The sixties: A fresh look at the decade of change

by Francis Wheen

176 pages, Hardcover

First published November 11, 1982

About the author

Francis James Baird Wheen (born 22 January 1957) is a British journalist, writer and broadcaster.

Wheen was educated at Copthorne Prep School, Harrow School and Royal Holloway College, University of London. At Harrow he was a contemporary of Mark Thatcher who has been a recurring subject of his journalism.[citation needed] He is a member of the 'soap' side of the Wheen family, whose family business was the long-established "Wheen & Sons", soap-makers, as was revealed in the gossip column of the Daily Mail on 26 March 2007. He was married to the writer Joan Smith between 1985 and 1993.

He is the author of several books including a biography of Karl Marx, which won the Isaac Deutscher prize. A column for The Guardian ran for several years. He writes for Private Eye and is the magazine's deputy editor. His collected journalism – Hoo-hahs and Passing Frenzies won him the George Orwell Prize in 2003. He has also been a regular columnist for the London Evening Standard.

Wheen broadcasts regularly (mainly on BBC Radio 4) and is a regular panellist on The News Quiz, in which he often referred to the fact that he resembles the former Tory party leader Iain Duncan Smith. He is also one of the more frequently recruited guests for Have I Got News For You.

Wheen wrote a docudrama, The Lavender List, for BBC Four on the final period of Harold Wilson's premiership, concentrating on his relationship with Marcia Williams, which was first screened in March 2006. It starred Kenneth Cranham as former Prime Minister Wilson and Gina McKee as Williams. In April 2007 the BBC paid £75,000 to Williams (Baroness Falkender) in an out-of-court settlement over claims made in the programme.

Francis Wheen is a signatory to the Euston Manifesto and a close friend of Christopher Hitchens. In late-2005 Wheen was co-author, with journalist David Aaronovitch and blogger Oliver Kamm, of a complaint to The Guardian after it published a correction and apology for an interview with Noam Chomsky by Emma Brockes. Chomsky complained that the article suggested he denied the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. The writer Diana Johnstone also complained about references to her in the interview. The Guardian's then readers' editor Ian Mayes found that this had misrepresented Chomsky's position, and his judgement was upheld in May 2006 by an external ombudsman, John Willis. In his report for the Guardian, Willis detailed his reasons for rejecting the argument.

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

The 1960s were recognized as an epoch of enormous social and political change in Britain not long after they ended. In 1982, Channel Four produced a television series about the Sixties, and Francis Wheen put together this companion book to the series. Wheen divides his overview of the decade of change into six themes: “Youth”, “Politics”, “Sex”, “Class”, “Money”, and “Work & Play”.

I was interested in this book because it was written closer to the 1960s than certain later treatments, and so I thought it would be capable of bringing the reader a more authentic air of the decade. That is unfortunately not the case. Wheen was twenty-five years old when this book was published. Born in 1957, he was too young to have a first-hand understanding of major issues of the Sixties, and he compiled this overview from earlier media sources. One finds that a substantial process of mythologizing the decade had already occurred by the early Eighties, and while Wheen gives us highlights from the decade like the “Mods and Rockers" clashes, the Profumo affair, and (as he uses the common more ample definition of the Sixties) the OZ trials, so much of the more humble, everyday life of the decade is lost. Dominic Sandbrook’s history of this era starting with Never Had It So Good is also a history based on previously published sources by someone too young to have been there, but it can be recommended over this book because Sandbrook writes at a length where he can drop plenty of hard figures. Wheen’s book, however, is rather superficial.

The text is rather skimpy because the publisher decided to have the book lavishly illustrated with photographs. Unfortunately, they are completely in black and white. So much of the decade’s great leaps in art, fashion and product marketing happened in vivid colour, but we perceive none of that here. I’ve found I get a much better sense of the visuals of the decade from art films of the era, like Jean-Luc Godard’s work or Antonioni’s Blow Up, in scenes that were shot on real location in ordinary supermarkets or high streets.

Wheen was twenty-five years old when this book was published. Born in 1957, he was too young to have a first-hand understanding of major issues of the Sixties, though he later fell in with a countercultural crowd in the Seventies. (As the decades went by towards the present, he gained quite a reputation as a strident political activities.) However, this book – a rather corporate production owing to its origin in the Channel Four series – is written in a very impersonal style and betrays none of the author’s own personal thoughts or concerns.

All in all, I cannot recommend this book unless you are a real fanatic about the Sixties in Britain (as I am, and that’s how I came across this).