http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/1969-the-year-everything-changed-1752220.html
Not everyone succumbed to Moon mania. David Randall, then an
18-year-old news junkie, was more interested in the great events
taking place on planet Earth
Sunday, 19 July 2009
We sat by the television on 20 July 1969, for hour after interminable
hour, waiting for the first sign of what we were told would
eventually come a man's slow, slightly mechanical voice uttering
those famous words we longed to hear: "Normal programmes will now resume."
To me, space was a bore. I was 18, there were girls to underwhelm,
bookish postures to strike, and far more interesting things happening
back on planet Earth. Only two days before, Senator Edward Kennedy
had driven his car off Chappaquiddick bridge, sending companion Mary
Jo Kopechne to her death and himself into a career permanently
hobbled by his ability to save himself but not her. It was one of
many reasons why, for a trainee news junkie, 1969 was a very good year.
But not, however, for people in Northern Ireland or Vietnam. In
Ulster, this was the time when The Troubles came again. The jailing
of Unionist hardliner the Rev Ian Paisley, the Battle of Bogside, the
conviction for incitement to riot of Bernadette Devlin McAliskey MP
(who had only just won a by-election at the age of 21), and, finally,
the arrival and then deployment of the British Army. And, in
south-east Asia, the newly inaugurated Richard Nixon began the policy
of "Vietnamisation" that would, he told us, soon bring the troops
home. It didn't. Instead, the anti-war campaign grew stronger,
fuelled not a little by Seymour Hersh's revelation that US troops
massacred 109 villagers in a place called My Lai. The name still
resonates 40 years on, as does that of Sharon Tate, pregnant wife of
Roman Polanksi murdered in August by Charles Manson and his
psychopathic "Family".
For some, it was a year of coming to power: Yasser Arafat, elected
leader of the Palestine Liberation Front; Golda Meir, prime minister
of Israel; and, in Libya, after the summary removal of King Idris,
Colonel Gaddafi, who is with us still. Enter, too, Rupert Murdoch as
the new owner of the News of the World, the Victoria line, Concorde,
Boeing's 747, the quartz watch, maxi skirts, and, in San Francisco,
the first Gap store.
Shopping was not quite the obsession it was to become; nor, too, were
house prices, the average being £4,640. But wages (a teacher, for
instance, earned about £1,650), and the lengths unions would go to
improve them, were becoming An Issue, hence Labour minister Barbara
Castle's proposed cure for industrial unrest, "In Place of Strife".
Its failure would ultimately assist Margaret Thatcher into office.
Sport, as ever, was a diversion and comfort. England were still world
champions at football, Birmingham-born Ann Jones won Wimbledon,
Scotland's Jackie Stewart was top Grand Prix driver, and Tony
Jacklin, a 25-year-old lorry driver's son from Scunthorpe, was the
first Briton to win golf's Open Championship in 18 years. He was
talked home over the closing holes by Henry Longhurst, one of a
number of cask-matured voices (cricket's John Arlott, and tennis's
Dan Maskell were others) that can still, when heard again by someone
of a certain age, conjure up long-lost summer afternoons frittered away.
There were other soundtracks, too, not all of them welcome. As Rolf
Harris's "Two Little Boys" and Lulu's "Boom Bang-a-Bang" were played
again and again on the radio. The hearing envied the deaf. And then
there was Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg's "Je t'aime, moi non
plus", the authentic sound of two people lost in coitus, we virgins
were led to believe. In time, we learned otherwise.
Altogether, the year had a fag-end feel, what with pirate radio gone,
T-shirts from 1967's summer of love long since shrunk in the wash,
the Beatles' last performance on the Apple HQ roof, and the release
of their swansong LP, Abbey Road. The group whose first Number One
had heralded the beginning of my teens had run out of good tunes and
out of patience with each other. Before the year ended, Paul
McCartney would marry Linda Eastman, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono
would stage their bed-in at a Montreal hotel and record the dirge
called "Give Peace A Chance". Woodstock, that August, seemed like an
end-of-term concert for the Sixties; the end of something.
It wasn't the only finale. Charles de Gaulle exited from the
presidency of France, looking as ridiculously proud as ever; Dwight D
Eisenhower, architect of D-Day and presider over America's years of
innocent plenty, died; so, too, did the Warner Brothers' Looney Tunes
cartoon series ("That's All Folks!"); the Krays were finally sent
down at the Old Bailey, good to their old mum to the last; Sir Matt
Busby left the manager's seat at Manchester United; Brian Jones of
the Rolling Stones was found dead in his swimming pool, something of
a mystery to this day; the BBC's cosy radio soap Mrs Dale's Diary was
put out of its lack of misery; and, saddest of all, Kenneth Horne,
ringmaster of what is still radio's funniest ever show, died at the
age of 61. Round the Horne, and much laughter, went with him.
In its place, later in that year, we got the start of Monty Python's
Flying Circus, thus inaugurating four decades of people without a
sense of humour wetting themselves as they recited the programme's
catchphrases. How we longed for them to do something completely
different; such as shut up. But they couldn't. It was 1969, you see,
and it was all so terribly new.
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