1976: An Introduction

I don’t remember a thing about 1976 because I was a baby. This could end up being a major flaw of this project: a complete lack of direct knowledge of the first four of five years of my life. We are not starting strong…

1976 in the UK. It was hot. The Sex Pistols played the Lesser Free Trade Hall. Harold Wilson resigned. NASA released a picture of a rock on Mars that looked a bit like a face. Brotherhood of Man won Eurovision. The Seychelles joined the UN. The first Arthur book was published.

By the way, did you know the first Arthur book was about Arthur considering, and then deciding against having a nose job? And then, in the tv show, he doesn’t have a nose at all. Just nostrils. It seems even fictional aardvarks can’t outrun the beauty standards embedded in capitalism. Makes you want to puke, doesn’t it?

Do you like the Sex Pistols? I liked them for about five minutes in my teens and then started to suspect they might actually have been a bit rubbish. An out-of-tune pub band that accidentally found a world-class frontman. You can’t deny their historical significance though, so I am probably wrong. I guess you had to be there to really understand how mispronouncing the word vacant so that it sounded like a swear felt like the birth of a new world.

And I wasn’t there. Or, I was sort of there, like… nearby… and a baby.

My parents saved me a copy of The Daily Mail from the day I was born. It’s pretty strong stuff. An article about Britain breaking diplomatic relations with Uganda is accompanied by a little racist drawing of Idi Amin. An article about the weightlifting at the Olympics features sentences such as, “Standing up, he looks like a vertical whale”, and, “not something you would readily mistake for Paul Newman”.

Marlene Dietrich, in a book review headlined “Oh… what a drag! She’s equally unavailable to all”, is described as, “the queen of the fairies or the fairy grandmother of the queens”, and also (when wearing a skirt) as having legs that, “drive her other admirers mad with perfectly conventional desire.” Peter Lewis, who wrote that garbage, described himself as “A mixture of saint, sage and silly.” That’s not how I’d describe him. I’d describe him as a not very nice person. I’m beginning to see why John Lydon felt he needed to mispronounce vacant.

There are a lot of memorable lines for one newspaper. “To us, Ulster’s Long Kesh is just that – a place for the bad guys of Northern Ireland.” “A penthouse in Monaco is a luxury – a garden thrown in pushes the price of such a domicile up to £300,000.” “Knowing there’s a quiche, or casserole, in reserve can be a comfort in a crisis.” “Armed guards – some of them women – patrol the trains and the stations.”

I also enjoyed the Diocalm advert: “Whatever commonly causes diarrhoea – over-ripe food at home, sea-food, or germs abroad…”

The Cannock Advertiser from the next day splits its front page between news of a “job shop” opening in the town centre and an update on the Miss Burntwood competition (“For pictures of the latest lovelies, turn to the centre pages.”). More interestingly, from an article inside the paper, I learned that there had once been plans to move the war memorial in the village I grew up in from the ridiculous place it still is to a more sensible place a couple of hundred yards away, but that people were mostly against it.

And if you fancy a go at a cryptic crossword from a copy of The Telegraph that is a couple of days over half-a-century old, print this off and see how you get on. I had a go but couldn’t quite finish it. I can’t get 1 down, 8 down, 9 across, or 13 across. If you can work them out, let me know in the comments, unless they turn out to be offensive in some way, in which case let’s just forget we ever did a crossword together.

So, in conclusion, I was born during a heatwave, at a time when the Daily Mail was full of hatred, in a year that one Labour prime minister resigned to make way for another one. You could buy a fancy apartment in Monaco for £300,000 and a Birds Eye Pizza for 12p. 4 across was a very nice clue.