The 1970's Called They Want Lady Gaga Back

They say that if you remember the 1960’s you weren’t really there. If only we could say the same thing about the 1970’s, a decade in which I never ever want to be able to remember. The 70’s, too me, wasn’t so much the Dawning of The Age of Aquarius; it was far more like the Morning after the Night Before, which left you with a terribly sore head, a bad taste in your mouth and abject feelings of shame and utter degradation. The 1970’s was quite simply, the decade that taste forgot!
Take fashion for instance. Fashion in the 70’s was notoriously bad. Clothes seemed to have been designed by people who were designed by people who were both colour blind and had very poor size perception. Tank tops, tie-dye t-shirts, cheese cloth shirts and bell bottomed trousers left us looking like a nation of badly dressed clowns. Levi’s were the worst culprits; they made those massively flared bell bottoms called, ‘The Big Bells’. Huge flares that could sweep a whole pavement as you walked down the street. (A design feature that came in handy during the many bin collector strikes of the era, where Britain was buried under tons of rubbish.)
Hair styles too, were also a bit random. No-one seemed to have any particular style apart from big, misshapen and floppy. It was like hairdressers of the 1970’s were permanently stoned, because everyone walked about as if they were sporting an Art Garfunkel wig.
Music was also a sad affair. Okay, there were a lot of tremendous bands and fantastic songs around in this decade, but for every legendary act like Led Zeppelin there were about ten really crap groups like
Showaddywaddy, The Osmonds, The Bay City Rollers and Boney M. No wonder so many rock stars choked to death on their vomit in the 70’s, so sick were they of working their butts off creating these modern masterpieces of intricate depth and tangible emotion, while the buying public pissed on their parade by purchasing mince like ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ and ‘Ra Ra Rasputin, Russia’s Greatest Love Machine’!
Much the same could be said about television. For every great programme like ‘Fawlty Towers’ or ‘The Sweeney’ you had hundreds of hours of dire viewing. During peak time hours, the three television channels that existed at that time, BBC1, 2, and ITV, would air programmes liked ‘Give us a Clue’, (which unbelievably happened to be televised bloody charades!) ‘One Man and his Dog’, (Televised sheep dog trials!) and if that wasn’t riveting enough, BBC1 had a weekly consumer programme every Sunday night called, ‘That’s Life’ which basically, as far as I could tell, consisted of viewers sending in freakish vegetables which looked like men’s private parts. (Which annoyed me personally as I’ve got private parts that look very much like freakish vegetables.

So starved were we of any real entertainment, the British public used to sit glued to the TV watching these ridiculous shows. Viewing figures were always between twenty million and thirty million mugs tuning in. It was kind of like some kind of bizarre religious observance. My theory is that we were so bored, the primitive part of our brains were starting to kick in. (Similar to cavemen in prehistoric times, who used to sit transfixed by the dazzling flames of cave fires and those morons who watch X-factor!) So why did I myself, watch television in the 70’s? Well, on the most part I watched it in hope really. Hope that they would some day broadcast some good ol’ fashioned violence or the merest hint of nudity. (What 1970’s telly really missed in my opinion, was a programme called ‘International Naked Mud Wrestling’.)
But not all popular culture in this wacky era was rubbish. There was one medium that came out on top this decade and that medium was cinema. Not only were films in the 70’s highly original, ground breaking and imaginative, they were also highly entertaining too. You had wonderful horror flicks like, ‘The Exorcist’ and ‘The Omen’. Great comedies such as ‘Young Frankenstein’ and ‘Take the Money and Run’, and fantastic war movies like, ‘The Deerhunter’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’. Drama like One Flew Over  The Cuckoo's Nest, Papillon, The French Connection and China Town. Cinematic film in the 1970’s was a joy to behold. (About the only blot on the landscape for 70’s cinema was that one of the biggest box office stars of the day was wobble voiced, torch song Diva, Barbra Streisand. A female impersonator look-a-like, who did a great impression of a Clydesdale.)
So to sum it all up in a nut shell, the 1970’s was a decade of terrible fashion, god awful music and crap telly. Throw in the energy crisis, the rise of terrorism, general strikes, recession and the election of the first/worst woman as Prime Minister and you realize that it was an era that didn’t have much going for it. Surely in the next decade, the 1980’s things couldn’t get any worse, could they? Of course they bloody could!