Keeping alive the glorious spirit of 1976
The 4th of July is always a special day in the United States, but 4th July1976 saw the party of a lifetime as the nation embarked upon the mother of all celebrations, to mark 200 years of independence. The US Bicentennial, as two centuries of freedom following the Declaration of Independence of the United States […]
Continue ReadingAs a teenage plane spotter in the 1970s I was always intrigued by the Icelandic airline Loftleidir (or Loftleiðir to the natives), but I never really knew much about it beyond the fact that amongst my peers it was considered an impressive “cop”. In actual fact, it was the world’s first budget airline. Long before […]
Continue ReadingWhen we think back to our childhood and our early adolescence there are those certain simple things which define the whole experience in ways that mere words can never hope to. And what more defining experience could there be than a chocolate or candy bar, so luscious that we can almost taste it today? We […]
Continue ReadingTo those of us whose day it was, for so many years all human existence revolved around Thursday evenings and the thirty-minute broadcast on BBC1 which brought us news of all the latest movements from the UK singles’ charts. Whichever football team one supported, which school one went to – Top of the Pops was […]
Continue ReadingIt is pretty much unthinkable that anyone who remembers the 1970s would not recall the determined interventions of Mrs. Constance Mary Whitehouse, CBE, guardian of the nation’s conscience, which were frequent and resolute. An evangelical Christian and former sex education teacher, for the best part of three decades Mary Whitehouse and her much-feared letters of […]
Continue Reading1. Concorde enters service On January 21st 1976 a British Airways Concorde took off from London Heathrow airport with a full compliment of passengers destined for Bahrain, while at the exact same time Air France’s maiden Concorde flight left the runway at Paris’ Orly airport for Rio de Janeiro. After initially having been refused permission […]
Continue ReadingImagine a world in which there was no internet and no mobile phones. If you wanted to call someone you rang their landline, and if they were out you rang them back again when they were in. No internet of course meant no e-mail, so if what you had to say needed to be put […]
Continue ReadingIf there ever was an enduring cultural icon of the 1970s it was the Raleigh Chopper bicycle. For kids of a certain age, it was necessary to be the proud owner either of a racing bike, or of a Chopper. One was practical, fast and, when ridden correctly, relatively safe. The other was the coolest […]
Continue ReadingIt is often said that what you’ve never had you never miss. Back in the early 1970s nobody in the UK, beyond the well-travelled few, had had anything remotely resembling what would today be called ice cream. Sure, we’d had some puffy yellowy-white stuff in a block served to us out of a wrapper, in […]
Continue Reading. Think of this iconic 1976 sci-fi movie and the mind becomes inexorably fixed upon a vision of the gaunt, pallid figure with wavy red locks that was David Bowie playing Thomas Jerome Newton, the visitor from another planet come to Earth to find water with which to sate the desperate thirsts of his drought-stricken […]
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