Like the Sixties didn't happen.....
Posted by Chris G on 23 November 2008 - 10:56am.
When did Britain stop being Grey (or if you will gray)? I only ask as the first sentence of last night "kings of glam" doc on BBC2 last night was along the lines of "In the early 70's Britain was a gray dull country but that was all about to change".
Now did I miss another meeting as I thought the sixties had banished greyness from these shores at least that's what the same programme makers we telling us well last week! I'm afraid it didn't encourage me to watch anymore.
Looking out the window this morning you hard pressed to imagine that Britain was ever colourful but that's a different story.
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One thing I'm prepared to bet
The person who wrote that line had no pubic hair at the time of the events described.
Britain was grey until...
...the 1980's. For those of us outside the 'hip 100' in London, the 60s was unremittingly grim but with a sense of possibilities - the white heat of technology, the final end of post war austerity, BBC2, Sunday colour supplements, heart transplants. Odd though it may seem for those whos knowledge of the 60s has been gained from books and documentaries - we didn't all spend the early 60s down the Flamingo listening to Georgie Fame then the late 60s floating into UFO to see the Floyd.
The 70s was grimmer as we realised that this was the future promised us in the 60s and it was filled with crap cars, crap food, crap economy, three months to get a telephone installed, power cuts, strikes, three-day week.
As Mr Valparaiso said in another thread, it was time of cultural blooming and possibilities but, for most people, everyday life was grey. Of course, we didn't know that at the time :-)
With you most of the way,
except for the cryptic 'until the 1980s'.
I don't recall anything colourful about the 1980s except the language shouted at the television screen as the political classes tore each other to shreds, gleefully watched and lampooned by Luck & Flaw, and we drowned a thousand conscripted teenage Argentinians to invoke the spirit of Winston and make ourselves feel Great again. For a week. The 1980s was a f*cking awful decade too.
but at least the 80s...
...were COLOURFUL
Day-glo eighties
How can you say the eighties weren't colourful? Pop stars paraded around in fancy dress, everything seemed to be garishly day glo, hairstyles grew increasingly bizarre. It was a brilliant, but still much maligned decade, summed-up rather well by Saint Etienne in a song called Fake 88.
Thing is. . .
Most people didn't dress like pop stars. The Eighties was when black was the new black for the first time. Black pencil skirts with black stockings with hideous swirly patterns stuck all over them (you can tell I know a lot about fashion, eh?), black toreador jackets with heavy-duty Oakland Raiders-endorsed shoulder pads, all set off with silver and diamonte - never gold - bling (although it wasn't called that then; it was "bisouterie" - unnecessary French was the new black too)... and that was just the blokes.
I spent most of the 1980s...
...dressed in clothes that made me look like a a cross between Colin Baker in Doctor Who and the generic presenter of a show aimed at pre-school children. Mind you I was only seven years old when the decade started. By the end of it I had adopted an all-black wardrobe, which I felt better reflected my complex and unfathomable inner torment.
Thanks to the internet we know that, in 2006, the lead singer of Coast to Coast (mentioned in Fake 88) had taken a break from doing the Hucklebuck (very much a young man's dance. John Sergeant would never have made it past the wiggling like a snake bit) and was delivering solid fuel for Aga cookers.
I'm tired of the endlessly
I'm tired of the endlessly recycled received wisdom about decades. It's a dreary, deceitful shorthand that's infiltrated every lazily researched pop culture documentary. The 70s in particular now seems fixed as some dismal Soviet archipelago of slate-grey skies, unburied corpses and general misery, a decade long winter of discontent lanced by the arrival of punk. But I was a kid then and I remember it as a circus of primary colours, not crushing monochrome gloom. It was Chewits and ELO and the sunbaked summer of 76. It was glitterballs and Grease and The Muppet Show. It was Tom Baker's scarf as much as it was trade unionists in charcoal macs. But our memories are now made to feel as faded and as politically charged as the colour-drained film stock they dredge up for these retrospectives, where the 70s are only allowed to exist as a hangover to the 60s or a long dark night of the soul before the 80s party. Enough!
Well put.
http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/guy-peellaert-man-who-invented-roc...
Most of my memories of the 70's
are coloured brown and orange. And I'm sure it wasn't just my parents who bought such furnishings and wallpapers.
Heh...
...Yesterday I was ordering some new sofas and had to dissuade Mrs Stimpy from choosing a nice 1970's brown fabric - it just brought back too many bad memories
Purple and orange, surely?
I seem to remember most of the rubbish student flats I either lived in or looked at as possibilities to live in at the time had orange or purple walls, often in the same room. Dunno about brown, that sounds almost tasteful.
Until about 15 years ago,
we had one of those living room chairs that looks like it was scooped out of an enormous orange boiled egg.
The thing was made of plastic and covered with an industrial material designed to endure nuclear blasts. I think it went in a skip when we moved to our current pile.
Bloody things are now 'collectable', and sell in shops like "I Saw You Coming" for enough to pay for a new Ford Mondeo. Sigh.
No-one who lived through 1966...
..even those of us who were mere kids in the provinces, can deny that everything exploded then. Even through a black and white cathode tube.
The clothes may have been colourful in the 80s, but the cynicism and lack of spirit was pure monochrome.
You are UTTERLY correct.
I can still feel the seismic shift in optimism that coursed through my 11 year old veins as Martin Peters hammered home the hat trick.
Martin?
Peters?
Or am I missing a joke?
Last goal, world cup Fraser....
..quite big at the time.
Last goal, world cup final, Geoff Hurst
Now, I know bugger all about football
but I'm fairly certain Geoff Hurst got the hat trick, not Martin Peters.
You're right, of course.
'Twas Geoff.
Was that the one ...
... which was offside, the one which never crossed the line or the one which should have been disallowed bacause, as has been observed, there wre 'people on the pitch'?
Hear Hear
Whatever about the colours there were definitely hometown refs back in 66 and they haven't just emerged from Old Trafford in recent years.
Doesn't it depend on what you were doing?
I was at school in the 70s, lived in a happy family and loved it all. I was at Uni in the early 80s and adored that. I was in the IT boom in the mid/late 80s and loved that. None of it was grey.
Not sure about 2009 mind you. With mortgage, high fixed outgoings, career insecurity, 3 kids to clothe and feed.... things are gonna be tough and no mistake.
Reminds me of an old Billy Joel number
(Not the definitive version from Songs in the Attic, but the closest I could find)
Moved
Sorry - moved comment