vivid brilliantly researched.. . Turner may be an anorak but he is an acutely intelligent anorak Francis Wheen New Statesman a masterful work of social history.. .told with much wit Roger Lewis Mail on Sunday The 1970s. Strikes power-cuts the three-day week inflation Paki-bashing & the dead left unburied. Or from another perspective a period dominated by Morecambe & Wise glam rock detective fiction club football Get Carter The Sweeney & The Good Life. It was the best of times & the worst of times. Wealth inequality was at a record low but industrial disruption was reached a record high. These were the glory years of Doctor Who & Coronation Street but the darkest days of the Northern Ireland conflict. In 1978 London Weekend Television launched a new series The South Bank Show announcing that it would cover the consumed arts
- cinema rock paperbacks & even television. It was an acknowledgement that if you wanted to understand modern Britain you had to look at popular culture. Crisis? What Crisis? follows that lead telling the story of Britain in the 1970s through the soaps & sitcoms the music & movies the fiction fashion & sport of the time. & it adds one crucial ingredient: politics considered as one of the consumed arts. This is not an insiders account of the crises that wracked Britain in that decade. Rather it is a viewers history a world seen through the eyes of the mass media in which Enoch Powell Margaret Thatcher & Tony Benn jostle for space with David Bowie Hilda Ogden & Margo Leadbetter. Alwyn W. Turner is the author of The Biba Experience & Cult Rock Posters. He lives in London. www.alwynwturner.com