Were the Seventies really so grim? Britain was a better place when David Bowie was at his peak and aspiration was a dirty word among the working classes, the broadcaster Danny Baker has claimed.
The award-winning radio presenter’s formative years growing up in a Bermondsey council flat have been turned into a BBC2 comedy, Cradle To Grave, which he hopes will challenge perceptions that the Seventies were a dismal period. Adapted from Baker’s memoirs, the series is set in 1974 – a year marked by the three-day week, a mainland IRA terror campaign and economic strife, which ultimately threatens the local docks. However, it will depict a loving family living in an estate infused with a strong sense of community.
The teenage Danny, played by Laurie Kynaston, is more concerned with getting to grips with the opposite sex and avoiding the temper of his bombastic father – a “wheeler-dealer” union leader who worked on the docks, with Peter Kay in the role.
“I was unaware I was living through the grim Seventies. I’m fed up with that decade always being about rubbish being piled up and bodies that couldn’t get buried,” the broadcaster said.
In praise of the Seventies (from left): Peter Kay, Danny Baker and Laurie Kynaston on the set of ‘Cradle to Gra
“It wasn’t a dark period. David Bowie was making albums in a glorious, wonderful renaissance for pop.” He added: “What we call the working-class council estates in London – I never wanted to live anywhere else. We were not aspirational. I didn’t want to own a house. Nobody in my family owned a house until my sister got one. We absolutely loved it there, couldn’t have been any happier.
“I think it’s perhaps a middle-class assumption that working-class people want to get on. We were doing quite all right as long as we’ve got places to go to work and places to come and play. It was only when they were taken away we suddenly realised how lonely it was down by the river.”
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Baker added: “When I was born, my mum and dad got a council flat with an indoor bathroom and a garden because they had three kids. I couldn’t help feeling responsible. I had a wonderful time, a fantastic Seventies.”
Baker noted that Debnams Road in SE16, where the family used to live, has been demolished to make way for a 128-unit, “partly gated” housing development. And it is the closure of the docks to make way for the Canary Wharf commercial regeneration of the area provides a backdrop to the series.
Shot in vibrant colours, Cradle To Grave challenges a television stereotype that the Seventies were a dreary era of poverty and poor fashion choices, he said.
“In your daily life, you didn’t walk around going ‘oh, its 1974, I wonder how long the three-day week is going to last?’ You’re unaware you’re walking through history. David Bowie - The singer through the ages
“If you watch Fawlty Towers or The Likely Lads, there’s no inkling that the outside world is burning down.
“The mundanity of ordinary life is part of the poetry. Most people I knew walked around dressed like Status Quo.”
Adapted with help from Jeff Pope, the Bafta-winning screenwriter of Philomena and the ITV drama Cilla, from Baker’s autobiography Going To Sea In a Sieve, it will begin on BBC2 on Thursday 3 September.
