Doomwatch 73-74 The 70s

# Oh, where have you been, my blue eyed sun?

# Where have you been, my darling young one?

# I've stumbled on the side of the twelve twisty mountains

# I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways

# I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests

# I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans

# I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard

# And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard

# It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall. #

Maybe you were settling down and having kids,

or moving into your first house,

getting a car or getting into trouble.

Or perhaps you were just a glint in your father's eye.

Our intimate memories of the 1970s

have become part of our national history.

These were the years in which our last fantasies

of imperial greatness were finally blown away.

Amid the storms of global upheaval,

splendid isolation had become a thing of the past.

From the boardroom to the bedroom,

we found ourselves at the mercy of change.

For 200 years, Great Britain had been the world's dominant power.

But by the mid 1970s, the winds of global change were gathering force.

And when the storm broke,

all our cosy little certainties would be swept away.

Some places are timeless.

# I lit my purest candle... #

Places of quiet tranquillity, havens of quintessential Englishness.

Places like Great Somerford, tucked away in the Wiltshire countryside.

And here on BBC One, I think it is time to get out and about

to what I think we must call the second capital of England,

out there to Wiltshire, and Great Somerford.

# As he neared, I felt the... #

In 1973, this pretty little backwater

was catapulted into the international limelight.

A local boy had hit the big time.

For by marrying 23-year-old Princess Anne, Captain Mark Phillips

was joining the ranks of British royalty.

# Stories of cold... #

Great Somerford had marked royal occasions before,

the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria,

the Coronation of Edward VII, and in 1953 to mark the Coronation

of the current Queen, the villagers had planted a ceremonial tree.

Although later, sadly, it was eaten by a Billy goat.

This picture postcard village was exactly the kind of place

that a royal bridegroom ought to be riding out from.

A blissful sanctuary

from the unsettling new realities of the 1970s.

'100 miles west of Westminster, and the four bells

'in this small church towers will ring out a wedding peal.'

They're going to ring 5,040 changes at Westminster Abbey.

-How many are you going to get through?

-You're going to have to hear it to believe it!

'Pictures from these cameras will be seen in all five continents.

'The wedding will be televised live to 16 countries.'

# And we'll all live happy ever after

# Yes, we'll all live happy ever after... #

We do do a good royal wedding.

And in 1973, Princess Anne's big day had it all.

Crowds, pageantry,

a radiant young couple.

And a happy family.

This was royalty still untouched by divorce and scandal.

It was almost...almost possible to imagine that Britain was one nation,

one happy family, united on a day of celebration.

But not all the pomp and circumstance in the world

could hide the stark truth of Britain's fall from grace.

And even on the biggest day of the year, the chilling realities

of globalisation were silently seeping in.

A month before the wedding, the Middle East had erupted,

as Israel's Arab neighbours launched a stunning surprise attack.

Both sides consider they're fighting a battle they've got to win.

And so that battle looks as though it could be a long one and a very bitter one.

This wasn't some local scuffle.

This was a conflict that would shake the world.

The oil crisis was the single decisive moment of the 1970s.

It was the tipping point, the catalyst that changed everything,

including our sense of who we were and where we were going.

Furious at the West's support for Israel,

the Arab oil nations announced an eye-watering price rise of 70%.

And in the storm that followed, no country was safe.

They don't seem to know how soon they'll be literally scraping

the bottom of the barrel and the tankers will stop coming in.

Almost overnight, Britain's motorists faced the prospect

of spiralling prices and crippling shortages.

'The era of cheap petrol is over. Today, for £1, the petrol that goes into your tank

'is little more than 1.5 gallons.'

-How much did you buy?

-Ten.

-Ten gallons?

-Yes.

-Have you tried to get petrol anywhere else?

-Yes. Very difficult.

For people who'd grown up after the Second World War,

rising living standards had been a fact of life.

One of the cornerstones of this affluent society had been

cheap motoring for all, and now that was gone.

But this crisis wasn't just about petrol, it was about power.

# You think you've got it all set up... #

Britain had once been the imperial master of the Middle East.

But now, economically speaking, the boot was on the other foot

and it was the Arabs who were doing the kicking.

# ..Hit you too hard

# One of these days... #

The new masters of the universe

were men like the super slick Saudi petroleum minister, Sheikh Yamani.

The era of a very cheap source of energy is gone.

And this is a new era.

Now don't expect the producers to accept something

much below than what the market forces will indicate for their oil.

Doesn't this new massive increase in the price of oil

mean a change in the world balance of power between developing nations

like you, the producers, and us, the developed industrialised nations?

Yes, it will.

'Oil has reshaped the money map of the world.

'By the end of this year alone,

'these countries will have earned £40 billion, £40,000,000,000.

'The noughts dance away almost to infinity.'

# Money, get away... #

This was the moment when globalisation really caught up

with the nation that had ruled the waves.

Almost overnight, people realised that Great Britain was merely

a small and frankly rather weak link in a vast economic chain.

For people who'd grown up believing in an age of imperial glory,

the reality of that impotence was a terribly psychological shock.

'The Arab states in particular see the oil price increase as the end

'of the West's superiority over the rest of the world.'

Visible evidence of this great power shift could be found on the streets of London,

a declining capital already turning into a playground

for the international super rich.

'This Sunday, the Sunday Times looks at the phenomenal wealth

'of Britain's newest millionaires, the oil Sheikhs of Arabia.

'They're buying our hotels, stately homes and flats in Mayfair,

'antiques, jewellery and works of art. They're giving a new meaning to the phrase Buy British.'

-What shall I do with the car, sir?

-Keep it.

'Oil rich customers from the Middle East are investing in chunks

'of British real estate with a gay abandon most people only show

'when they're playing Monopoly.

'With the Arab invasion,

'the old game has undergone a kind of Mecca-morphosis.'

# Money, money, money money... #

This new oil elite weren't just driving up London property prices.

They were hitting Britain where it hurt, in the pocket.

# Money, money, money, money. #

Oil was the fuel on which the affluent society depended.

So when the price went up, the economic effects were devastating.

Anything made with a lot of oil, like say plastics

or artificial fibres, automatically became a lot more expensive.

That pushed up demand for the alternatives, for things like wool or wood or cotton.

And that in turn pushed up the price of things like shoes or furnishings or clothes.

After decades of endless growth,

most people had never known anything like it.

With household essentials soaring in price

and inflation hitting double figures, in the autumn of 1973,

even the ordinary family dinner was becoming a titanic challenge.

'Frozen fish, a staple meal for many families,

'has jumped in price by 15.3%.

'Meat has gone up on average by nearly 22%

'and eggs have jumped by more than 29% since last November.'

It's price increases like these which make up

the 11% rise in the cost of food in the last eight months.

For people on low incomes, inflation was a silent menace.

'Edna and Michael Hargreaves returning home

'from their weekly shopping expedition in Oldham.

'Michael's take home pay as a fireman is only £22 a week.

'Tonight, the family's having tinned stewed steak, mashed potatoes and fresh Brussels sprouts.'

Things just weren't supposed to work this way.

Modern capitalism with a little bit of judicious tweaking of the laws

of supply and demand were supposed to have the answer to everything.

But thanks to what economists now call the Great Inflation of the 1970s,

even the pound in your pocket was losing its value.

And for people who'd just got used to full employment and rising living standards,

the inflation of the 1970s came as a terrible shock,

a cancer, eating away at everything they'd taken for granted.

It looks as if we must now, learn to live with high food prices. How are we going to cope?

Sum up your advice on how to deal with rising food prices.

You can save money just by eating less of everything.

And then you can proceed further and save money by giving up

the idea you've got to have a roast at every meal and do some of these things,

using cheaper foods that are just as good for you.

After 25 years of wanting more, ordinary families were now

tightening their belts and settling for less.

But it was too easy to blame the Arabs because in many ways,

the Great Inflation was also made in Britain.

By the early 1970s, shopping habits had been transformed

and at the heart of the change was a very simple idea - credit.

'With an Access card, you can buy all kinds of things simply buy signing.

'Suppose you buy a TV set for £79,

'you can either pay the whole sum at the end of the month or you can pay

'the minimum, in this case £3, and pay the rest when you want to.'

There's something rather sweet about an advert that has to explain how to use a credit card.

But we lost our innocence soon enough.

And by 1973, the great plastic boom was on.

Today, the 3.5 million people who received Access credit cards through the post

can start off on a cash-less spending spree of up to £350 million.

At the root of the credit explosion wasn't just profligate self indulgence.

The truth is people's expectations had outrun their incomes.

A great gulf was opening up between what you earned and what you wanted.

And for people who'd got used to the idea of owning their own home,

driving their own car, even going on their first foreign holiday,

the answer was simple - borrow now, pay later.

We've got in mind in the near future, a three-piece suite.

The only way we can get one is on the HP.

Every time you pick the paper up, or the television, something's rising.

It's to get what you want now and let the future take care of itself, more or less.

Just pay up and be happy.

Pay up and be happy. This was the mantra of '70s consumerism.

All right, Penny. You have 45 seconds to have a looking, starting from now.

On the conveyor belt tonight, a rocking chair, a carving set...

..a topical home-making candle set...

..a crystal bowl, an electric drill...

BUZZER

There we are. You have 45 seconds to recount your thoughts, starting now.

-A cassette recorder.

-You wanted that, yes.

-Chair.

-A chair.

The carving set, the electric drill...

-A potty.

-Yes, a potty.

-A big tortoise.

-A big tortoise, yes.

-A food mixer...

-BUZZER

Didn't she do well? APPLAUSE

The truth is that in the 1970s,

everybody wanted all of these things.

This was the era in which what you bought was beginning to define who you were.

Britain was falling in love with mass consumerism.

-This is what I'd really love.

-What's that? Oh, the candelabra?

-Is it real silver?

-Yeah, silver plate, yeah.

-Oh, it looks so lovely.

The strained suburbanites of Abigail's Party are wicked caricatures,

but in their spending on something special for the lounge,

they were typical of ordinary families across the land.

-Sue.

-Thank you.

'Access is the latest step that money has taken.'

But like our illusions of empire,

Britain's new spending power was a hollow sham.

After unleashing the biggest boom in history,

the Chancellor, Anthony Barber finally yielded to reason.

Desperate to control inflation, he restricted credit and announced savage cuts in public spending.

Britain was in an economic nightmare. But now came a generous offer of help,

and a bracing dose of the truth from a rather surprising source.

There is no food in Britain, there is no tea and they have no meat and milk.

We are ready to give them banana. We have so many tonnes of bananas.

For Idi Amin, Ugandan dictator and all round rabble-rouser,

the plight of Africa's old colonial master was too good a chance to resist.

British now is in chaos completely.

So these are some of the telegrams that Idi Amin sent personally to Ted Heath.

They make extraordinary reading.

This is the first one, the 14th of December 1973.

"In the past few months," Amin says, "the people of Uganda have been

"following with sorrow the alarming economic crisis in Britain.

"But there is a solution because I have decided

"to contribute 10,000 Ugandan shillings from my personal savings.

"And I'm convinced that many Ugandans will donate generously to this Save Britain Fund."

And this is coming from somebody who is a former British colonial subject.

Nothing could be more humiliating for Ted Heath or the British Government.

No longer British is the master of Africa.

Now, they must kneel down to us.

For two centuries, Britain had been number one.

Thanks to the Empire, British goods, British ideas British culture,

even British sport, had penetrated every corner of the world.

But now the Empire had gone and the world no longer cared.

Once, perhaps, the nation would have pulled together

in the face of the economic blizzard.

But one group of workers saw the global tempest not as a threat,

but as an opportunity. The miners.

The trouble is, old friend, they've had coal too cheap in the past.

Like we had oil too cheap in the past,

the old Arabs are getting educated... We're getting educated.

The oil crisis played right into the miners' hands.

They knew that Britain's energy supplies were now under tremendous pressure.

If they cut off coal production, then the whole country would come grinding to a halt.

The miners had the whip hand and they proposed to use it.

# They carry news that must get through... #

Only two years earlier, the miners had walked out for more money,

plunging Britain into darkness

and forcing Ted Heath's Tory Government into abject retreat.

But now that the oil shock that brought the economy to its knees,

the miners saw their chance.

In the dying days of 1973, they came back for more.

Much more.

They were led by a straight-talking rugby league fan from Wigan,

a miner since his teens, Joe Gormley.

What Joe Gormley wanted for his men was to get rid of the outside loo and the vegetable patch.

What he wanted for them, he said was a Jag at the front of the house,

good schools for the kids and a Mini for the wife to go shopping.

We're out for what we can get and what we should get.

Bristling with confidence, the miners wanted not a 10% deal,

or even 20%, but an inflation busting 35%

and they were in no mood to compromise.

I've never been a militant. But I'm more bloody militant today than I've been in my life!

It was a showdown that divided the nation.

The miners could count on intergalactic backing.

We've got 50 years now since joining the Galactic Federation,

and what have the miners got to show for it?

-Harder work for the same rewards.

-It is a feudal society, Doctor.

-The court is resistant to any change.

-And we have got to step up the production of trisilicon.

While Ted Heath had some rather earthier supporters.

The reason your power workers, your coal miners are unhappy is because of Bolshy bastards like him!

Look at it! Militant! I'll give 'em bloody militant!

On the 12th of November 1973, the miners voted for an overtime ban

that would slash coal production by more than half.

# To Blockbuster... #

The government declares a state of emergency because of the electricity and coal disputes.

The first regulations announced take effect at midnight tomorrow.

As Prime Minister, I want to speak to you simply

and plainly about the grave emergency now facing our country.

We are asking you to cut down to the absolute minimum

the use of electricity in your homes.

..right now!

In terms of comfort, we shall have a harder Christmas than we have known since the War.

Hello and a Merry Christmas. I am Santa Heath.

LAUGHTER As you've just seen, I arrived on my sleigh,

which proves that I am doing my bit to save petrol.

It was a miserable Christmas.

Shops shrouded in darkness, shortages of bread, candles

and paraffin, and every night the television shutting down early.

As TV is closing down at 10:30 at night. It could...

It could come to this.

Match Of The Day! LAUGHTER

Even the Prime Minister was reduced to Christmas shopping by gaslight.

At the top of the charts, Slade tried to rally a beleaguered nation.

# Merry Christmas, everybody's having fun... #

"So here it is, Merry Christmas. Everybody's having fun.

"Look to the future now, it's only just begun."

Not perhaps the most appropriate lyrics.

1974 began with shortages and blackouts.

With Britain on a three-day week and the age of plenty a fading memory,

it was as though ordinary families had been hurled back in time

to days of scarcity and struggle,

when food, heat and light were precious resources.

There's something amiss. Something strangely amiss.

Stop rolling your eyes and pull yourself together.

Many people remembered the last age of austerity, during the Second World War.

When these things, petrol ration books,

were distributed to cope with the expected shortages, it must have seemed like a bad case of deja vu.

But this time, one thing was missing, the Dunkirk spirit.

This time, we couldn't blame the Germans.

The only people we had to blame were ourselves.

It's unconstitutional, it's undemocratic, it's against everything we're fighting for.

-I intend to see my MP at once.

-I wouldn't worry, sir.

You'll just have to knuckle down. After all...it is for your own good.

15 to 20% of production lost, gross pay down by 11%.

This will be worse than the '30s if it were to continue for any long length of time.

The sunny optimism of the affluent '60s had long since faded.

The headlines were full of doom and gloom.

There were black clouds overhead.

The future seemed bleaker than ever.

Not just for the economy, but for planet Earth itself.

Just three years earlier, American astronauts had sent back

the first pictures of Earth from space.

These stunning images captured the fragile beauty of our common home,

a precious crucible of life in the dead vastness of space.

And around the world, these pictures came to symbolise an idea

that would challenge the complacent assumptions of industrial society.

Across the Western world, a new breed of intellectuals

was advancing radical visions of a very different future.

The critical thing is what you're doing to the planet's life support systems.

If we rack them up, we won't get anywhere.

So the picture is really a rather grim one.

The coming economic apocalypse, they argued,

was the least of our worries because what was at stake was nothing less

than the future of the planet itself.

'The city, greedy for growth, spreading upwards and outwards,

'but every day less of nature.

'Every day, more of Man.

'This is the shadow of progress.'

Through heavy industry and our heedless pursuit of consumer comforts,

we were destroying the fragile ecology of Spaceship Earth.

The plight of our own green and pleasant land told the story.

For the last quarter of a century, great swathes of the British countryside

had been smothered by concrete and tarmac.

This was the heavy price we paid for progress.

Nothing captured the anxieties of the emerging ecological movement

better than the BBC series Doom Watch.

Every week, a crack team of scientists

battled man-made threats the natural world.

From nuclear Armageddon to a plastic eating virus

that could munch its way through an aircraft.

Now the growth threat isn't constant, it's in decline, it shows...

An exponential rise.

If only 14 got out?

It'd go through the city like a bush fire.

'Doom Watch attracted 12 million viewers,

'and even provoked calls for a Doom Watch Parliamentary committee

'to investigate environmental affairs.'

With Britain's major parties still committed to economic growth,

perhaps it was time for a new political organisation.

'And it was here, in industrial Coventry

'that Britain's first Green party was born.'

Founded by disgruntled Tory activists,

and of all things, an estate agent,

the People Party first came to prominence in early 1973.

And this is a copy of its first advert,

which was put in the classifieds section

of the Coventry evening Telegraph.

"Are you sincerely concerned about pollution, conservation,

"population, survival, ecology, and environment generally?",

it says.

"People want positive action now,

"in response to the doom watches forecasts."

The people party were nothing if not radical,

they were asking us to use less energy,

spend less money,

even have fewer children.

They knew their policies weren't exactly crowd-pleasers,

as one of them put it, it's a bit like asking people of Coventry

to vote for a permanent recession.

The candidate doesn't get his loudspeakers.

With such doom laden message,

perhaps it was not surprising that the people party

didn't win much electoral support.

But outside the political arena, a home-made revolution was underway.

What we should be doing is working with the job of life itself.

I quit work, and we become

as damn near self-sufficient as possible.

-Tom?

-Yes.

Did you wash your hands after messing about with those chickens?

'The good life charts the process of Tom and Barbara Good,

'a middle-class couple who leave the rat race

'for a life of self-sufficiency,

'with their neighbours watching in horror from over the garden fence.'

Jerry?

Jerry?

Why is Barbara ruining a perfectly good greenhouse?

-They're converting it, they're going to keep chickens.

-Chickens?

Does the residents' association know about this?

I really don't know.

Well, they should. This whole thing is getting entirely out of hand.

It's like living next door to gypsies.

Tom and Barbara's handknitted enthusiasm

didn't arrive fresh from the writers imagination.

It was based on the lifestyle choices of thousands of people

up and down the country,

who'd been inspired to embrace a life of self-sufficiency.

We try to grow as many of our own vegetables as possible,

and I do dressmaking, knitting,

so I make most of the children's clothes.

So, you might have planted your vegetable patch,

but what about the messier aspects of the self-sufficient life?

This book is unbelievable,

the most humane way to castrate a goat is to use rubber rings.

Put on with an elastrator

that you can buy from any agricultural supplier.

This illustrated handbook was a, sort of, Joy of Sex

for the lentil mongering classes.

John Seymour's book, the Complete Self-Sufficiency,

was one of the more unlikely bestsellers of the 1970s.

Probably not all readers religiously followed its advice,

on how to train your land or slaughter your pigs.

But it's true appeal lay elsewhere,

at a time of enormous economic disarray,

with food prices heading through the roof,

this book was your insurance policy.

And if things got really tough,

it was your handbook for survival.

Today, self-sufficiency sounds terribly woolly and well-meaning.

But amid the turmoil of the 1970s,

its advocates saw it as hard-headed preparation

for an apocalyptic future,

in which millions would have to flee the city's and fend for themselves.

And yet the most enduring environmental message of the era

was altogether more cuddly.

Wandering across Wimbledon Common,

making good use of the things that they found,

the Wombles were pioneers of recycling.

40 years on, we're all Wombles now.

# Underground, overground, wombling free...#

Put a little nailing, oh.

That's the idea. That's the idea.

Look at that, look at that.

I think I should have the first sit down in the new rocking chair

because, because I'm tired, and I was the Womble who was tired.

Tyre-d.

Ha ha, T-Y-R-E-D.

# The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we. #

With the future of the planet at stake,

it was little wonder that a deep sense of pessimism

was seeping into British life.

And for all those who worried about economic decline,

there were many more terrified that morally,

the country was going to the dogs.

Do you believe in birth control?

Yes.

Premarital sex?

Do I believe in it?

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

Do you believe in birth control?

Yes, I do.

For both men and women, premarital sex?

Yes, irrespective of religion.

We often think of the 1960s as the high point of sexual liberation,

and endless orgy in the summer sunshine of swinging London.

But of course, the swinging 60s only actually happened to about 14 people

in the few privileged enclaves.

For ordinary men and women, it was only in the 1970s

that the great tectonic plates of sexual liberation

really began to shift.

Sex, once banished beneath the bed clothes,

by the early 1970s, it had burst out in to the open.

And at the cutting edge of this cultural revolution

was a brazen, booming business,

imported from that notorious den of iniquity, continental Europe.

Porn.

The heart of the British sex industry, here in the seedy

alleyways of Soho, boasted a total of 54 sex shops,

39 cinema clubs, 16 strip and peep shows,

and 12 licensed massage parlours.

Most of them open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

During the 1960s, many of Britain's neighbours embraced the new sexual frankness

with unsettling enthusiasm.

And now, extravagantly explicit material from red light Amsterdam

and free-thinking Copenhagen

had found its way to buttoned up Britain.

Your export sales, I gather, are booming?

Last year we had a total sale of more than 20 million Danish krone,

that will be about one million pounds.

In the 70s there was a sense of a kind of wildness,

a free for all, even,

with sex breaking out from beyond its boundaries,

and invading the kind of public spaces

from which it had been previously absent.

The influx of XXX rated European pornography

transformed the British market.

In this full frontal battle for customers, coy was out,

explicit was in.

Even old fashioned, bawdy humour was becoming crassly obscene.

With cinema audiences in free fall,

the British film industry created a whole new genre,

the 70s sex comedy.

The French had the exotic eroticism of Emmanuelle.

We had spying on school girls in the shower.

'Some of the things you see are quite an education.

'Blimey, they're big for their age.

'They're also big for my age.'

'Confessions of a window cleaner,

'the lowest point in British cinema history,

'and, embarrassingly, the highest grossing film of 1974.'

'Even prime time family entertainment

'was splattered with sexual references.'

You're a member of the permissive society,

you're supposed to know where the erogenous regions are.

It's here, the Mecca of a permissive society.

-Where?

-Well, right here in suburbia.

Perhaps I should be more... permissive?

No.

No, no.

And say hello to Lesley Phillips,

his libido unleashed in this nominally comic effort.

Do you think I ought to get my bosom lifted?

LAUGHTER

What, again?

For people who had been brought up in an older, more conservative moral regime,

all of this was profoundly shocking.

It was as though an entire moral order was falling apart.

This is our message!

This is the light of our Festival of Light, praise the Lord.

'Gathered under the banner of the Festival of Light,

'thousands marched to demonstrate their outrage.

'This was the voice of the traditionalist, Christian counterrevolution.'

The whole world has a problem of moral pollution,

and once again, Britain has the chance today

to give leadership to the whole world.

'Mary Whitehouse, the Shropshire schoolmistress,

'was determined to clean up filth wherever she found it.

'And the reliably provocative European film industry

'gave her something to really complain about.'

In January 1973, a team of censors,

the British Board of Film Classification,

sat down to watch a film called last Tango in Paris.

It was to prove one of the most controversial pictures

in British cinema history.

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci,

Last Tango is classic 70s arthouse erotica.

Charting the intense relationship

between Marlon Brando's shabby widower,

and a young Parisienne, half his age.

It's a bleak, misanthropic vision,

punctuated by loveless, sadomasochistic sex.

So, it gave the censors plenty to think about.

This is the file in which we have the original examiners report

from 9 January, 1973.

They did have a few problems,

"reel four, the butter and buggery scene,

we have had nothing like this passed." It says.

And "reel five, a scene in which Brando commands Jan

"to trim her nails and put her fingers up his..."

Yeah, um...

The censors gave Last Tango an X certificate.

But now, for a bit more fuss about the film all the fuss is about,

Last Tango in Paris.

One London cinema took £600,000 during its year long run.

Since the film's release, 18 months ago,

more than a million British cinema goers have seen the film.

Eroticism, as Andre Malraux has said,

is the means by which man escapes from his era,

and ours, God knows, is an era to escape from.

But the film generated a flood of complaints.

You've seen it, what do you think of it?

Ah, not much.

Was it as bad as you thought it was going to be?

Just about, yes.

Last Tango was banned by 17 local councils,

indeed, no other film has ever provoked as many letters

to the film censors.

But not everybody was against it, so, here's a letter.

"Congratulations on your decision about the film Last Tango.

"I never usually write letters,

"perhaps I'm one of the silent majority,

"but I'm very angry and somewhat frightened

"by the pressure of people like Mary Whitehouse

"and the Festival of Light.

"Is this a free society or not?",

says this man.

Now, this...this one is a bit different.

"I'm just an ordinary house wife", it begins.

"I speak for thousands more like me when I say,

"the majority of us have had as much as we are going to take

"of all the sex filth that is being allowed to be shown

"on our television.

"Why should a few depraved perverts,

"and most of them from other countries,

"be allowed to display sex and love in the most disgusting manner?

"And you, a British citizen, giving way to a rotten Italian."

Tut, tut.

I suppose what you get from all these letters

is a real sense of the vigour and contentiousness of the debate.

This wasn't a reasoned argument between two sides

that were prepared to listen to one another.

This was an argument between, I suppose, an old Britain

based on conservative moral values and faith and tradition and so on,

and a new Britain, based on the individual exercise of personal choice.

And, in many ways, that confrontation,

is the key to the whole decade.

The Festival of Light campaigners battled on,

urging the Government to crack down on the plague of pornography.

But by February 1974,

Edward Heath was locked in a very different battle,

in which his political survival was at stake.

Weeks of talks between the miners and the government had got nowhere.

And now, the miners raised the stakes,

as their overtime ban became an all-out strike.

We're not going to accept pennies,

well, my hope is, we're not going to accept pennies this time.

We've got to win it, haven't we?

If he beats us, what chance have other people?

They've no chance whatsoever.

Two years earlier, Ted Heath had lost the first round to the miners.

But this time, he appealed to the country.

It's time now for the ballot that really counts,

it counts because the government you'll return

will have the strength of your confidence

to tackle the new problems that face us.

We shall need that strength to cope with a world in crisis.

But, let's face it, the miners aren't the only ones

who spend most of their lives in the dark,

half the time I don't know what's going on either.

The shock general election was set for the last day of February.

The papers called it the crisis election.

And never had one been fought under grimmer circumstances.

As the Daily Mail put it,

it was "the strangest, most exciting,

"and most wide-open election for decades."

For Ted Heath, the choice was simple,

the elected government or the union militants.

The British people, he said, must decide. Who governs?

These men want to bring down the elected government,

not just this government, but any government, and control events.

Britain's yachting Prime Minister

thought this was an election about union power.

But sailor Ted had misread the political wind.

It soon became clear that this was really an election

about something rather closer to ordinary families' hearts.

In crucial marginal seats, like Falmouth in Cornwall,

the great inflation was eating away

at the prosperity that people had got so used to,

and most local voters were only interested in one issue,

runaway prices.

I've been in the shop this morning, yesterday I went in the same shop,

it was seven and a half for a tin of tomatoes, they've gone to ten and a half,

they were doing them like that as we walked in this morning.

That's in a day's time.

I had a pensioner come in this morning,

she wanted a bar of household soap.

I said, "Sorry, it's up tuppence on last time."

She said, "My mother always used to say to me

"that poverty was no excuse for being dirty,

"but I've got second thoughts now."

You try and plan a week ahead,

but next week the prices are completely different

from what you budgeted for last week,

so it's impossible to deal with intelligently.

It's a ridiculous situation.

It's costing me a fortune in new price tickets every week

just re-marking everything.

Prices. They've come smack into the middle of the election

with a bang tonight.

In just four years, the price of eggs, cheese, and beef

had almost doubled.

In 1970, if you'd spent nine pence,

you'd have been able to buy this nice, big, white loaf.

By 1974, it would have bought you barely half a loaf.

MUSIC: "Devil Gate Drive" by Suzi Quatro

At the end of February, Suzi Quatro went to number one,

and an anxious Britain went to the polls.

In Falmouth, the Tories just clung on,

but late that night from the state-of-the-art,

and tastefully beige BBC election set,

came news of an historic muddle.

And we are now, from the computer, almost certain

that neither Conservative nor Labour

will get enough seats to form a government.

Accordingly, the Liberals and other parties

are almost certain, according to the computer at this stage,

to be holding the balance in the middle.

And when Heath failed to do a deal with the Liberals,

Labour's Harold Wilson returned as a minority prime minister.

Heath had asked the British people, who governs?

And the nation had answered, not you.

And while Heath's political career sank beneath the ocean waves,

Wilson gave the miners what they wanted,

a pay rise worth a cool £110 million.

In October 1974, Wilson called a second election,

and won a tiny majority,

but he had inherited a whole heap of problems,

from record borrowing and soaring inflation,

to the decade's most dreadful dilemma,

the bleeding sore of Northern Ireland.

Since the beginning of the decade,

Republican paramilitaries, loyalist vigilantes,

and the British Army

had been fighting a bloody battle

to control the streets of Northern Ireland.

How is it that over 1,000 people have died in a part of the United Kingdom

that, five years ago, appears no more important to the British government

than London taxicabs?

Harold Wilson was determined to come up with a solution.

And buried in these recently declassified government documents

is the story of his attempts to find one.

What all these top-secret documents show

was just how far the Wilson government was prepared to go

to find a solution to the problems of Northern Ireland.

So, for instance, they talked about redrawing the border,

about giving Catholic areas to the Republic.

The talked about negotiating openly with the paramilitaries,

and indeed, they had already secretly started talking to the IRA.

They discussed getting the United Nations involved to run

the province themselves.

And above all, Wilson contemplated what he called the doomsday scenario,

in which Britain would just unilaterally get out,

and Northern Ireland would be left to sink or swim.

To many British observers, the conflict in Northern Ireland

seemed an unfathomable relic of ancient history.

But after years of bloodshed, with no end in sight,

the Republican IRA decided to copy the Marxist terror groups

wreaking havoc in continental Europe.

It was time, they thought,

to take their struggle across the water,

from the killing grounds of Belfast

to the quiet streets of middle England.

On 17 November 1974, the Provisional IRA spokesman,

David O'Connell, gave an interview to British television.

Let me make this point,

for five years the British government

has had his forces waging a campaign of terror,

not just on the IRA, but on the people of Ireland.

What have we got from the British public? From the British people?

Total indifference, they can wash their hands.

We said last week in a statement

that the British government and the British people must realise

that because of the terror they're waging in Ireland,

they will suffer the consequences.

Four days later in two Birmingham pubs,

those consequences became devastatingly clear.

It was payday, and in the city centre, The Tavern in the Town

and the Mulberry Bush were packed with young drinkers.

That dreadful night, 21 people were killed

and nearly 200 injured by the bombs of the IRA.

I was just standing with about four friends,

and there was a flash and a blast

which seemed to, you know, just go on and on.

It was like a nightmare,

I was under this rubble and I was trying to get out,

and I thought I'd be trapped there, my legs were trapped.

What were you thinking at the time?

I was just thinking, you know, God help us.

The victims weren't policemen or soldiers,

they were ordinary young men and women

on an ordinary night out.

In the immediate aftermath,

the public reaction was horror and fury.

Do you want to see the death penalty come back altogether?

Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.

I think it's just really necessary for terrorism at the moment.

After the horror of Birmingham,

public opinion rallied against the bombers of the IRA.

Wilson's doomsday scenario disappeared into the filing cabinet,

and the war went on.

But Birmingham was also a terrifying reminder

that nowhere in Britain was safe

from the violence that had engulfed Northern Ireland.

As one commentator put it,

it was as though the vanguard of anarchy was loose in the world.

Britain had entered a new age of insecurity,

when even going for a quiet pint could get you killed.

That terrible day in November 1974

had raised the spectre of the international terrorist,

and 40 years on, we still live in the bomber's shadow.

# Oh, it's 12 o'clock

# On the old grey wall

# Yet another year

# 75 is here... #

As the clocks tick down to 1975,

the harsh truth was sinking in

that the British people were no longer masters of their own destiny.

Our island fortress had been overwhelmed

by the tempestuous realities of a changing world.

And nothing in our economy, in our politics,

or our culture would be the same again.

As the British people dusted themselves off and looked around,

they found themselves in a strange and unsettling new landscape.

Much of what they'd taken for granted had been simply swept away.

A new Britain, edgier, more anxious,

and more ambitious was at hand.

Next time, belligerent.

Bolshy.

Bust.

And bursting with ideas.

Britain hits the mid-'70s.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd