First viewed : May / June 1987
I would probably have seen this sooner except that it was usually scheduled directly against Coronation Street. Probably the first one I saw was the repeat episode on 1968 which was broadcast early on Spring Bank Holiday Monday in 1987. Fortunately for me, the third season covering the years in which I was most interested, 1972-80, was broadcast at 8pm.
The series was a development of a Radio One series, 25 Years of Rock , which simply intercut contemporary news bulletins with the records of the day. The Rock 'n' Roll Years had more leeway to match visuals with an appropriate record such as matching footage of dodgy Pakistan premier Bhuttto to Thin Lizzy's Don't Believe A Word. The most striking juxtaposition I can recall is from the 1969 episode, with a performance by Marsha Hunt of Walk on Gilded Splinters cut with footage of the aftermath of the Sharon Tate massacre.
When it came to the years I knew best, inevitably I sometimes disagreed with the selections. I'm still flabbergasted that the 1973 episode somehow omitted to use Part of the Union when covering the industrial unrest that year.
Some of the captioning was a bit slapdash. The 1983 episode covering that year's election had a caption that read "The Liberal and Social Democratic Parties form an alliance" which had actually happened in 1981. And I've just noticed that the caption above is incorrect; there were only five victims* and only three of them were Sharon Tate's friends, the fifth being a friend of the caretaker who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The series stopped at 1989 in a fourth series broadcast in 1994.
* unless you include Sharon Tate's unborn child
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