I recently watched Dominic Sandbrook’s series, The 1970s. Sandbrook was right. Margaret Thatcher did not create the rampant, and continuing, individualism of the 1980s. Rather she articulated and made coherent a long-developing consumerist ethos.
Sandbrook’s glimpse into our recent past was perhaps at its most perceptive when he viewed social developments against contemporary culture.
Like many teachers I have always avoided fiction set in schools. Sandbrook’s use of Grange Hill as a leitmotif for late 1970s perceptions of education was therefore a revelation.
Riots, regular and serious assaults by pupils, incompetent teachers petrified by students and incapable of dealing with recurring crises, were, it seems, the staple of the series.
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