At the Royal Court theatre last week I sat next to the novelist Linda Grant. We were there to see Mike Bartlett's new play Love, Love, Love, which is a satirical attack on the good fortune of the baby-boomer generation, and follows the story of a spectacularly selfish couple and their two blighted children over 45 years, beginning, minus the children, in a London bedsit in 1967. This is Grant territory; her most recent novel, We Had It So Good, charts a similar story of personal folly and self-indulgence through the same decades.

"The wallpaper's wrong," the novelist muttered soon after the curtain went up. I didn't know about the wallpaper. What struck me was how the male protagonist vaults over the back of the sofa at one point and then punches the air and hisses a triumphant "Y-e-e-s-s-s!" Nobody punched the air so aggressively in 1967, so far as I can remember. It's a gesture I associate with post-McEnroe tennis professionals winning a point or Lord Sugar's apprentices celebrating a sale, which puts it firmly in more recent times, possibly the present century, and no more part of the 1960s than the new habit of street smokers losing any interest in a cigarette the moment they throw it away, so it rolls glowing along the pavement: the smoker now like a negligent duchess, insulting society.

At the interval, we told each other we were enjoying the play, which we were. The period solecisms, however, were more interesting to discuss. The girl's dress seemed wrong – not short enough, Grant said – and her feminism too well developed. And what kind of 1960s flat was it that had glasses and a bottle of cognac sitting on the sideboard when the tenant was a young, working-class man who stuck up posters for a living? What kind of ill-paid billposter, come to that, could afford a London flat big enough to have a spare room where his brother could sleep (or otherwise vanish into, to facilitate the drama)? I thought about the bedsits I'd lived in: the Yale lock on the door, the sink stained brown, the coin-fed gas meter, the one-bar electric fire, the linoleum, the never-consulted paperback by Katharine Whitehorn that told you how to cook in one. There was no reason Bartlett, born in 1980, should have come across any of this, and perhaps a little historical implausibility had done no harm to his play. After all, more rigorous history – history as non-fiction rather than drama – also has a habit of excluding many of the people who lived through it.

"I have an anniversary this month," Grant said quite suddenly. "It's 41 years since I had my first trip." Really? How did she mean – and then I realised she meant LSD. She'd taken it aged 20 as a student at York University. Nothing like that happened to me at that age, or (so far) at any other age. In 1982 in a Yates' Wine Lodge in Blackpool I'd seen a couple measuring out what looked like a Beechams Powder, and puzzled about it for a couple of weeks, until the word "cocaine" offered a solution. As for weed, marijuana or whatever, none of it came my way in 1960s Glasgow and, while I take the historian Dominic Sandbrook's point that the pleasure-seeking aspects of the 1960s happened for most people in the next decade, London in the 1970s offered me no more transgressive a prospect than a newspaper colleague and his wife who lived in Muswell Hill and shared joints at parties.

One of the dominant narratives of recent social history therefore excludes me and, I imagine, millions of others in my generation. Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll may have been pleasurable, but they delivered us no epiphanies of a future in which life would be more free and fairer, as well as more fun. How many people did I know between, say, 1967 and 1972 who believed they might? Not many, perhaps none. In Bartlett's play, a stoned girl says the bomb and Vietnam have made the world a terrible place and that "all we're asking for … is some humanity, is some freedom, is to throw off everything that holds us down and explore what we can do instead. Maybe … underneath our background and our countries and our clothes … we're all the same." The sentiments were common enough – clearer versions of them could be heard at CND rallies or accompanied by Bob Dylan's acoustic guitar – but they existed long before the Beatles sang about love, love, love, and had no necessary association with tuning in, turning on, and dropping out.

The dominant narrative also demands that baby boomers rebel against their parents. In the play's last act, set in 2011, the daughter of the stoned girl we saw in the first act complains that her parents gave her bad career advice. "But why did you listen to us? We're your parents," says her father – a funny line. "Why the hell did you take any notice of what we told you? You're supposed to rebel. That's what you're supposed to do." And here, too, I am a disappointment, along with millions of others who found their parents unobstructive and remarkably understanding of their children's ambitions and absences, taking an interest in the former and forgiving the latter. Dramatically, we must be a hopeless lot: bystanders as blind as Mr Magoo to the inter-generational warfare that, if standard portrayals of the period are to be believed, was a hallmark of 1960s life. And yet when I went on my first anti-nuclear demonstration, in 1962, my mother made me a parcel of corned beef sandwiches, and at other times smiled at the sound of the Everly Brothers when I bent down to the record player and placed the stylus on the spinning rim of Wake Up, Little Susie.

Rebellion would have been difficult against such calm indulgence, but what a poor play we would have made. The stage and the novel need conflict, just as history needs events to shape stories around, and so general interpretations become hard to avoid: summers of love lead to self-obsession, which leads to selfishness, Mrs Thatcher, Tony Blair, and so on. "You didn't change the world: you bought it," say the daughter in Act Three. "What did you stand for? Peace? Love? Nothing except being able to do whatever the fuck you wanted." How many of us were like that? I have no idea. But like our consumption of Black Forest Gateau and Mateus Rose in the 1970s – whose mention is always a feature of those documentaries that splice bits of Blue Peter with Top of the Pops – the number is probably exaggerated.

Those of us who feel excluded or unsatisfied by this kind of history can look forward to a treat on Monday night, when the first part of Michael Apted's 56 Up is shown on ITV1, the eighth in the series of documentaries that began in 1964 when the same participants were seven years old. Few things deepen our sense of history as this brilliant programme has done; 56-year-old women become seven-year-old girls, 14-year-old boys on bicycles turn into troubled men in late middle age. "I'm going to work in Woolworths," says one little face preserved in the earliest black-and-white film. "I'm going to be an astronaut," says another. Everything is gloriously particular. The wallpaper is always right. General movements, other than towards the inevitable, are hard to detect.