How I laugh at the bad old Seventies

Revisiting your Seventies childhood is never rewarding. The frizzy perm, National Health glasses, the terrible moment when, aged 11, I realised that my mother had made up my school dress using a maternity sewing pattern (we were so poor, I had to wear it all summer with one of those ghastly elasticated nurse's belts). Just don't get me started.

But I can truly say that watching the Old Vic's production of The Norman Conquests, I howled with laughter. Everything floods you with nostalgia, from the Hornsey pottery to the terrible pyjamas men wore, and the low-grade meals made by pouring all the tins in the larder into one big stew.
We lived on instant coffee and cold meat salad. Everyone had bad hair. I don't remember anyone running away for a dirty weekend in East Grinstead with their sister-in-law (the Norman Conquests is full of sex) but, oh, I recognise the arguments at the table.

The trilogy is jaw-droppingly funny but for all the safari suits and kipper ties, you can spot the pain. Because the middle classes have hurts and losses and unrealised dreams, too. It's nice to see them taken seriously.

The great thing about a theatre marathon — the Old Vic is staging all three plays for seven Saturdays — is that you feel the temperature of the audience. Because you're watching them in the round (make sure you book different seats each time), you see fortysomethings getting all the same jokes.

I've never understood fashion's mania for reviving the Seventies. Everyone misrepresents the period — with swoony girls in feather boas and Bowie-esque boys in great make-up. But where are the interminable evenings playing board games by candlelight, or the humiliation of sharing bathwater during the power cuts?

If the stock market keeps crashing, some of us will be back there soon (Fray Bentos mince with tinned peas, anyone?). But thanks to Alan Ayckbourn, I've finally learned to love the Seventies.