Profumo. Chatterley. The Beatles. 1963 was the year old England died

Shortly before his death, David Frost rang to ask me to take part in a radio series he was making to mark the 50th anniversary of ‘the year, Chris, that I know is closest to your heart, 1963’. This was not because 1963 was the year when he and I worked together on the BBC satire show That Was The Week That Was (TW3), which overnight made Frost a television superstar. It was because he remembered the importance I had given to the events of that year in The Neophiliacs, a book I wrote long ago analysing the tidal wave of change which swept through British life in the 1950s and 1960s. By any measure the stream of scandals, shocks and sensations which poured through the headlines in 1963 made it as extraordinary a year in Britain as any since the second world war. Recent books, films and articles have recalled some of the individual events of those surreal 12 months — the worst winter for 200 years, which covered Britain in snow from December to March, the Profumo scandal, the Great Train Robbery, the explosive rise of the Beatles, Harold Macmillan’s dramatic exit from the political stage.