If you want a portrait of Britain in the Seventies, you can't beat Nationwide. This was a news magazine programme shown every weekday evening after the six o'clock news. It began with news from your region and then went national to tackle both serious and lighter subjects.
The regional presenters featured in the national segment too, and people of my generation will still recall nanes like Mike Neville in Newcastle, Bruce Parker in Southampton and Ian Masters in Norwich. And I think they were all men – very Seventies.
Nationwide covered the three-day week, the drought, the Silver Jubilee and so on through the decade. It also covered the rise of both consumerism and environmentalism.
And the programme had a fondness for supernatural stories like this one, which also gives you a picture of Sheffield people in 1970.
In 1982 David Dimbleby took over from Michael Barratt as the programme's main host, and his pomposity killed it off. But naybe something as Seventies as Nationwide was always going to struggle in the new decade.
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