This is not how we saw it at the time.

We saw it in black & white. In 1972, a colour TV was a rare and wondrous thing. Clip shows may depict the 1970s as a world of multi-coloured tank tops and bright yellow Choppers, but the reality was a lot less colourful. Britain was a like grim annexe of the Soviet Union. The buses, railways, coal mines, the telecommunications and steel industries, most of the motor industry, every energy company, two-thirds of TV stations and all radio stations were controlled by the state. Unimaginable now but this record still makes me strangely nostalgic for that monochrome misery. Maybe because, with its brass accompaniment by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, it sounded old-fashioned even then. Peter Skellern died this week, aged 69. Which means he was only 25 when this was a hit. I’d assumed he was much older and had probably, like the era his famous song evokes, died a long time ago.