News, current affairs, and cultural issues from the 1970s
On the night of November 27, 1975, Britain was stunned by the shooting dead of household name celebrity, Ross McWhirter. He and his identical twin brother Norris created and compiled the world famous Guinness Book of Records in 1955 and both men appeared regularly on the BBC children’s show Record Breakers in the early 1970s….
In the 1970s and 1980s, youth unemployment skyrocketed among young Boomers born at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s – “late” Boomers if you want. Hundreds of thousands of young people were leaving school and months later had not found any work. The Labour government of Prime Minister James Callaghan in the late…
Two plastic balls linked by a skinny rope caused the most ridiculous moral panic at at the start of the 1970s. Clackers was a toy that, it was claimed, could leave you blinded or seriously injured. Very rapidly it went from being the must-have item in the school playground to a shunned and dangerous creation….
Doctor Who was a 20th century TV success story that soared but then crashed as historian Tony McMahon discovers
1985 saw two double agents exposed. KGB agent Oleg Gordievsky and US Navy officer John Walker were not what they seemed. Tony McMahon reports
Corporal punishment was a constant feature of 1970s schools reducing children to a terrorised state as TV historian Tony McMahon remembers
Short Sharp Shock was a military-style prison regime for young offenders that wrecked lives and didn’t work as Tony McMahon discovers
Mods and Rockers were at each others’ throats again in the late 1970s in the town of Tamworth in England as Tony McMahon discovers
From the 1960s to the 1990s, abortion became a culture war issue that is hugely divisive down to the present day as TV historian Tony McMahon reports
In the 1970s, parents increasingly tried to rescue their children from cults but ACLU objected on civil liberties grounds
