The return of Tutankhamania
Donny Osmond was top of the charts, 'The Joy of Sex' was in the shops, but what really turned Britain on in the summer of 1972 was the tomb of a little boy king. As plans are unveiled for Tutankhamun's return to London, Paul Vallely remembers the original - and best - blockbuster show
It was the year that T-shirts with political slogans came in big. Cosmopolitan, the first women's magazine that dared to talk about the female orgasm, was launched in the UK. Crossroads, the television sitcom where the acting was more wooden than the wobbly sets, hit the airwaves. Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky in a classic Cold War match in Reykjavik to become America's first world chess champion. The fey drawings of a naked man with a wispy beard announced the institutionalisation of the sexual revolution in Dr Alex Comfort's illustrated The Joy of Sex manual. Polaroid cameras were the cutting edge of technology, and The New Seekers came second in the Eurovision Song Contest with "Beg, Steal or Borrow".
And yet 1972 is not really remembered for any of these things. Rather it was the Year of Tutankhamun (when we learnt the ancient name rhymed with " moon", consigning the traditional British pronunciation of Tutankhamen to the dustbin of history). That year the people of Britain were seized with a feverish enthusiasm for Egyptology, which would nowadays probably be described as Tut-mania. One scribe went so far as to coin the term " Tutankhamunophilia".
Read entire article at Independent (UK)
It was the year that T-shirts with political slogans came in big. Cosmopolitan, the first women's magazine that dared to talk about the female orgasm, was launched in the UK. Crossroads, the television sitcom where the acting was more wooden than the wobbly sets, hit the airwaves. Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky in a classic Cold War match in Reykjavik to become America's first world chess champion. The fey drawings of a naked man with a wispy beard announced the institutionalisation of the sexual revolution in Dr Alex Comfort's illustrated The Joy of Sex manual. Polaroid cameras were the cutting edge of technology, and The New Seekers came second in the Eurovision Song Contest with "Beg, Steal or Borrow".
And yet 1972 is not really remembered for any of these things. Rather it was the Year of Tutankhamun (when we learnt the ancient name rhymed with " moon", consigning the traditional British pronunciation of Tutankhamen to the dustbin of history). That year the people of Britain were seized with a feverish enthusiasm for Egyptology, which would nowadays probably be described as Tut-mania. One scribe went so far as to coin the term " Tutankhamunophilia".