| Abstract | This article takes as its starting point a speech made in 1976 by the television presenter Hughie Green at the end of the Christmas edition of Opportunity Knocks, a talent show on the UK commercial channel ITV. Green's speech was a personal take on the political and economic crisis of the mid 1970s. In this article it is read against other events of late 1976 so as to illuminate the peculiar collective mentalities of that moment. My aim is to bring together different strands of the low-cultural and high-political in order to show how they form part of a unique historical conjuncture, one which cannot necessarily be tied to a uniform understanding of ‘the 1970s’. By focusing on a largely forgotten moment in the cultural history of that decade, I want to set some of the historically contingent elements of the 1970s against the simplifications of popular memory and political mythology. Green's speech forces us to look at the events of the mid 1970s through a cultural-discursive as well as an economic-political lens, and specifically to see in the crisis at the end of 1976 the beginnings of a symbolic renegotiation of the postwar social-democratic settlement and the relationship between social democracy and consumer capitalism.
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