Nixon Richard Milhous - Strange days indeed: the golden age of paranoia

I feel I am living in a dream world at the moment.

Diary entry by Tony Benn MP, 17 January 1973

This is a book about that most distant of times, the day before yesterday. I discovered for myself just how remote the Seventies are when, in 2006, I wrote a TV drama about Harold Wilsons last government, covering the period from 1974 to 1976. Although the thirtysomething producer liked the script, she found many of the allusions baffling. What was a prices and incomes policy? Or a balance of payments crisis? These appeared almost daily in British headlines during the 1970s; only a generation later, they were as incomprehensible as Babylonic cuneiform. One scene that the producer queried had Wilson using a public payphone in Oxford to ring an aide. When I pointed out that it actually happened, she conceded that this might be so, but nevertheless insisted that viewers under the age of forty would be unable to believe that the Prime Minister had no mobile phone. The scene was deleted.

To those of us who lived through that era of polyester, platform shoes and power cuts, one thing seemed certain: no one would ever wish to revisit it. As Christopher Booker wrote in The Seventies, an end-of-term report published in 1980, it was a decade of unending hard slog through the quicksands hardly a time which in years to come is likely to inspire us with an overpowering sense of nostalgia For the next quarter-century or so this prediction was largely fulfilled, apart from a few eccentric gestures such as Bill Clintons adoption of Dont Stop Thinking About Tomorrow by Fleetwood Mac as his theme tune in the 1992 presidential election, or occasional ironic tributes to lava lamps or tank tops, Burt Reynoldss toupee or Roger Moores lapels so naff theyre cool, even if they pong a bit. When people did stop thinking about tomorrow their minds usually strayed back to the Sixties, or perhaps to the Second World War; anywhere but the day before yesterday. The pattern had been set in 1979, when the decade was brought to a juddering halt by the Iranian revolution and the election of Margaret Thatcher: the new Islamic fundamentalists wanted to turn the clock back about 1,500 years; the market fundamentalists atavistic project, only slightly less ambitious, was to re-establish the Victorian values of self-help, private philanthropy and laissez faire. On one point the Imam and the grocers daughter would certainly have agreed: the clock must never be turned back to the Seventies.

Recently, however, the decade that time forgot has been fished out of the sewer, hosed down and found to be not so whiffy after all. The subtitle of Howard Souness Seventies: The Sights, Sounds and Ideas of a Brilliant Decade (2006) speaks for itself: the book is a breathless celebration of the decades greatest songs, sitcoms and films. Very enjoyable it is, too: so long as you keep the spotlight on David Bowie and the Clash, The Godfather and Fawlty Towers, while leaving much of the social and political backdrop in shadow, you can almost persuade readers to murmur Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive But hang on a moment. Bowies cocaine-fuelled Nietzschean ramblings in 1976 prompted the formation of Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League. (As I see it, I am the only alternative for the premier in England, he drawled. I believe Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. Suddenly that line in one of his songs about making way for a Homo superior acquired a creepy new resonance.) Two years later I watched the Clash performing at a huge Rock Against Racism carnival in Victoria Park, in the East End of London, and urging British youths not to heed Bowies siren call: the bands angry fervour, like their name, was a direct reaction to the godawfulness of Britain in the 1970s. And whats the message of The Godfather? Dont trust police and judges. Theyre corrupt: we should know, we corrupted them. Even Fawlty Towers, one of the most perfectly conceived and enduringly hilarious TV comedies, is hardly innocent fun. Most of the laughs come from watching a man, driven beyond exasperation, who teeters constantly on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

Hardly a time which in years to come is likely to inspire us with an overpowering sense of nostalgia, Christopher Booker wrote. Little did he know. Mildly incredulous critical eyebrows were raised in 1999 at the launch of Mamma Mia!, a stage show of ABBA hits; it has been running ever since (as has a similarly plotless musical cobbled together around songs by Queen), and the film version went on to conquer the world. Like Souness book, these presented a feel-good, poptastic view of the decade that wouldnt frighten the coach parties. More remarkable, perhaps, was the tremendous popular appeal of Life on Mars (named after the David Bowie song), a BBC television drama of 2006 based on the high concept that a Manchester detective inspector, Sam Tyler, is transported back to 1973, an age when the abbreviation PC had nothing to do with political correctness or personal computers. (When he demands a PC terminal, a puzzled colleague replies: What, you want a constable in here? Theres similar bafflement when Tyler says he needs his mobile: Your mobile what?) Tylers the very model of a modern DI who believes in doing things by the book, whereas his new guvnor, DCI Gene Hunt, is a rough-hewn, hard-drinking, heavy-smoking Neanderthal who prowls the city like a sheriff in the Wild West, driven by only one imperative: lock up the bad guys. Tylers initial reaction to Hunt and his kipper-tied colleagues evokes another line from Bowies title song: Oh man, look at those cavemen go

Each episode of Life on Mars began with a voice-over from the time-travelling cop: My name is Sam Tyler. I had an accident and I woke up in 1973. Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time? Whatevers happened, its like Ive landed on a different planet. Yet the most striking thing about this rough-hewn planet was how attractive it began to seem: given the choice between harsh reality in 1973 and virtual reality today, many viewers and critics sided with DCI Gene Hunt. So, eventually, did Tyler himself: having spent most of the first series yearning to go home he chose to stay in the Seventies after all, heading off to the pub with Hunt for a celebratory pint or three of Watneys Red Barrel. And, no doubt, a packet or two of cigarettes: incredible though it will seem to future generations, in those days you could smoke pretty well continuously throughout the day on the bus or train to work, at your desk in the office, and then in the pub or cinema afterwards. I have an abiding memory from the late Seventies of my first encounter with a puppyish young barrister named Tony Blair, who turned up at the New Statesman offering a short article about a High Court judgment and then accompanied me to our local pub in High Holborn, where he bought a packet of fags and lit up. Cherie Booth later ordered him to kick the habit as a precondition for marrying her; in 2006, as prime minister, he avenged himself by banning smoking in all public buildings. Having a ciggy in the saloon bar is now as unthinkable as driving without a seatbelt. But then the Seventies themselves are now largely unimaginable and irrecoverable, at least for students or journalists whose only source is the Internet: the decade has fallen down a pre-digital memory hole.

What do I mean by the Seventies? Dont believe the calendar: decades have no fixed duration. What many of us think of as the Sixties a fizzy cocktail of protest and pop music, pot and the Pill started in Britain three years behind schedule, sometime, as Philip Larkin observed, between the end of the