Flares, lava lamps and safari suits and a national cinema dominated by smutty comedy and cheap softcore have all made 1970s popular culture appear too gruesome to recycle as nostalgia and too offensive for academic study. but the generic artefacts of the seventies, such as sexploitation films, Skinhead novels, wife-swapping suburbia, football terraces, James Bond and creepy country houses have become important reference points and are now embraced by contemporary popular culture. British Low Culture revisits the 1970s through some of its least respectable texts: television programmes such as Jason King and On the Buses; films such as Suburban Wives, House of Whipcord and Confessions of a Windowcleaner and the prime-time titillation and pornification of Britain by comedians such as Benny Hill. Identifying 'permissive populism', the trickle down of permissiveness into mass consumption, as a key feature of the 1970s, Leon hunt considers the values of an ostensibly 'bad' decade abd analyses the implications of the 1970s for issues of taste and cultural capital. Hunt explores how the British cultural landscape of the 1970s coincided with moral panics, the troubled Heath government, the three day week and the fragmentation of British society by nationalism, class conflict, race, gender and sexuality.