Golden Years?

"The Seventies! The Seventies! Jeremy Corbyn will take Britain back to the Seventies!"

But the cult of the allegedly horrific 1970s has been very prominent indeed since my early adolescence, and may already have been in place before that. It is still going strong.

Have you ever seen or heard a depiction of Britain in that decade in anything other than at least broadly sympathetic terms? Wallowing in nostalgia is entirely normal. And the public cannot get enough of it.

By contrast, consider the cultural memory of the 1980s. Have you ever seen or heard a depiction of Britain in that decade in anything other than at least broadly unsympathetic terms, to put the matter in the mildest possible terms?

It is telling that depictions of this supposedly nation-saving period are, in themselves, strikingly uncommon. No one seems to want to watch or to listen to them very much, if at all.

The television series Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes illustrate the point, especially in the attitudes of the far-from-leftish Gene Hunt.

Do not try and blame "left-wing media". Of course there are left-wing media. But Sky is not one of them. Nor is Virgin, which is part of the empire that, even more than Rupert Murdoch's, embodies the liberal Right unleashed by Thatcherism.

Nothing could be more central to that than the understanding of what there is a market for, and what there is not.