It’s a deja-vu thing
24th July 2016Cutting a film for the BBC about Britain in the nineteen seventies. The decade that made me, and our celebrity presenter, was astonishingly action-packed: rampant inflation, terrorism, collapse of industry, failing governments, IMF bail-outs, soccer violence, fears about immigration, Gay Lib, Women’s Lib, Clockwork Orange, Love Thy Neighbour, Ziggy, Iggy, the National Front, Johnny Rotten and Thatcher Thatcher, Milk Snatcher.
In 1973 Mr Heath took us into Europe, and in 1976 had to come out of a retirement created by the Miners and Maggie, to try to keep us from Brexiting in the first UK referendum. As an undergrad he’d been obsessed with Europe and especially Germany, meeting all the leading Nazis for cocktails. Mr Goering was avuncular. In the sixties he was a regular weekend guest at the home of my birth mother, I learned to my surprise. He stank, she says. That’s Edward, not Hermann.
At the start of the edit watching archive footage of dark times long ago was a comfort. How similar it all seemed, how surmountable the problems. We laughed. And then it was Friday morning.
