, this will be the only mode of transport between Framlingham and Saxmundham.'"
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posted 30-01-2011 08:58
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There was a good interview with the author of this book on Dough Henwood's podcast - seems like it has a very similar thesis to Becketts.
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posted 22-03-2011 01:15
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Reading it now, very good.
Never heard of Maplin Sands airport before. It got abandoned because of the oil crisis (1973/4). Was it thought the crisis would go on forever?
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posted 23-03-2011 19:33
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I'd never heard of Jamie Morris and the Westminster Hospital dispute, though I recognised it as being the inspiration for Britannia Hospital.
How bad must the union have been in the past for unskilled hospital staff to be on £44(54?) a week in 1978. You can see why the members would have swung behind Morris. The downside in the longterm, and upside for Mrs Thatcher, was that few of the newly powerful shop stewards had any media training. Morris duly blurted out that the Health Secretary (David Ennalls) in a hospital bed was a "legitimate target for industrial action". As far as I can see, nothing much happened to him when he was in there, and the hospital got emergency supplies in. It didn't look or sound very good, though the 9.6% pay settlement wasn't bad. It's incredible to me that Morris then got attacked as being a sell out by some members.
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Last Edit: 24-03-2011 10:44 By Tubby Isaacs.
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posted 24-03-2011 10:11
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I hadn’t heard of Heathograd either until I read the book, but it does explain why in OTF Gold Paul S was “From: Plastered over the Maplin Sands”.
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posted 24-03-2011 10:43
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I remember the proposed Thames city, but I can't remember its name.
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