The documentary that heads back to the troubled seventies airs tonight.
“A nation crippled by strikes, high inflation and a cost of living crisis. You’d think it was 2022, but it was the winter of 1978.” – Channel 5
A vintage 1970s Presto Supermarket newspaper advert (ATV Network Archive).
1978, Boney M. had the best-selling single of the year with Rivers of Babylon/Brown Girl in the Ring. Daytime soap Crossroads was dominating the ITV top Ten ratings, so much so the TV regulator called it ‘distressingly popular’, while This is Your Life and Coronation Street ended up on their ‘dubious quality list’, That’s Life! was taking on consumer issues – between looking at penis shaped vegetables, Grandstand was still hosted by Frank Bough, Are You Being Served? actor Arthur Brough died as did movie icon Susan Shaw and Pope Paul VI, Giovanni Montini.
Shopping in Presto Supermarkets would see you spending 13p on half a lb of butter, 9 and a half pence on cream crackers and a three-pack of Mars Bars at 16 and a half pence.
In this 90-minute Channel 5 respective of the events in 1978 the show brings to life the story with contributions from That’s Life!’s Esther Rantzen, radio and television presenter David Hamilton, journalist Carole Malone, ITN News and GB News anchor Alastair Stewart and many more famous faces that survived it – this is the story of seven bleak months of industrial chaos that changed Britain forever – The Winter of Discontent.
With the worst weather for a decade, 13 million days were lost to strikes. Thousands of schools were closed, hospitals were only admitting emergency patients and they couldn’t even bury the dead.
But, as the country was spinning out of control and James Callaghan’s Labour government was at loggerheads with powerful union leaders, there was a political explosion – the election of Margaret Thatcher.
Winter of Discontent, tonight on Channel 5