Alwyn W Turner is a non-fiction writer specializing in the politics and culture of post-war Britain. His current book, out in paperback, is Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s. Previous work includes Halfway to Paradise, The Biba Experience and Cult Rock Posters.

Mark Thwaite: What made you want to write a book about the Seventies Alwyn?

Alwyn W Turner: Mostly, it was a fascination with the period in which I grew up. The popular culture meant, and still means, a great deal to me, and it was the time when I was becoming aware of politics. I wanted to explore the connexions between the two. And, quite apart from self-indulgence, it seems to me that the events of the era have cast a long shadow over British society: in his response to the Budget last month, David Cameron was still referring back to the winter of discontent in early-1979 -- these things have lingered long in the memory, and have shaped so much of what has happened in the country ever since.

Mark Thwaite: What do you think is our biggest collective misconception about the decade?

Alwyn W Turner: Back when I started work on Crisis? What Crisis? I would have said that it was the idea that everything was grim, awful and depressing in the 1970s, when clearly that wasn't the case. But I think more recent developments, as the recession has kicked in, have slightly changed that perception, and we're now more likely to see the positive aspects of the time, in particular, the sense of community and national unity, which might have been breaking down but which look ever more attractive.

So, instead I think the biggest misconception is that it was 'the decade that style forgot' (a cliche which turned up in the 1980s, of all decades). It wasn't. It looked fabulous. Street fashions for men weren't quite as spectacular as they had been in 1964-66, but the existence of the glam rock stars more than made up for that, and women's fashions were much better than they had been in the 1960s.

Mark Thwaite: Some on the Left think that at certain moments Britain was close to a pre-revolutionary moment, do you share that view or is it hyperbole?

Alwyn W Turner:No, that's overstating the case. The idea that Britain was approaching revolution was more common on the right at the time than on the left -- the fear of trade union power led some to think that society was irretrievably breaking down, leading to calls for the raising of private militias and to such apocalyptic warnings like Anthony Burgess's 198

Mark Thwaite: They exaggerated. Apart from anything else, there was no appetite on the part of the union leadership for a seizure of power, as there never has been in British unions. Governments were brought down by strikes -- Heath in 1974, Callaghan in 1979 -- but in neither case were the strikes politically motivated: they were attempts by individual unions, acting independently, to secure a better deal for their members at times of economic difficulties. There was some revolutionary rhetoric coming from the Trotskyist left, but these were fragmented and tiny sects -- between them they couldn't outnumber the Communist Party membership.

What there was instead was a feeling that something had to change, that we had reached a T-junction and that it wasn't possible to continue in the same direction we'd been pursuing since the war. A turn to the left or to the right was seeming inevitable. We ended up, of course, with a turn to the right.

Mark Thwaite: How long did it take you to write and research Crisis? What Crisis?? Do you like research, or are you always itching to get down to the actual writing?

Alwyn W Turner: It took about eighteen months for the formal researching and writing, though I also drew on work I'd done before then. I love both aspects of the work. Researching involves a great deal of watching old series of George and Mildred, which can't be bad, but there does come a time when the desire to start shaping the material becomes overwhelming.

Mark Thwaite: What was the most interesting/unexpected thing you learned during your research?

Alwyn W Turner: It was the small details that surprised me -- things that indicated how deep were the roots of tendencies one might think of as being part of our own time. The idea, for example, that the first pubs in Britain to ban smoking did so in 1971. Or the fact that in 1975 Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart was forbidden to play requests on his Radio One show Junior Choice for children who had passed the 11-Plus, for fear of upsetting those who hadn't passed. Or that in 1977 the Union of Muslim Organizations wrote to the government calling for schools to have a statutory requirement to provide halal food.

Mark Thwaite: Who are your heroes and villains of the decade? And what is your favourite Seventies TV show and band!?

Alwyn W Turner:When I was a child in the early-1970s, the two figures who intrigued me most were Muhammad Ali and Richard Nixon. Both still fascinate me, and I think it's quite clear which was the hero and which the villain.

Mostly, though, I'm not sure that it was a time when there were many heroes or villains, at least in political terms. There are figures on the right -- Rhodes Boyson, Mary Whitehouse - whose politics I disagree with strongly, and who should therefore be villains, but who I can't help admiring for their consistency and tenacity. Meanwhile, Roy Jenkins, who was clearly the best home secretary and possibly the best chancellor since the war, cut such an absurd figure that it's hard to see him in heroic terms. If there is a villain, then -- cruel though it is to say so -- one would have to look to Edward Heath, an incompetent prime minister who confused meddling with modernization. Not that he was the last such, of course...

The best television of the period was spectacularly good. I, Claudius and The Sweeney remain among the finest achievements in the history of TV drama, Coronation Street was at its absolute peak, and the comedy was extraordinary: Morecambe & Wise, the work of Dick Clement and Ian LaFrenais and, best of all, the mighty Rising Damp. But all this is now available on DVD and can be relived. What I really, really miss is the wrestling on a Saturday afternoon with commentary by Kent Walton: I mean, the glory days before Big Daddy ruined it, when Kendo Nagasaki, Adrian Street and Les Kellet were in their pomp. I still have a programme from an evening at the Civic Hall, Wolverhampton on which I got the autographs of Massambula and Vic Faulkner.

The best music of the 1970s was -- to be entirely obvious -- provided by David Bowie. He didn't put a foot wrong all decade, and more than that, he drew you out beyond the music. It was as if he came with a reading list, so that if you liked him, you'd find yourself drawn into a world populated by the likes of Lindsay Kemp and Jean Genet, where German expressionism was as important as rock and roll.

Mark Thwaite: Your book encompasses much pop/cultural history -- why do you think that that is so important for our understanding of the past?

Alwyn W Turner: Popular culture often reveals more about the state of the nation than politics ever can, indeed it tends to precede political change. And particularly so in the 1970s. Whilst the newspapers and the Westminster establishment were in a state of panic about the unions and the prime ministerial prospects of Tony Benn, the sitcoms and the soaps, the pop music and the paperbacks of the time told a very different story -- here Enoch Powell was very definitely the most resonant figure. The arrival of Margaret Thatcher, a kind of surrogate Powell, as Tory leader in 1975 and her election in 1979 was pre-shadowed by the trends you can see in the popular culture.

Popular culture is the primary arena in which people can share their fears and aspirations. To take just one example, the country voted decisively in the 1975 referendum to remain members of the EEC (as it then was), but that vote was immediately followed by a spate of novels about rabies that expressed Britain's underlying uncertainty about closer links with Europe.

Mark Thwaite: Do you have an overarching thesis? How does your book differ from, say, Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out?

Alwyn W Turner: The main aim is to tell some good stories, to remind those who were there of things they've forgotten, and to capture something of a fascinating period for those who missed it. In the process, I was hoping to show why and how Thatcherism came into existence. If there is an underlying thesis, it's to emphasize that relationship between politics and popular culture we've just been talking about. I'm not a political journalist or a parliamentary insider, I see politics from the point of view of the consumer, and from that perspective, government doesn't exist in isolation -- it competes for public attention with sport and television and all the rest. Westminster is important, but so too are the Wombles.

Mark Thwaite: What do you think we can most learn from studying the Seventies?

Alwyn W Turner: Primarily the same as we always learn from history -- that despite the superficial differences, human beings remain the same. Even if you remember history, you're still condemned to repeat it, as Gordon Brown is discovering in his re-enactment of the dying days of Jim Callaghan's government. But there are specific lessons that can be learnt. We might look at the much more constructive and intelligent response to terrorism, a much more serious threat then than it is now. Or, from another angle, we might look at how rock music should ideally be experienced in squalid, smoke-filled cellars, not in vast fields dominated by the sponsor's logo.

Mark Thwaite: Do you read the critics? Have you learned anything from their responses to your book?

Alwyn W Turner: I think you have to reach a very rarefied level to enable you not to read the critics. But I fear I do so from a sense of vanity rather than in the hope of learning anything.

Mark Thwaite: What was the most difficult aspect of writing Crisis? What Crisis?? How did you overcome it?

Alwyn W Turner: Simply the scale of the project. Trying to capture a decade, and such an eventful decade, in the space of around 300 pages means that regrettably some things have to be left out -- things like the fallout from the underground scene of the late-1960s, for example. On the other hand, the discipline of keeping it tight produces what I hope is a fast-paced, entertaining read.

Mark Thwaite: Did you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Did you write specifically for them?

Alwyn W Turner: I'm the ideal reader. I try to write books that I'd enjoy reading. In this instance, I was also counting on the fact that I was born smack in the middle of the most populous generation in British history, and that therefore there would be others who would have had the same experiences, been interested in the same things, asked the same questions and wanted to see the same themes covered.

Mark Thwaite: Who is your favourite writer? What is/are your favourite book(s)?

Alwyn W Turner: My favourite period of literature spans from the late-19th century through the first few decades of the 20th: writers like Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Aldous Huxley, PG Wodehouse, HG Wells, Barry Pain -- subtlety, wit and intelligence aimed at the widest possible readership, not simply at an elite. It all went wrong with modernism; we hanged William Joyce, but James Joyce walked free. That can't be right, surely? Non-fiction writers I admire tend to be more recent: Bernard Levin, Simon Garfield, Tony Benn. Under the regulations of Desert Island Discs, I'd chose the seven volumes of Benn's diaries to take with me.

But if there's one writer I'd really like to mention, it'd be John Summers, a wonderful novelist of the 1960s and '70s. Two of his books in particular are amongst the best things written for many decades: Edge of Violence (retitled The Disaster in paperback) is a fictionalized account of the Aberfan tragedy, and The Raging Summer is a masterpiece about growing up in a South Wales pit village during the great depression -- warm, beautiful and very funny, it's a book that will one day claim its place as a modern classic; all human life is here.

Mark Thwaite: Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer/historian?

Alwyn W Turner: Write as much as possible; never mind the quality, feel the width -- the quality will come in due course. And keep going. It took me ten years before I got a book published, another ten before it really felt like it was working.

Mark Thwaite: Anything else you would like to say?

Alwyn W Turner: I'm currently working on a sequel to Crisis? What Crisis? about the Thatcher years. And I'm being constantly surprised how rich 1980s culture was -- the music's better than I've ever been prepared to admit, the television has survived remarkably well, and it really was the golden age of detective fiction. At the time, it left a lot to be desired, but in revisiting the period I'm impressed that there were so many good things in there. The wrestling might have gone into terminal decline, but at least we had the snooker to compensate us.