Was life really this bad in 1973?

So with the heat and the boredom and the laziness and all, we are downloading stuff to watch on the computer. Our latest find is the British show Life on Mars. I guess that I've been living under a rock again, as I have only recently heard of this. The American version will air here in a month or so, and Colm Meaney will be on it. So how did I miss hearing about it?


Anyway, we're watching the original British version, and are maybe a third of the way through. Life on Mars has nothing to do with the planet Mars. There's a present day police detective who gets hit by a car, and then he wakes up in 1973. And he knows that it can't really be 1973, and in 1973 he was only four years old, so he can't be an adult police detective in 1973.


But, he's still a police detective, and if you give him a case to work on he'll try to solve the crime. What alternative does he have? It probably isn't real, but it might be, and if he makes a big deal about this not really being his life they might lock him in a padded cell. So he tries to catch the bad guys, without a cell phone or a computer or DNA testing, etc....


Things really seem bad in this TV version of 1973 England. And since I've never really been to 1973 England, I can't say that this isn't a fair representation. I'm sure that a lot of it was like that. I'm sure that there were a lot of dirty cops and that a whole bunch of them were sexist and racist and that a lot of them were just plain rude. I'm sure that a lot of this stuff is just the way it was there, and that a lot of it was just the way it was here too.


But I'm wondering if things were really all that bad in 1973. I was six years old back then. I went to first grade, I wanted to wear flare-leg pants all the time, I played with my dog and climbed trees when the weather was warm, I went to church on Sundays, and I watched cartoons on Saturdays. The rest of the week we watched Little House on the Prairie, The Waltons, The Brady Bunch, Truth or Consequences, and Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. Once or twice a week we had candy and sodas. Dad went to work, and Mom stayed home to cook and do laundry and such. The Avon lady and the Tupperware lady came by once in a while. We ate pretty dull food sometimes, but we were made to eat all of it because there were starving kids in China. Most of the people I knew were reasonably polite and wore clean clothes. There was a war going on someplace else, but I knew nothing about it. I'm sure I was sheltered from a lot of things, but were they that bad?


Everything on this show looks dirty and run down. The only normal person the detective works with is a woman who has also studied psychology and nursing, and he's the only person who appreciates her. He's a grown man about my age, he has a steady job, and he's the second ranking man in his particular part of the police department. So why does he live in such an awful little apartment? It looks like some fleabag motel rooms I had to stay in back when we were on the road a lot. And his apartment doesn't even have a normal bed, but something that looks like what we would sleep in at summer camp, only with the top bunk taken off.


In 1973 my dad was a bit younger than this guy. He wasn't a cop, but he had a steady job. Besides taking care of himself, he had a wife and three kids. We lived in a regular house. Martha Stewart did not decorate for us, but things were clean and nicer looking than what things look like in this show. My parents had a regular bed, and I had a regular bed, and my siblings had bunk beds that looked a lot better than the thing that this guy sleeps on.


My dad didn't wear leather jackets. Maybe this guy can't afford a good place to live because he spends all his money on beer and snappy clothes.

I know that we didn't have cell phones and computers and debit cards and such, and it would be hard to go back in time and try to do without stuff we are used to having now, but was the rest of it really this bad in the 70s?