I was 14 in 1975 and remember well the hype through my childhood from about the age of 5 onwards. I remember that 68 Awake and the buzz about 75 and how I wouldn't leave school. I was scared of demons and wet the bed until I was ten, but none of us realised the major cause of my anxieties. What a croc - I was only a kid and my gullible parents either sang 1975 from the rooftops and in the neighbourhood (my mother) or went a long with it and provided no alternative direction (my father). It was driven from the travelling overseers and it came to them from Fanatic Freddy and was efficiently managed by Nutter Knorr and his underlings.
Then it was "the middle seventies" and "we may be out by a year or two" because "we don't know how long Eve was created after Adam and the 6000 years starts from when they were thrown out of Eden but Eve hadn't had kids so it could only be a year or two at most".
And the "backstop" of the generation - so 70 or 80 years from 1914 might mean 1984 (and later 1994).
And then the generation change of 95' (by then mum had died and taken her irrational zeal to the grave). And I had the glimmerings of an awakening further fuelled by the wonderful internet and lurking on this site from 2003 which helped me realise I wasn't alone in my thinking.
So my UK town was no different from your Yankee city or your Aussie street or your German neighbourhood or your Italian piazza - and the current leadership tries to say it was a few brothers that ran ahead. Yeah right!