history and politics, podcasts

When the lights went out

When the Lights Went Out Cover

“Hindsight is a great simplifier, and the Seventies as an era has been simplified more than most.”

Andy Beckett

My interview with Guardian journalist Andy Beckett about When the Lights Went Out, his reassessment of the 1970s (were they really as bad as we remember them?) has recently gone up on the Faber website. You can listen by clicking here.

Andy interviewed many of the major political figures from the decade. There is, for example, an almost tragi-comic encounter with the very elderly Ted Heath. I asked him before the interview whether he’d tried to get an audience with Margaret Thatcher and he pointed out that his previous book had made that a bit of a long shot:

Pinochet in Piccadilly