Francis Wheen
LIFE ON MARS
When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies
By Andy Beckett (Faber & Faber 592pp £20)

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Andy Beckett was born in 1969. 'I have been hearing what was wrong with Britain and British politics in the Seventies all my adult life,' he complains. 'No other theme has been as unrelenting. The Seventies were grim. The Seventies were the hangover from the Sixties. The Seventies were violent. The Seventies were a dead end. Above all: we don't want to go back to the Seventies.'

Want it or not, that seems to be where we're heading - back to recession and unemployment, terrorism and environmental apocalypse. Cinemas offer The Baader Meinhof Complex, Milk, Frost/Nixon and singalong screenings of Mamma Mia! The BBC is making a new series of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Gordon Brown has entered into the retro spirit by nationalising banks and printing money. Can power cuts, loon pants and Watneys Red Barrel be far behind? As George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, said at the time of the Northern Rock crisis: 'Brown's Britain is like an episode of Life on Mars.'

Each episode of Life on Mars began with a voice-over from the time-travelling cop Sam Tyler: 'I had an accident and I woke up in 1973. Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time? Whatever's happened, it's like I've landed on a different planet.' But the most striking thing about this rough-hewn planet, which George Osborne apparently missed, was how attractive it seemed to much of the audience. Given a choice between the harsh reality of 1973 and virtual reality today, most viewers and critics sided with Tyler's neanderthal sparring partner, DCI Gene Hunt, and his kipper-tied colleagues. Oh man, look at those cavemen go...

Perhaps the Seventies weren't so bad after all? Beckett isn't the first revisionist popular historian to make this case. The subtitle of Howard Sounes's Seventies: The Sights, Sounds and Ideas of a Brilliant Decade (Simon & Schuster, 2006) speaks for itself: the book was a breathless celebration of the decade's greatest songs, sitcoms and films. Very enjoyable it was, too. As long as you keep the spotlight on David Bowie and The Clash, Reginald Perrin and Basil Fawlty, while leaving much of the backdrop in shadow, you can almost persuade readers to murmur 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive'.

But hang on a moment. Bowie's cocaine-fuelled Nietzschean ramblings in 1976 prompted the formation of Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League. ('As I see it, I am the only alternative for the premier in England,' he drawled. 'I believe Britain could benefit from a fascist leader.' Suddenly that line in one of his songs about making way for a homo superior acquired a creepy new resonance.) Two years later I watched The Clash performing at a huge Rock Against Racism carnival in east London, and urging British youths not to heed Bowie's siren call: the band's angry fervour, like their name, was a direct reaction to the godawfulness of Britain in the 1970s. Even The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and Fawlty Towers, two of the most perfectly conceived and enduringly hilarious TV comedies, are hardly innocent fun. Most of the laughs come from watching a man, driven beyond exasperation, who teeters constantly on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

Andy Beckett has set himself a harder task than Howard Sounes. Although he alludes to popular culture in his introduction ('How had the dead-end of the Seventies produced such a flowering of pop music, fashion and television?'), he resists the temptation to drown out the economics and politics with rousing Abba singalongs. Instead, he hears strange harmonies in the social discord. 'British politics in the Seventies, for all the gothic prose it usually prompts, was about moments of possibility as well as periods of entropy; about stretches of calm as well as sudden calamity,' he writes. 'Politics was rawer, and more honest.' Thus speaks a man who spent the decade at primary school. Although he strives valiantly to accentuate the positive - 'the rise of environmentalism, or feminism, or the Gay Liberation Front, or Rock Against Racism, and other new forms of politics' - the very title of his book is an implicit admission of defeat: the Seventies were and will forever be the years when candlemakers got rich. Yet even here he finds silver linings: the disruption wrought by strikes and inflation and oil crises, and by the lights going out, proves that politics was 'more obviously connected to everyday life'. It sounds like Voltaire's Candide reflecting on the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.

Beckett's picaresque journey isn't quite so disillusioning as that of Candide, but he often struggles to stay cheerful. He goes to Salisbury to ask Ted Heath what he wanted to do for Britain in 1970. 'Speak up,' the Grocer barks, unsmiling. He dies soon afterwards, and Beckett notices that at the funeral there isn't a single damp eye.

Although the publishers are making much of the fact that Beckett interviewed some of the surviving participants in this bleak melodrama (the Thatcherite gurus Sir Alfred Sherman and Lord Harris, the trade unionists Jack Jones and Arthur Scargill), none of them has anything interesting to say. What makes the book such an evocative and riveting read is the archival record of an approaching thunderstorm, which he describes vividly and honestly even when it doesn't suit his purpose: Beckett is too good a reporter to ignore the evidence that Britain in the Seventies was not the best of all possible worlds. Jim Callaghan confessed to his Cabinet colleagues that if he were a younger man he would emigrate. Margaret Thatcher told Kingsley Amis that if she lost the general election she and Denis would stay in Britain 'but we'll work very hard with the children to set them up with careers in Canada'. 'Goodbye, Great Britain,' the Wall Street Journal editorialised in 1975. 'It was nice knowing you.'

Four years later, Margaret Thatcher entered 10 Downing Street. Was this the inevitable culmination of our decade of decline and despair? Beckett thinks not: right up until polling day, he says, 'Thatcher was not the only possible answer to the questions the decade posed. Hindsight is a great simplifier, and the Seventies as an era has been simplified more than most.' On this occasion, however, hindsight is surely right: the post-war Butskellite consensus had reached a dead end. I remember ringing the New Statesman's printers in March 1979 on the night of the no-confidence debate that brought down Jim Callaghan, telling them to go with the front-page editorial we had prepared for a government defeat. 'NO CONFIDENCE', the headline yelled. 'This time, something's got to give.' Something did, and the only conclusion one can draw from Andy Beckett's compelling narrative is that it had to. This time round, now that we seem doomed to relive the Seventies, perhaps we'll find an alternative exit. Anyone searching for it should start by reading this book, preferably before the lights go out again.

Francis Wheen's book about the Seventies, 'Strange Days Indeed', will be published by Fourth Estate in September.