Born in 1961, in my household my family often call me ‘Seventies Man’ when they point out I have different views or expectations of life in 2026. It stings a bit.

In suburban Buckinghamshire for the whole of that decade, our family knew our doctor by name and he would come to supper with my parents with his wife.  Our village policeman still rode – just – his push bike up and down the main road outside our house, despite a significant increase in traffic year after year. The dustmen expected a Christmas ‘box’ (basically a tip) which my parents gave them willingly.  We had coal and boiler coke delivered to the house by soot-stained men from a lorry. If they didn’t come, we had no hot water and the house froze. Fred the Fishman would come to us in his little van and my mum would choose a piece of cod and some smoked haddock from the ice boxes on the floor at the back.  Glass milk bottles stood on our kitchen doorstep every morning from Wren Davies, the local dairy, with a pot of cream on Saturday mornings ready for Sunday lunch’s pudding. On frozen mornings, robins and chaffinches would peck through the foil tops of the bottles for beakfuls of top-of-the-milk.

I worked doing holiday jobs in the bakery near our house, starting shifts at 4 or 5am and finishing around lunchtime.  For a forty-two-hour week, I was paid £44.  It seemed a lot. I remember first hearing Donna Summer’s I Feel Love, produced by Georgio Moroder, played on Capital Radio’s breakfast show as I stuffed 2,000 doughnuts.  Its pulsy, electro beat was a strange new thing in music.  The track is now enshrined as the great grandparent of countless dance mixes.  

Pre-internet, we were connected as a family through the medium of shared experience via television and conversations round the kitchen and dining room table (the latter on Sundays). England – and we referred to it as England back then, as the “UK” had not entered the national conversation as being the politically correct description – was rediscovering a little cynicism after the positivity of the 1960s.  There were strikes, particularly by the miners in the early part of the decade, which led to three-day weeks of power cuts and meant that school classrooms were lit by smelly paraffin lamps.

The entire country – as in the UK – entered the decade with one channel of commercial television and left it with two, as ITV was joined by Channel Four in 1979. Viewing figures regularly topped 20 million, for soaps like Coronation Street.  Saturday nights were a real family viewing time, with Morecambe & Wise, The Two Ronnies and – especially connecting for all ages – Bruce Forsyth’s The Generation Game. With that size of audience, people shared catchlines from TV advertisements in playgrounds and on production lines in factories.  ‘Heineken Refreshes the Parts Other Beers Cannot Reach’ was widely quoted, seen on the telly and on posters. Rampant sexism was rife in advertising, with women constantly objectified in campaigns for Pretty Polly hosiery and relegated to the kitchen for just about every food or laundry product.  Lorraine Chase’s comedy Cockney delivery, when she replied to the question, “Were you truly wafted here from paradise?” in a Campari advert was, “Nah. Luton Airport.” It became a national catchphrase. (I have worked in advertising all my life, as did my dad. I think the 1970s played a very big part in sending me in that direction.)

Long hair was very much the look for boys, desperately rebelling against (what they saw as) their strait-laced parents.  The male fashions were pretty grim.  Two-tone stacked heels were (literally) the height of cool on blokes. Shirt collars approached the wingspan of a 707. On the other hand, my elder sister looked – to all of us – like a sort of Arthur Rackham vision of floaty beauty in her Laura Ashley dress.  Rackham was an artist and illustrator of many books in the 1920s.  The 1970s saw a return to romanticism and drifty, colourful décor, after the austerity of the post war 50s, and the madly rebellious exuberance of the 1960s.   I was livid when my grandmother cut the small but noticeably white ‘Hugger’ label off my burgundy cord trousers as being unsightly.  The generations above our heads simply didn’t ‘get’ casual fashions and the emergence of ‘cool’ labels as defining signifiers.

The diet was still limited, although my mum was brilliant as disguising a limited repertoire with ingenuity.  Angel Delight was a fixture as a weekday pudding, powder simply whipped into milk that contained a gelling agent.  We ate a lot of Marmite pasta, as penne – or macaroni as we called it – was a relatively recent arrival. A heart stopping lump of butter and two big spoons of Marmite and – bingo! – lunch was ready.  Parmesan, except for powdered stuff in cardboard tubes that smelt of sick, was still a distant prospect.

Finally, the 1970s was the time that package holidays abroad first arrived in the UK.  My dad, somehow, afforded to take us all on a two-week holiday to Northern Spain in 1970. After hours of delay at Gatwick, we were mini bussed from Gerona airport to Tamariu, where we stayed in a flat with two ‘Muri Birds’ from the company, Murrison Small, looking after us. It was just the best holiday, as we sat on a Mediterranean beach for the first time ever, snorkelling and sunning ourselves surrounded by exotic, white stuccoed houses and pine trees, resiny in the heat.  As a nine-year-old, I feasted on Chupa Chops, bullet-hard, solid lolly pops which followed us back home as go-to purchase of choice in every sweetshop for a few years. They still exist in the 21st Century. With a shorter half-life, the other craze that followed us home was clacker balls, two plastic balls on conker-length string that, once you’d got them going in a rhythm of evenly bashing each other when held like opposing pendulums in one hand,  you had to make hit each other both above and below your wrist for as many times as possible. It was a maddeningly addictive exercise – and lethal.   None of our family suffered, but when clacker balls came to England, stories of broken fingers, wrists and fragments flying into peoples’ eyes led, eventually, to their being banned. 

These first snapshots come to mind when thinking back.  It wasn’t the greatest decade but, from a personal point of view, they were the years that shaped me.  So yes, when my immediate family call me ‘Seventies Man’, I have to admit to being guilty as charged.