up in a kind of golden age. Tarnished, but golden nonetheless. The 1970s are typically portrayed as grey, hopeless, hyper-inflationary, riddled with failure, strikes and sullen class warfare. Certainly, if you watch an episode of The Sweeney , it’s hard to square John Thaw’s menacing, jaw-crunching, whisky-slugging, cigarette-puffing, convention-defying Flying Squad detective Jack Regan with the unconvincing-Oxford-English-accented, crossword-solving, classical-music-loving, vintage-Jaguar-driving, tweed-jacketed Inspector Morse, who appeared a generation later. The brutal realism of the one contrasted with the cosy nonsense of the other is revealing. Similarly, the excellent balance of Upstairs Downstairs stands up very well against the ghastly snobbery and tacked-on noblesse oblige of that horrible Abbey programme. I say this guiltily, having actor friends I like very much who play in it, and play excellently, but truth must out.
Musically the 1970s were astonishing, even for someone like me, who is not especially attracted to pop or rock. You can distinguish early 1973, for example, from late 1973 in terms of both musical and fashion styles. Loons came in and bellbottoms bowed out. Every week you could see the young Elton John, David Bowie or Marc Bolan on Top of the Pops (admittedly Gary Glitter and Jimmy Savile too), not to mention Mud, Slade, Wizzard, Roxy Music and a myriad of freakish novelty songs and eclectic mixes. Meanwhile Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes … giant album artists were dominating the world. A few years later punk exploded – all this a heartbeat away from the dissolution of The Beatles. Music, unless my ear is staggeringly dysfunctional, hasn’t undergone anything like such remarkably swift, imaginative, colourful and fundamental changes of style in the twenty-five years between the arrival of rap and now. Bits of acid house, trance, garage and other electronic dance music seem to have coincided with hip-hop in a more or less unbroken line. A photograph of an eighteen-year-old in 1990s clothes looks exactly like a photograph of an eighteen-year-old in twenty-first-century clothes.
But that is not the point, not the point at all. We moan about the sense of entitlement the young are said to have today. I think it is nonsense. It is simply that they are aware of the actual entitlement my generation enjoyed. Despite coming from a comfortably off household, since expulsion from private school all my education was at the expense of the state. Grants to cover living costs, tuition fees, everything. I even, while I was in debt to a bookshop at Cambridge, had the cheek to send a photocopy of their bill for the due sum of four hundred or so pounds (the equivalent of well over a thousand now) to the Norfolk and Norwich Local Education Authority. A tutor had added a paragraph to say that, as a scholar and potential academic of the future, these books were necessary to me. A cheque to cover the bill was immediately sent. I tell stories like that to my godchildren and nephews, who are just emerging from their university careers, burdened with debt, and I can see them wanting to punch me in the face. Hard.
I left university and shared a flat with my friend and Cambridge lover Kim in Chelsea, and life seemed infinitely interesting and straightforward. For the emerging graduate today there seems to be little on offer but a McJob, endless unpaid internships (only then if you know the right people) and a first rung on the property ladder that is higher and less attainable than the middle rung was in my early days.
But wait a minute – you’ve made me leap ahead of myself again. So, NORCAT. Three-card brag, beer, a girl, absolutely no interest in the curriculum and … a disappearance.
My memory cannot quite summon up the absolute circumstances of the First Great Escape. I was seventeen, it was 1974, I think I had agreed to go to some kind of musical festival and meet
Musically the 1970s were astonishing, even for someone like me, who is not especially attracted to pop or rock. You can distinguish early 1973, for example, from late 1973 in terms of both musical and fashion styles. Loons came in and bellbottoms bowed out. Every week you could see the young Elton John, David Bowie or Marc Bolan on Top of the Pops (admittedly Gary Glitter and Jimmy Savile too), not to mention Mud, Slade, Wizzard, Roxy Music and a myriad of freakish novelty songs and eclectic mixes. Meanwhile Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes … giant album artists were dominating the world. A few years later punk exploded – all this a heartbeat away from the dissolution of The Beatles. Music, unless my ear is staggeringly dysfunctional, hasn’t undergone anything like such remarkably swift, imaginative, colourful and fundamental changes of style in the twenty-five years between the arrival of rap and now. Bits of acid house, trance, garage and other electronic dance music seem to have coincided with hip-hop in a more or less unbroken line. A photograph of an eighteen-year-old in 1990s clothes looks exactly like a photograph of an eighteen-year-old in twenty-first-century clothes.
But that is not the point, not the point at all. We moan about the sense of entitlement the young are said to have today. I think it is nonsense. It is simply that they are aware of the actual entitlement my generation enjoyed. Despite coming from a comfortably off household, since expulsion from private school all my education was at the expense of the state. Grants to cover living costs, tuition fees, everything. I even, while I was in debt to a bookshop at Cambridge, had the cheek to send a photocopy of their bill for the due sum of four hundred or so pounds (the equivalent of well over a thousand now) to the Norfolk and Norwich Local Education Authority. A tutor had added a paragraph to say that, as a scholar and potential academic of the future, these books were necessary to me. A cheque to cover the bill was immediately sent. I tell stories like that to my godchildren and nephews, who are just emerging from their university careers, burdened with debt, and I can see them wanting to punch me in the face. Hard.
I left university and shared a flat with my friend and Cambridge lover Kim in Chelsea, and life seemed infinitely interesting and straightforward. For the emerging graduate today there seems to be little on offer but a McJob, endless unpaid internships (only then if you know the right people) and a first rung on the property ladder that is higher and less attainable than the middle rung was in my early days.
But wait a minute – you’ve made me leap ahead of myself again. So, NORCAT. Three-card brag, beer, a girl, absolutely no interest in the curriculum and … a disappearance.
My memory cannot quite summon up the absolute circumstances of the First Great Escape. I was seventeen, it was 1974, I think I had agreed to go to some kind of musical festival and meet
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