Strange Days Indeed is follow up to How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered The World, the book that explored, hilariously, how the modern world is under the sway of multi-form unreason, from homeopathy to conspiracy. It was the story of a world as it is thirty years after the twin Year Zero revolutions started by Thatcher and Khomeni in 1979. That we have strayed into unreason is, according to Wheen, a given, and Strange Days Indeed tells how the paranoid urge that came to dominate the 1970s got us here.

Strange Days Indeed is then, a selected highlights history of the 1970s told in support of a unifying thesis. The history part comes via self-contained examples of creeping paranoia, ranging from the obvious (Nixon; the last days of Harold Wilson), through to slightly less well trodden, or perhaps slightly overlooked or forgotten paths (Idi Amin; Chairman and Madame Mao). This being Francis Wheen, these potted histories are told with precision and a great sense of the absurd and are entertainingly and thought-provokingly fresh, witty and insightful.

The connecting thesis that once the sheen of 60s optimism wore off, hidden depths of cynicism and paranoia revealed themselves as the last knockings of an exhausted system. Again because this is Francis Wheen, the argument is logical, clear, convincing and above all, entertaining. This is history designed to shed light on the time in which it is written and is all the better for it.

Nick Cohen and Christopher Hitchens cover similar territory but are too shrill for some. Wheen’s brand of intelligent reasonableness and easy going, thorough logic are also put into service to shine light on the corrosive effects of paranoia and conspiracy and to assert the primacy of reason. This is not history to help pass a degree course but will undoubtedly help win many a dinner table discussion.

For most of the 80s and 90s the 70s were presented as an irredeemable decade. Popular culture’s inherent obsession with nostalgia has since tried to convince us the 70s were not after all the anti 60s , i.e. the shittest decade evah. Those of us brought up then may concur and be nostalgic for lost childhood idylls – I would happily live in my bedroom as it was in 1978 for the rest of my life – but a cursory look shows the 70s in Britain was the end of the post war period, the last dying breaths of an exhausted way of life. Or were they?

Andy Beckett’s When The Lights Went Out is a more straightforward history of Britain in the 1970s, a cousin to David Kynaston’s cottage industry, Austerity Britain. Beckett’s starting point is that contrary to received wisdom the 70s in general and 1976 in particular, were some form of high water mark. For example, fewer people were out of work during the worst 70s recession than during the height of the Blair boom years. So have we got the 70s all wrong? Maybe so, but by the end of the decade, Britain still put aside its perennial pursuit of deficit financed collective solutions and charged down the road to individualism, never to be the same again. When The Lights Went Out is a story of how we got to where we are.

This is a jaunty trip through some decidedly unjaunty territory and Beckett charges through the political landscape of the 1970s with much glee showing how and why they were not as unremittingly awful as popular legend would have it. A few excursions away from Westminster and Union HQs to take in a bit of sport, culture and everyday life would have helped, not least to save us from the Life On Mars, spangles weren’t they crap version that serves as a sneering shorthand on today’s television.

Beckett’s strength though lies not in an apology for all things 70s, but in a novelist’s eye for a teeming, inter-connected world staggering along in the chaos following the end of an uncontrolled boom. Sound familiar? Perhaps the 70s are back, if so we will have to sail the stormy waters without the sense of shared purpose done away with in the 1980s. Oh dear.

Both of these books are history exactly as it should be written – equal parts thought provoking and entertaining and absolutely resonant with the age in which they are written. Excellent.

You can read a Q&A with author Andy Beckett on our sister site, Bookhugger.co.uk.

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