The 70s - TV review

Simple, unsophisticated and easy-to-please. That, according to historian Dominic Sandbrook, pretty much sums up the dim-witted folk who blazed a trail of home ownership, cheap foreign holidays and new wave fashions during the 1970s.

Sandbrook's pseudo-intellectual look at the decade that brought long hair, flares and Jackie was a classic case of re-writing history. He looked back at the seventies through rose tinted shades, rather than looking back in anger.

Sandbrook, a whippersnapper who wasn't born until 1974, delivered a programme that was big on fun but short on social history. And that, to be honest, is as much as licence-fee payers can hope for from mainstream TV.

His programme was skewed to the middle classes, looking at the proliferation of cheap wine and continental travel, rather than the grind of life on working class estates.

Androgynous fashions, consumerism, bottles of cheap plonk, David Bowie, immigration and a war over the Common Market – those were the touchstones of Sandbrook's seventies. It was a programme that glossing over the bleaker realities of a decade bookmarked by periods of social unrest.

There was much to enjoy, however. The 70s was a programme filled with fun, a stunning soundtrack and an intelligently-written script.

Sandbrook tackled his subject with gusto, showing great enthusiasms for his charges. He painted the seventies as being the decade when the nation changed from being 'old-fashioned' to starting out on the road to modernity.

People wanted colour TVs, a decent wage, their own homes and a car – preferably a Ford Cortina. If history has taught us one thing it is this: few things change. Forty years ago, people took to the streets to protest against the perceived threats from immigration, their inability to afford a pint, their lust for a new TV and their desire for a better car. In the tennies, the proletariat does the same. Flat screen TVs, trainers from JD Sports and whisky from Tesco are the must-have items that cause 21st century riots.

He focused on great stories: Arthur Scargill's successful management of coal miners who wanted more, the aspirations of immigrant workers who fled to the UK to find better lives, the militancy of the working classes and the way in which their collective might defeated the Government over coal.

Sandbrook was like a cool university lecturer, tailoring his story to please an engaged group of students. His social history lesson was enjoyable, if not entirely accurate.

He brought his stories to life, making them easy to understand for a new generation. He did for history what Professor Brian Cox does for science and what Nigel Slater does for food. He made his subject interesting. In his words, a decade often viewed as drab, dull and lightweight became substantial, alive and electric.

Enjoyable as Sandbrook's rhetoric was, however, it couldn't match the programme that followed in its wake. The 70s was the hors d'erve to Sounds of the 70s, a blitzkrieg of youth culture featuring archive performances by the Kinks, Roxy Music, Elton John, New York Dolls, Queen, Sparks and Rod Stewart.

Such footage – as well as a recently rediscovered recording of David Bowie singing The Jean Genie from January 1973 – told us more about youth culture in 30 unmissable minutes than Sandbrook did in an hour.

Andy Richardson