Remembering the 'Jet Set' LIfestyle

The 'Jet Set' and the 'Jet Setting' lifestyle - remember those?  If, like me, you grew up during the 1970s, they would be familiar terms.  With a new generation of 'Jumbo jets' making air travel both practicable and affordable for more and more people, the idea of being part of that new class of people who could spend their time jetting between exotic foreign destinations became an aspiration pushed heavily by the media.  You could find it everywhere: advertising, films, TV shows, etc.  The sight of a Boeing 747 either landing or taking off at a major airport became ubiquitous visual shorthand for the 'Jet Set' lifestyle.  It didn't even matter if the 'Jet Set' wasn't the central theme of a film, such sequences still turned up in order to define characters as they were introduced.  I was just watching Baron Blood (1972), for instance, a film involving a perambulatory rotting corpse murdering people couldn't be further from the idea of jet-setting, but it still opens with a Pan Am 747 landing at an Austrian airport.  But, of course, when Antonio Cantafore steps off that airliner, thanks to that sequence, we already know by implication that he's arriving the US, probably well-off, a professional and doubtless sophisticated because, well, he's a 'Jet Setter'.  I remember that as a child, it did, indeed, all seem incredibly glamourous.  We used to visit relatives in London once a year and usually drove in through West London, under the Heathrow flightpath, so that the skies seemed full of airliners arriving from or departing for far off destinations.  Moreover, the route was lined with those hotels converted from old Georgian houses that catered for air travellers, all sporting glamourous sounding names, even though they were really just glorified B&Bs.  That and all those advertising hoardings for the likes of Pan Am, TWA, BOAC and the like made quite an impression on my young mind.

Obviously, things have changed a lot since the seventies - international air travel is seen less as aspirational and glamourous than polluting and climate destroying.  In truth, the whole concept of the 'Jet Set' as being an exclusive 'club', membership of which showed that you had 'arrived', was gradually undermined during the seventies, as cheap air travel fueled, in the UK, at least, the growth in package holidays to sunny destinations in Spain, Portugal and the Mediterranean,  Everyone was 'Jet Setting'.  For some reason I've been thinking a lot lately about my seventies childhood and realising that there's still a part of me that yearns for those early seventies days of 'Jet Setting' glamour.  Perhaps because I grew up in a provincial market town, London at that time seemed incredibly glamourous, with its shiny glass-fronted hotels - I remember when the Inn on the Park was the London destination for sophisticated 'Jet Setters' - theatres, lights and landmarks.  Everything emanated from London then: the BBC, ITN, Thames and London Weekend TV, national newspapers and so on. Conversely, there's a part of me that resents the early seventies - I was very young when the sixties ended, but the idea of it is wrapped up with many warm memories, not just of family, but also of stuff like the comforts of black and white TV, vinyl records and scratchy sounding stereo systems, my older brothers' Tri-ang train sets and Scalextric set ups.  The seventies seemed, in comparison, to be something of a harsh wake up call, as flower power went out of the window and we were suddenly in the grip of strikes and oil crises.  The question, of course, is whether the transition from sixties to seventies really was that jarring, or whether it was simply that, as I grew older, I became more aware of the realities of the world, making it seem jarring to my young mind, (possibly also why I sought comfort in that early seventies 'Jet Set' glamour).  Whatever the case, it is all a long time ago now, so long ago, in fact, that it seems, as they say, like another country.