A daft, wonderful BBC cop show leaves no doubt that the Britain of 1973 was a strange, ugly place, but it turns out that the daily papers of that time have things to recommend them
The first week of February 1973 was "Bath Week" in the Sun. No, Rupert Murdoch's soaraway tabloid had not adjourned to Somerset to celebrate Jane Austen and Roman plumbing; it had decided, for reasons unclear at 34 years' distance, to have fun with the household bath. The page three girls, therefore, were photographed writhing among the suds; hapless interview victims appeared in their tubs doing irrelevant ablutions; and the paper even had a readers' offer: a "top-quality shower unit at a bargain price" - £6.90 plus p+p.
The past in general may be a foreign country, but - as the BBC's daft but wonderful cop series Life on Mars proves beyond doubt - 1973 is a different planet altogether. Perhaps because it is located in a grey patch of time between memory and history, or perhaps because of the intrinsic awfulness of the wallpaper, the shoes and the attitudes, it is a year that seems to deserve only neglect or mockery. And yet the national press of that time, when you look back at it, turns out to have considerable charm, even innocence.
It wasn't just the Sun having a lark with baths. There was Bernard Levin devoting his Times column to the prospect of a strike by bit-part actors, and proposing an alternative form of industrial action: instead of refusing to go on stage, he said, the actors should play their parts as usual but at strategic moments utter the wrong lines. Thus the murdered Duncan in Macbeth might suddenly sit up and announce from his bed, in appropriate blank verse, that he wasn't dead at all, only scratched. Or the gravedigger in Hamlet could reply, on being asked whose skull he had dug up, that it was his mother's, so rendering the Yorick speech impossible. What better way to hold theatre managements to ransom?
There was also the Telegraph reporting in its arts pages on "Serious drama developments at Watford" and lamenting "Exaggerated style in Bach Mass". And the Express, looking forward to a meeting of the US president and the British prime minister, printing the headline: "Nixon needs Heath - first emissary for a new, formidable Europe".
Yes, the casual sexism is everywhere, from the Sun's description of a group of army wives as "the petticoat patrol" to the "Women's Appointments" pages in the Times, where a West End firm advertised for a shorthand typist who would work alongside "two senior girls . . . who look after the Vice-Chairman and the Managing Director".
That aside, the mood of these newspapers seems surprisingly gentle, the prose calm, the pages crowded with information yet somehow uncomplicated. There isn't that sound of earthmoving that constantly blasts out of our papers now, as molehills are desperately transformed into mountains. If DCI Gene Hunt in Life on Mars is brutish (and he certainly is), he's not getting that from his daily paper.
A very unscientific survey suggests that though the newspapers were thinner then - the Times had 30 broadsheet pages for 5p, compared with 120 tabloid pages for 65p now - they didn't carry noticeably less news. Articles today are longer, with rarely more than four fitting on a page and often just one; a single page back then would often hold a dozen stories, most of them of less than 250 words. It helped in making room for all of this that pictures had to be smaller because the reproduction was so poor.
Another difference is that whole categories of news which are staples now were marginal to papers in 1973. Eva Gabor's engagement to her fifth husband, for example, was just a mugshot and a paragraph in the 1973 Express, while the possibility that Jimmy Hill might hop from ITV to BBC was tucked away in a corner. Similar stories today would routinely rate half a page, with pictures, near the front - think Liza Minelli and her marriages, or Gaby Logan changing channels.
Yes, there was column after column of parliamentary coverage, but then again every paper managed to find plenty of space to report on the 66-year-old Surbiton businessman who married a nightclub dancer from Venezuela and, when she refused to have sex with him, went to court and got an annulment. Those were restrained times, but they were not po-faced.
And there were the opinion columns: with only one or two to a paper they were far fewer in number, making the press appear less vicious, less finger-jabbing than what we see every morning.
Does this mean that newspapers were superior on the distant and ugly planet that is 1973? That would be a reckless thing to say - almost as reckless as Sir Alf Ramsey's claim in February that year that football was getting better and better. This was, he insisted, "no starry-eyed viewpoint. It is made dispassionately, in the knowledge that in most human activities we improve with the passing of the years." Up to a point, Sir Alf, up to a point.
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University
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