RICK: Finally, after years of stagnation, the TV people have woken up to the need for locally based minority programmes, made by amateurs, of interest to about two or three people.
Rik Mayall, Lise Mayer and Ben Elton, The Young Ones (1982)
Make the most of every day,
don’t let hard times stand in your way.
Give a wham, give a bam, but don’t give a damn,
’cos the benefit gang are gonna pay.
Wham!, ‘Wham Rap!’ (1982)
Even our protests were hopeless – neat little marches down Blind Alley.
Derek Jarman, The Last of England (1987)
In April 1979 the Radio Times listed the first appearance of a new satirical comedy show on BBC2 entitled Not the Nine O’Clock News, starring seven virtually unknown performers. Anyone tuning in, however, would have been disappointed, for the previous week the House of Commons had recorded a vote of no confidence in the government, a general election had been called, and the BBC had pulled the programme in the interests of avoiding political controversy. It was to take another seven months before the show finally made it to the screen. When it did, the cast had been slimmed down and now featured Rowan Atkinson, Pamela Stephenson, Mel Smith and Chris Langham (for the second and subsequent series, Langham was replaced by Griff Rhys Jones). The result was the most celebrated and popular cult comedy show since Monty Python’s Flying Circus, indeed considerably more popular than that, for a compilation screened on BBC1 at Christmas 1980 attracted eighteen million viewers, while three records of highlights from the series spent a year between them in the album charts.
It had been five years since the last series of Monty Python and, with the exception of the solo projects by the members of the team, the show had left little trace on the television schedules. Furthermore the wave of Oxbridge graduates who had made that programme – in addition to the slapstick of The Goodies and the satire of That Was the Week That Was, creating a distinctive strand of comedy in the 1960s and early 1970s – seemed to have come to an end with the emergence from Cambridge of Graeme Garden in 1964. The next generation of students chose more orthodox career paths and didn’t follow them into comedy, and it began to look as though the supply of new talent from the universities had dried up.
In the absence of such graduates, the comedy on television towards the end of the 1970s had reverted to type and looked little changed from a decade earlier. The few sketch shows that existed, such as The Two Ronnies, which ran for fifteen years right up to 1986, were – like the variety shows of Tommy Cooper and Morecambe and Wise – essentially part of the light entertainment tradition, with song-and-dance routines, musical guests and nothing more offensive than saucy postcard innuendo. The other comedy staple was the family-flavoured sitcom, including most typically Happy Ever After (1974), with Terry Scott and June Whitfield as suburban couple Terry and June Fletcher. This was perfectly agreeable fare but so limited that its chief writer John Chapman eventually walked out, complaining that there were no new permutations to be wrung out of the format; the BBC, reluctant to lose such a fine property, rebranded the show as Terry and June (1979), gave the couple a new surname – Medford – and ran it for another nine series, maintaining a consistent audience of over ten million viewers.
There was, however, a clear public appetite for an alternative, demonstrated by the enthusiasm with which a small group of new comedians were received in certain quarters. Jasper Carrott, Mike Harding, Max Boyce and Billy Connolly all came from the unlikely background of folk-clubs, broke through to a national audience through hit records rather than television – though all but Connolly were rewarded with their own television series in the late 1970s – and were of a similar age (Harding, Carrott and Boyce were born within twelve months of each other). More importantly, they departed from the traditional stand-up format of simply telling jokes. Instead, drawing on their working-class origins outside London, there was a new emphasis on story-telling, on observational humour, on a much more individualist style of delivery that prefigured some of what was to come. Popular though these comedians were, however, there was little sense of their emergence being anything more than a one-off event; and there was no indication of future stars to come from the same source.
If the arrival of the folk comedians was one hint of the future, another came in the form of the Radio 4 series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, first broadcast in 1978. It was written by Cambridge graduate, Douglas Adams, who had contributed a sketch to the last-ever episode of Monty Python, despite being ten or more years younger than the regular cast. Characteristically that had been a piece satirizing bureaucracy, which became one of the central themes of Hitchhiker’s, in which a human, Arthur Dent (Simon Jones), is saved just before the Earth is destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass; he spends the remainder of the series wandering the universe, including a visit in the second series to a planet, Brontitall, where he is monumentalized in a vast statue, commemorating the moment when he staged a quiet rebellion against the tyranny of machines (especially those that failed to understand how to make a cup of tea).
Here was a clear return to the Oxbridge tradition, using the Python blueprint to construct a rambling but coherent narrative that would become a long-running cult, spreading into novels, records, television and ultimately the cinema. And the following year came Not the Nine O’Clock News to relaunch the Oxbridge sketch show (Mel Smith and Rowan Atkinson had studied at Oxford, Griff Rhys Jones at Cambridge). The series did not seek to copy Monty Python – it opted for a slick professionalism, making no attempt to emulate the earlier show’s surreal juxtapositions, its excursions into history and cross-dressing, its refusal to end sketches with a punchline – but there was a discernible influence, particularly in the fascination with other television formats. Indeed the parody of the highbrow talk-show, a standard Python target, reached new heights with the sketch about a professor who has made a breakthrough in communicating with a gorilla; the primate in question, Gerald, turns out to be highly articulate, capable of quoting Aristotle in the original Greek and a fan of the music of Johnny Mathis.
The debt was made explicit in a sketch mocking the reaction accorded to the film Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979). In a debate hosted by Tim Rice on the BBC2 chat show Friday Night, Saturday Morning, the Python stars John Cleese and Michael Palin had tried patiently, but with growing exasperation, to explain to the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge that the movie wasn’t actually blasphemous at all, while the always preposterous Mervyn Stockwood, Bishop of Southwark, smugly fingered the ostentatiously large cross around his neck and made the occasional snide comment. Not the Nine O’Clock News countered with a studio discussion of a film by the General Synod of the Church of England, Life of Christ, described as ‘a thinly disguised and blasphemous attack on the life of Monty Python’. Rowan Atkinson appeared as the bishop who had directed the film, toying with a camera lens on a chain around his neck and simpering his way through a mock apologia: ‘The Christ figure is not Cleese, he’s just an ordinary person who happens to have been born in Weston-super-Mare at the same time as Mr Cleese . . .’
The series also featured songs which were, as ever with such things, of a hit or miss nature, but did include at least one bullseye in ‘Nice Video – Shame About the Song’, ridiculing the pop industry’s obsession with promotional films. Again the influence of an earlier generation could be seen: Bill Oddie, first in the radio series I’m Sorry I’ll Read that Again and then with the Goodies, had been working for years on songs that sounded like perfect recreations of current pop styles, while being undermined by the lyrics.
John Lloyd, the co-creator of Not the Nine O’Clock News, saw the show as following in the Oxbridge tradition, though he argued that where That Was the Week That Was had been characterized by its optimism about the power of satire to change society, and Monty Python had mostly opted out in favour of whimsy, now there was a ‘sad and cynical conclusion that the world cannot be changed so we might as well go down laughing’. There was, however, a strong vein of protest in the show, with a relentless line of attack on the government, on nuclear weapons and on the monarchy, and an edge that hadn’t been seen on television for many years. In particular the 1980 sketch ‘Constable Savage’ was deliberately contentious with its depiction of Rhys Jones as the eponymous police officer being given a dressing down by his superior (Atkinson) for bringing a string of ridiculous charges: ‘loitering with intent to use a pedestrian crossing’, ‘looking at me in a funny way’, ‘coughing without due care and attention’. The list of nonsense culminates in the incredulous comment: ‘In the space of one month you have brought 117 ridiculous, trumped-up and ludicrous charges. Against the same man.’ It then transpires that the victim of Savage’s attentions is black, and what had seemed like an absurd joke turns out to be an attack on racism in the police force.
This was very definitely a return to the humour that had made That Was the Week That Was such a controversial programme. A brief sketch in that series, written by a young John Cleese, had seen a man saying ‘Good evening’ to a policeman and promptly getting beaten up, with the officer remarking, ‘Just a routine enquiry, sir’. But that had been in 1962, and in the years since, British comedy had mostly returned to a more traditional image of the police on the suburban beat (Deryck Guyler’s portrayal of Corky in the Sykes series being the most memorable). In the wake of Not the Nine O’Clock News, others followed the lead. The following year, for example, the Radio 4 comedy series Injury Time included Rory McGrath in a parody of Shaw Taylor’s Police 5 programme, appealing to the public for help in solving a crime: ‘Otherwise, they say, they’ll go out and arrest the first black person they see – it’s never let them down in the past.’
Like the folk comedians, the success of Not the Nine O’Clock News helped prepare the way for what was to become known as alternative comedy (‘It was the first show at that time which was capable of being watched by a seventeen-year-old,’ as Rhys Jones later pointed out), but there was no immediate sign that it was anything more than an isolated exception to the norm. A couple of months earlier The Comedians, the show that had made household names of Charlie Williams, Frank Carson and Jim Bowen in the early 1970s, had enjoyed a return to ITV, with producer Johnny Hamp predicting big things for his new stars Charlie Daze, Ivor Davies, Mick Miller, Harry Scott, Roy Walker and Lee Wilson. To celebrate the occasion, the Daily Mirror ran a full-page spread on these comedians, inviting them each to contribute a joke; of the six gags, three were standard Irish stories: ‘Heard about the Irish fellow who had his arm amputated so he could sail around the world single-handed?’ Even here, however, the concern over racist humour that had become an issue over the last couple of years was making its presence felt, and Hamp insisted that Irish jokes would be banned from the show unless they were told by Irish comedians.
But the old tradition of comedy was still very much in evidence. It was in 1979 that Benny Hill, who had been named TV Personality of the Year as far back as 1955, began his conquest of America, with syndicated highlights of his Thames TV sketch show proving so popular, according to one report, ‘that a 1988 survey of Florida schoolchildren revealed that although many of them did not know London was our capital, they all associated one person with Britain: Benny Hill. A riot broke out in a California gaol when prisoners were prevented from watching his show.’ In his own country Hill was to become a controversial figure as the Thatcher years wore on. Never much liked by critics (‘what a strange survivor his humour is,’ marvelled Joan Bakewell), he was to be reviled by many of the new comedians for what was perceived of as a reactionary style of humour, though at this stage he was under attack from another quarter altogether: in 1981 the moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse wrote to the heads of all the companies that advertised during his show, asking if they knew that they were supporting the broadcasting of pornography during family viewing time.
The same alliance of liberal critics, right-wing moralists and right-on comedians was also to be found ranged against Bernard Manning, the Manchester-based stand-up whose humour, wrote Michael Ginley, had ‘its roots in the savage conditions endured by the working-class poor in the nineteenth century’. Technically Manning was the most accomplished of the comics to break out from the northern club circuit in the 1970s, and he was also the most transgressive, capable of subverting expectations like few others. ‘We’ll have no more Jewish stories tonight, I’ve just discovered that I lost my grandfather at Auschwitz,’ ran one gag. ‘He fell out of the machine gun tower.’ Only Barry Humphries’ character Dame Edna Everage could rival him for cruelty and obscenity, though that wasn’t what made him the most notorious figure in 1980s comedy. ‘I don’t want to sound like a preacher,’ said Ben Elton, the man who came to personify alternative comedy for the public, ‘but we can make people laugh without being racist or sexist. Bernard Manning’s mother-in-law jokes and jokes implying that all Irish are stupid are out.’ So personalized had this dislike become that at the opening of the Jongleurs comedy club in Camden Lock, north London, a burning effigy of Manning was thrown into the adjacent canal. His humour wasn’t much better received when he appeared in 1982 at the opening night of Factory Records’ Hacienda club in Manchester.
The way that comedy became such a contentious issue was indicative of the polarization of culture in the period. The alternative comedy that followed in the wake of Not the Nine O’Clock News saw a rebirth of the crusading spirit of That Was the Week That Was, mixed with the absurdism of Monty Python and the bellicose personal commitment of Lenny Bruce (whose work was revived in the West End in 1979) and of Richard Pryor (whose groundbreaking Live in Concert film was released in Britain in 1980), but there was also, and perhaps most importantly, a large dose of post-punk anger. And, just as punk had directed much of its fury against other strands of rock and roll, so did alternative comedy come with an ad hoc agenda that challenged the established order in television humour, hence the attacks on Benny Hill and Bernard Manning.
The catalyst was the opening in 1979 of the Comedy Store, the first comedy club in London since the Establishment, founded by Peter Cook, had closed its doors fifteen years earlier. Followed shortly by its offspring, the Comic Strip, and by the muscling in on the Oxbridge-dominated Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Comedy Store provided a platform for the coming generation, the likes of Rik Mayall, Keith Allen, Ben Elton and the double act of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. Their success saw the sprouting up of other comedy clubs, first in the capital and then in major towns and cities across the country, establishing a network of live venues that seemed never to stop growing; by the mid-1980s there were an estimated fifty clubs in London alone. The confrontational, chaotic atmosphere in the early days of this circuit was again reminiscent of the excitement of punk rock in 1976–77: ‘It was crowd control, really,’ commented Alexei Sayle, the first compere of the Comedy Store. ‘You never knew whether some lunatic with a machete would leap on to the stage.’ Punk may have shifted far fewer units than the record industry had hoped, but its influence and inspiration were to be felt for many years.
The rise of alternative comedy was chronicled in fictional form in Martyn Harris’s 1992 novel The Mother-in-Law Joke, told from the point of view of Phil First, a comedian who works the clubs as part of a double act, makes it to television and finds himself gradually assimilated into the mainstream he had once hated. Early on in the story he offers a definition of the new approach, emphasizing that although there was a political agenda, it was often more implicit than explicit: ‘Alternative comedy. It’s just a matter of trying to get away from stuff like Jimmy Tarbuck and Bernard Manning. You try not to do nig-nog jokes or Jewish jokes or sexist jokes. Don’t do jokes at all really.’ The old style of interchangeable gags that could be told by anyone from Bob Monkhouse to Des O’Connor was replaced by what Frank Skinner identified as a more individual approach: ‘What was said on stage roughly represented that comic’s view of the world.’ Or, as seen by Les Dawson, a disapproving older comic: ‘To these performers, the lavatory, sexual organs, tampons, body smells were all acceptable subjects for humour.’ He wasn’t the only one to worry about the nature of some of the material. In 1983 Channel 4 screened a series titled The Entertainers that featured most of the big names from the circuit including Paul Merton, Helen Lederer and Hale and Pace, but felt itself obliged to put one episode out at 11.25pm rather than in its usual 8.30pm slot because it included, in a routine by French and Saunders, the word ‘clitoris’. The word ‘penis’, on the other hand, had been deemed permissible for broadcast before the 9pm watershed that divided family viewing from adult programmes.
Just as significant as the content was the age of the audience. Previous comedy had emerged primarily from the music halls or from the variety and seaside theatres, where it played to multi-generational audiences, making it eminently suitable for transfer to the limited number of British television channels, with both BBC1 and ITV chasing the family audience. Even the northern clubs, despite the blue humour that was permitted, catered for a wide age-range. The alternative comedy clubs, on the other hand, attracted an overwhelmingly young and mostly middle-class audience; this was essentially a monocultural market, populated primarily by students and by readers of the music press. And there was no reason to assume that it would necessarily attract a larger audience than punk had managed: ‘For now their appeal looks like being narrower than previous comedy waves,’ wrote Bryan Appleyard in The Times in 1981, while also noting that the new comedians ‘are the standard “creative” types who emerged from the art and drama schools in the sixties to form groups and have done so again to become comics.’ (He was not entirely correct about their backgrounds: although the stars of alternative comedy were not from Oxbridge, they were largely the beneficiaries of university education, with Manchester and Sussex universities being particularly influential.)
Nonetheless, alternative comedy became a regular presence on television, in part at least as a consequence of Thatcherite principles, despite a hatred of her regime being one of the unifying threads in the movement. ‘In her hunger for the free market,’ noted the producer Harry Thompson, ‘the lady ruled that 25 per cent of BBC TV programmes (not to mention 100 per cent of Channel 4 shows) should come from the independent sector. A rash of hurriedly created independent companies suddenly needed to find wholesale new talent, new ideas and a whole new outlook.’ One of the easiest ways to fill the airtime turned out to be recruiting stand-ups from the alternative circuit and giving them a national platform to articulate what were often anti-Thatcher opinions.
Even so, the viewing figures for the flagship programme of the new wave, The Young Ones, an exuberantly ill-disciplined show about four students sharing a house (first broadcast on BBC2 in November 1982), did not suggest that the nation was entirely ready to embrace this development. By the end of its six-week run, the series was registering in the top ten most-watched programmes on the channel with an audience of 3.3 million, but it was being outperformed by other comedies, including Yes, Minister and The Further Adventures of Lucky Jim (which proved to be no funnier than his original adventures in the 1954 Kingsley Amis novel), while the most popular show was Des O’Connor Tonight. None of these, however, got anywhere near the really big comedies broadcast that week over on BBC1: Hi-De-Hi! (with 11.2 million viewers), The Morecambe and Wise Show (11.1 million), Are You Being Served? (10 million), Three of a Kind (9.45 million) and The Likely Lads (9 million). The second, and final, series of The Young Ones did slightly better, topping the 4 million mark.
Regardless of viewing figures, the impact made by the programme was considerable. Structurally it remained a sitcom, depicting a closed environment in which neither escape nor progress was possible, but in almost every other respect it subverted the genre. There was always a musical item performed by a group appearing in the living room of the house (thus ensuring that the programme fell within the purview of the variety rather than the comedy department at the BBC and therefore worked on a higher budget), the live action was frequently interrupted by puppets, and there was a casual disregard for such conventions as continuity. The characters were unstable – actors would often break out of character to address the camera directly, while Alexei Sayle appeared every week in a variety of roles, though he made no attempt to vary his performance – and the location was equally uncertain: excursions were made into other television shows and even, on one occasion, into Narnia. And running through it all was a vein of exaggerated slapstick, even a violent stupidity, that owed something to The Goodies and a great deal to Tex Avery’s animated films of the 1940s.
Up against the light entertainment that still dominated the British media, and at a time when Thatcherism had begun to recover from its depths of unpopularity and looked as though it might well emerge triumphant from its travails, the very existence of the programme seemed to its devotees like a beacon of hope, providing an alternative voice, an attitude seen nowhere else on television. It swiftly became a cult favourite, effortlessly being voted best television programme in the music weekly, the NME (following on from Not the Nine O’Clock News two years earlier), and winning over the more perceptive humorists of an older generation: ‘this is the best, brightest, most inspired TV comedy since Monty Python,’ wrote Miles Kington, the inventor of Franglais. ‘Also the funniest.’ He went on to compare it to the formula used in the radio version of Hancock’s Half-Hour in the 1950s: ‘put four or five egocentric monsters in the same house and let them get on with their fantasies.’
What was unusual about this particular combination of characters was the way they exemplified, even exaggerated, the diversity of contemporary youth style. Neil (Nigel Planer) was a nouveau hippie, forever depressed and forever making lentil dinners; Vyvyan (Adrian Edmonson) was a punk, though confusingly his studded jacket spelt out the words ‘heavy metal’, engaging in random acts of violence and destruction; Rick (Rik Mayall) was a caricature student, dressed in badge-ridden charity-shop clothes and spouting puerile politics, often in poetic form; and Mike (Christopher Ryan) was the self-proclaimed cool one, almost a parody of the Fonz in the American series Happy Days: always on the make, but ultimately as sexually inadequate as the others. At the time the media were busy trailing the splintering of youth culture, and the disparate characters seemed to echo and parody this. ‘Today youngsters divide very clearly into cults – punk, skinhead, heavy metallers, mod or Ted,’ the Birmingham Post told its readers in 1981, and the Sun provided much the same service with a feature headlined SEVEN TRIBES OF BRITAIN, which identified a slightly different roster: rockabillies, heavy metal, new psychedelics, punks, new romantics, skins and mods. Part of the appeal of The Young Ones was the way it played with these reductive concepts, blurring the boundaries and then throwing the mutated results together in a pressure-cooker of mutual loathing and dependency.
The series was also, ironically, a unifying force, bringing together those self-same tribes. For despite the clumsiness of the newspapers’ analysis, there was some truth in the idea that youth culture had fragmented by the start of the decade, much of it feeding on previous post-war cults. First out of the blocks had been a rockabilly revival, with a donkey-jacketed look that was distinct from the traditional Ted image, while sharing much of the same music. That had been followed by a mod revival, complete with disturbances in seaside resorts, and by a considerably more violent skinhead revival (in 1980 Lord Home and Lord Chalfont were separately reported to have been assaulted by skins). There was even a punk revival in the lumpen shape of Oi! Music, and an attempted psychedelic revival, though this never got much beyond London, with the Regal clothes stall in Kensington Market and the Groovy Cellar club in Soho. The fallout from punk also saw a loose alliance of more sombre fans who gathered at the Futurama festival, first staged in Leeds in September 1979 when it featured performances by Public Image Ltd, Cabaret Voltaire and Joy Division; the associated image tended to come with heavy overcoats, suitable for both the depressed economy and the climate of northern cities. From the north too came the first stirrings of what would become goths, complete with back-combed hair and clothes in such intense shades of black that they seemed to have sucked the health out of the pallid faces they surrounded. Meanwhile London contributed a vein of exhibitionist clubbing in a scene that produced such luminaries as Steve Strange, Boy George and Spandau Ballet; misleadingly named new romanticism, and associated in the public’s mind with frills, flounces and eyeliner, there was actually little sartorial continuity here from week to week, just a love of dressing up in as outlandish a fashion as possible.
Much of the approach of these latter groupings was rooted in the various styles pioneered by David Bowie at various stages of the 1970s, and, unlike the various cult revivalists, many adopted elements of his literary and artistic aspirations in a way that made them perfect for analysis by the increasingly theory-driven weekly music press, particularly the NME, then the market leader. For punk had transformed the parameters of modern rock music, adding, for a short while at least, a requirement that any new movement wishing to be taken seriously should come with at least a token nod towards some form of ideology about the nature of art and preferably its place in society.
No such claims could be made for the contemporaneous New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM as it was catchily known to its adherents), though it did produce some of the biggest British exports of the era with bands like Iron Maiden, Def Leppard and Saxon. More to the taste of theorists in this field proved to be Venom, who inaugurated a new development in heavy metal with their early-1980s albums Welcome to Hell, Black Metal and At War with Satan. Combining the technical incompetence of punk with the Satanic lyricism of 1970s band Black Sabbath, they created an alternative, underground style of the music: faster, less flamboyant and more nihilistic than before, perhaps reflective of their recession-hit native city, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Venom made little commercial impact at the time, but their initiative went on to influence a bewildering number of subgenres (black metal, thrash metal, death metal, speed metal) that were, to the outsider, mostly indistinguishable from each other. Although the most successful acts that followed were American groups – Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth – a new benchmark was set by the Ipswich band Napalm Death (launching yet another sub-genre known as grindcore), whose commitment to speed and economy of style meant that their 1987 debut album Scum included twelve tracks that were under a minute long, one of them, ‘You Suffer’, barely topping the one-second mark. The guttural vocals, distorted guitars and flailing drums identified this music as being ultimately derived from heavy metal, but only in the sense that, say, saxophonist Anthony Braxton was derived from New Orleans jazz: it had reached a level of abstraction that was closer to the avant-garde. What remained, however, was the audience, still predominantly drawn from the ranks of teenage boys, forming a separate sub-species that shuffled along within the massed ranks of youth culture.
The fragmentation of these cults suggested that the onward march of youth, so dominant since the advent of rock and roll, was now suffering a crisis of identity. There was no confidence on display here, no obvious unifying thread. And the decade went on to witness the sightings of a wide variety of other alleged sociological groups – Yuppies, Sloane Rangers, Young Fogeys – as though the cultural confusion were not merely related to music but to the future of the nation itself.
Or perhaps it was that the new rock tribalism simply reflected the triumph of style over music. Certainly the industry was changing. Although the weekly music press was passing out star journalists who could break into the mainstream media in a way that their predecessors had never managed – Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons, Danny Baker, Paul Morley, Garry Bushell amongst them – its position as the arbiter of pop fashion was slipping. The first four years of the decade saw the sales of the four surviving weekly newspapers (NME, Melody Maker, Sounds, Record Mirror) fall by 50 per cent, while sales of music publications generally increased by 35 per cent, the difference being the result of a new generation of magazines, both self-conscious style sheets like The Face and i-D and pure pop titles such as Smash Hits and No. 1. These glossy magazines, more interested in celebrating image than analyzing the music itself, were also the product of punk, which had continued the British rock tradition of an art school interest in the look of pop. They were augmented by the tabloid newspapers, displaying a newfound interest in youth culture, in the hope of increasing circulation. John Blake, who had created a pop gossip column titled Ad Lib in London’s Evening News to cover the capital’s clubbing scene, was enticed to do the same at the Sun in 1982, and launched BiZARRE. ‘Simply the first column ever published in a national newspaper which encompasses every aspect of being young in Britain today,’ boasted the paper. ‘BiZARRE is about Pigbag and hang-gliding, Space Invaders and pacey paperbacks, the Rolling Stones and zoot suits. BiZARRE will be a must every day for everyone with a zest for life.’ It was followed by similar ventures in other papers. Together with the magazines, these columns chronicled the British pop movement that was, for the first time in two decades, to sweep to international success.
Because out of the patchwork that was alternative youth culture at the start of the decade was to emerge a generation of globally successful pop bands, whose obsession with style led to an eager embrace of the new medium of video, just in time for the launch of the MTV channel in America in 1981 with its insatiable appetite for such promotional films. Acts such as Culture Club, Duran Duran, Wham!, Eurythmics and the Police were to score No. 1 hits in America over the next couple of years. Behind them came Soft Cell, Dexys Midnight Runners, Madness, A Flock of Seagulls and Kajagoogoo, and by July 1983 eighteen of the top 40 US singles were by British acts, breaking a record that had stood since the glory days of the British invasion in the mid-1960s. The brand of highly polished pop that was mostly purveyed by these bands seemed a long way removed from their roots in the recession years of the first Thatcher government, a fact that was not accidental; when drummer Jon Moss persuaded Boy George to change the name of their band, Sex Gang Children (they became Culture Club), he argued that audiences had had enough of the decadence that had been celebrated in the new romantic clubs of London: ‘They want a reason. They want to believe in something. They want faith. They want to work.’
This phase of pop had originated with Gary Numan, who reached No. 1 in the summer of 1979 with both ‘Are “Friends” Electric’ and ‘Cars’ (the former under the group name Tubeway Army, the latter as himself). His low-budget, unglamorous take on Bowie’s Berlin albums initiated a wave of electronic pop that came to characterize much of the soundtrack to the first half of the decade, but just as influential was his hands-on involvement in the music business itself. ‘A year ago Gary Numan spent his days queuing at Slough Job Centre or collecting his £19.75 dole,’ enthused the Daily Mail in October 1979, but now ‘he has already formed a merchandising company to market his own T-shirts, posters, badges and programmes, cutting out the middle man.’ This too was part of the legacy of punk: the discovery that it was possible to augment gig income by selling badges and seven-inch singles at the venue; Numan simply turned this sense of garage-band enterprise into a major merchandizing operation. He showed an equally astute grasp of potential new markets with the 1980 release of The Touring Principle, the first rock video sold for home consumption. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was one of the few rock stars openly to support Margaret Thatcher.
Others were learning the same lessons. Adam and the Ants had formed their own fan club in 1978, when they were still an unfashionable band, dismissed by the London elite, and Adam continued to keep a tight control of merchandizing when he became the nation’s biggest pop star in 1980–81; he even went (unsuccessfully) to court to try to establish copyright on his distinctive make-up. And taking the punk ideal of releasing records on an independent label to a new level, Jerry Dammers, leader of the Coventry ska band the Specials, launched 2 Tone Records, which operated as a fully autonomous company under the umbrella and distribution of Chrysalis. Its first twelve singles all reached the charts, an unprecedented achievement in British pop music, and included not only releases by the Specials themselves, but also the debut records by other bands who blended the rhythms of ska with the attitude of punk: Madness, the Beat and the Selecter.
Gary Numan was an exception; for the most part these examples of entrepreneurship espoused a more leftist brand of politics, much of it centred on race. The breakthrough of 2 Tone came at the tail-end of Rock Against Racism, a movement that had been launched in 1976 and had brought punk, new wave and reggae bands together on shared bills around the country in a successful attempt to combat the racism of the National Front. The 2 Tone bands, many featuring line-ups that were as racially mixed as their sound, added their weight to the cause, playing at the gigs and creating a style that had an immediate political impact as well as a longer-term musical influence. Their era, however, was brief. The Specials broke up in 1981, following a radical second album, More Specials, on which Dammers took unexpected departures into lounge music, John Barry soundtracks and spaghetti westerns and, in the process, alienated some of his own band (guitarist Roddy Radiation said it made him feel ‘physically sick’). Others continued, but with the withdrawal of the presiding genius of Dammers, and despite the continuing success of the increasingly pop-orientated Madness, the bands of the ska revival were soon eclipsed by a more durable generation of groups, employing synthesizers to create a white version of soul pop.
‘The music scene was healthier than it had been in a long time,’ noted Boy George, reflecting on this shiny new wave of groups, after the downbeat imagery of punk and post-punk. ‘Suddenly it was okay to be rich, famous and feel no shame. Some saw it as a natural consequence of Thatcherism.’ And yet, in the unlikeliest of places, there were traces of political resistance to be found. Depeche Mode’s second album, A Broken Frame, came in a sleeve that resembled a communist propaganda poster; Spandau Ballet wore clothes inspired by Soviet constructivism; the Human League offshoot Heaven 17 launched themselves with the single ‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang’; ‘Wham Rap’, the first single by Wham!, was a witty and defiant celebration of life on the dole; and Sade’s debut album, Diamond Life, included ‘When Am I Going to Make a Living?’, a song whose message of resilience in the face of unemployment was set to a light quasi-jazz backing. The chorus of ‘Dance Stance’, the 1980 debut single by Dexys Midnight Runners, comprised a list of great Irish writers from Oscar Wilde to Laurence Sterne in a rebuttal of jokes about stupid Irishmen. Even ‘Land of Make Believe’, a No. 1 hit for Eurovision Song Contest winners Bucks Fizz, was said by its lyricist, Pete Sinfield, to be an attack on Thatcher:
Something nasty in your garden’s waiting patiently till it can have your heart.
The early years of Thatcherism were a golden age for political pop, a time when it was possible for the Beat to have a hit with the self-explanatory ‘Stand Down Margaret’, for UB40 to do likewise with ‘One in Ten’ about the unemployment statistics, and for the Jam to reach the top three with the class-conscious ‘Eton Rifles’. (In 2008 the then leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, revealed that when he was an Eton schoolboy, this last single was particularly popular with him and his chums. ‘Which part of it didn’t he get?’ snapped songwriter Paul Weller. ‘It wasn’t intended as a fucking jolly drinking song for the cadet corps.’) This level of engagement was to fade somewhat in the face of the riches available to those who could crack the American market, but for a while pop music – like the new comedy – seemed to provide a forum for alternative points of view to be expressed.
Beyond the charts, the Notsensibles won over some fans with their ironic single ‘I’m in Love with Margaret Thatcher’, while the Exploited sounded a more aggressive note with ‘Maggie’ on their Horror Epics album: ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, you fucking cunt!’ And beyond even them were the more fiercely committed bands, led by the most successful underground group of the decade, Crass, an anarchist collective who were based in a commune and whose every song was a political statement. The music may have been conventionally primitive punk, on little more than nodding terms with melody, but their self-produced, self-released records always retailed at a low price-point and tended to come in fold-out poster-sleeves, featuring collages that were as uncompromising as was the music. All of this was received with great enthusiasm by those who were devotees and, while there was never any question of the band making an impact on the charts or on television, they could by the time they split up in 1984 claim sales of two million records. They had also become perhaps the best-known anarchists in the country though, as Sounds magazine pointed out, this status brought its own contradictions: ‘Their complete control over their records and their unbridled assaults on all things authoritarian made them the reluctant leaders of an anarcho-punk movement that was about anything but leaders.’
Crass were the most visible band in terms of their commitment. Typical of many others, now mostly lost to rock history, were To The Finland Station, who took their name from Edmund Wilson’s book about the birth of socialism, and whose 1981 single, ‘Domino Theory’, was issued on the cooperative label Melodia (not to be confused with the Soviet state record company); over a scratchy guitar and drum-machine backing, a simple pop tune carried lyrics that addressed cold war tensions:
Such outward-looking sentiments were unusual, though such was the tenor of the times that even the charts did feature the occasional excursion into foreign affairs, albeit in the less radical shape of Kim Wilde’s ‘Cambodia’ (1981) or the Human League’s ‘The Lebanon’ (1984).
If the swathes of songs inspired by Thatcher and Thatcherism – others were later contributed by Elvis Costello, Morrissey, Kirsty MacColl and many, many more – reflected a newly politicized aspect to pop lyrics, just as important was the increase in the numbers of young people in the dole queues, which in turn provoked a rapid expansion in the number of groups being formed. Many of the bands who made it, and most of those who didn’t, started their careers while unemployed, using supplementary benefit to subsidize their early years within a tolerant DHSS structure that was, at least partially, responsible for the great explosion of British pop; when so many were on the dole, pressure from the benefit office to seek work was greatly reduced and time for artistic pursuits increased. As with the arrival of alternative comedians on television, the musicians railed against Thatcher, and helped create a cultural resistance to her politics, but their careers were often indebted to her.
Music and comedy were not the only beneficiaries of the new culture of unemployment. There was too a boom in performance poetry, inspired by the popularity of John Cooper Clarke in the late 1970s. Recognizing a cheap option when they saw one, rock promoters began to put on poets as support acts at gigs: John Hegley, Attila the Stockbroker, Seething Wells, Anne Clark, Mark Miwurdz, Little Brother all benefited, as did a couple of the future stars of alternative comedy, Porky the Poet (Phill Jupitus) and Mark Jones (Mark Lamarr), teenage author of ‘Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Work’:
I’m the James Dean of the dole queue
You’ve got to admire my cheek –
Trying to work out how to live fast and die young
On seventeen-fifty a week.
In more orthodox literary fields, Clive Barker, the horror writer and filmmaker, made his name with his short story collections, The Books of Blood (1984), after nine years of being unemployed, during which time he regularly had to justify his status to the DHSS: ‘In the end, they even called me in for one of those heavy interviews where they locked the door. I told them I wrote plays and produced a whole file of them out of a bag. I might not have been paid for them in those days, but I believed in what I was doing.’
Similarly, Jon Gaunt, who was later to become a Sony Award-winning broadcaster, was then trying to establish himself as a playwright, with the help of the Enterprise Allowance Scheme: ‘The basic principle was that you had to invest at least a grand in your new business and then the government would allow you to pick up a payment of forty quid a week for a year while you got the company off the ground.’ Having just been awarded a thousand pound grant from West Midlands Arts, he used the money to sign up for the scheme: ‘We then re-circulated the grand to other mates so that they could do the same thing and hey presto we were all off the dole and in business.’ Alan McGee was another who enrolled: ‘The Tories – I hate giving them credit for anything – had this thing called the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, and I was part of that.’ Securing a bank-loan for his thousand pound contribution, McGee set up Creation Records, which in 1984 released ‘Upside Down’ by the Jesus and Mary Chain, acclaimed at the time as the best debut single by a British band since the Sex Pistols, and was later home to acts like Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine and Oasis.
And, perhaps the unlikeliest beneficiary of all, there was Viz comic. Initially produced as a fanzine by Chris Donald, a DHSS clerk in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, together with his brother and a friend, it was launched in 1979 as a joyously crude parody of The Beano and sold by hand around local pubs and record shops. The Enterprise Allowance Scheme enabled Donald to spread its reach until, in 1985, its distribution was taken up by Virgin; it ended the decade as one of the most successful magazines in the country, with a circulation of more than a million. Proudly refusing to grow up, it specialized in behind-the-bike-sheds humour and sheer silliness, and successfully appealed to schoolboys of all ages, with a huge cast of characters that included the Fat Slags, Finbarr Saunders (‘and his double entendres’) and Johnny Fartpants. Despite its declared intention never to be educational or political, many of the comic’s satirical thrusts, aimed at the mass media (in its parodies of tabloid newspapers) and at a host of other targets including militant feminists (the Andrea Dworkin-inspired Millie Tant), provided a running commentary on the decade that was more effective than many of its contemporaries. ‘If the future generations look back on the literature of the age,’ wrote the era’s greatest humorist Auberon Waugh, ‘they’ll more usefully look to Viz than they would, for instance, the novels of Peter Ackroyd or Julian Barnes, because Viz has a genuine vitality of its own which comes from the society which it represents.’
These recipients of government funding, however, were not noticeably grateful to their patron: ‘We weren’t children of Thatcher; we hated her,’ insisted Alan McGee. Interviewed in 2009, Norman Tebbit, who had launched the scheme (under the slogan ‘Inside every unemployed person, there’s a self-employed one’), professed himself unfazed by the hostility towards the government displayed by so many of the artists involved: ‘It is slightly ironic. But of course, in some cases, they found themselves as entrepreneurs in a nice, free-market, liberal capitalist system, where they weren’t paying tax but they were able to earn money and build themselves a business.’ He added, a little ruefully: ‘In many cases they built themselves a lot more capital than I’ve managed to build myself.’
Quite apart from the way that alternative viewpoints were thus being encouraged, there was a further irony in this informal and unofficial system of supporting artistic endeavour. For the Thatcher government had firmly set its face against the subsidizing of the arts, both because of its belief in the virtues of the free market economy, and because, as Jim Hacker put it in Yes, Minister: ‘Why should the rest of the country subsidize the pleasures of the middle-class few? Theatre, opera, ballet – subsidizing art in this country is nothing more than a middle-class rip-off.’ Confronted by such Thatcherite logic, his establishment-minded permanent secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, is scandalized: ‘Subsidy is for art, for culture. It is not to be given to what the people want, it is for what the people don’t want but ought to have. If they want something, they’ll pay for it themselves.’
Sadly, one of those organizations that did expect people to pay for it themselves – the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company that had been bringing Gilbert and Sullivan’s work to audiences for over a century – found itself unable to survive in the absence of subsidy, and closed in 1982. Elsewhere, however, much of the arts establishment did not noticeably suffer during the Thatcher years, at least for those administrators who knew their way round the corridors of power. ‘In the long run the Conservative government was to work in the Museum’s favour,’ recalled Roy Strong, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. ‘At no other time in my career had I known so many people in power.’ It compared favourably, he found, with the last years of Labour, when the V&A had had to close on Fridays because of cuts. In the great institutions there was a change of emphasis away from education and towards entertainment, as they pursued private sponsorship, but the high arts remained mostly the preserve of Hacker’s ‘middle-class few’; when the Arts Council conducted a survey in 1989, seeking to discover how the subsidized arts were being consumed, it found that, in a three-month period, 6 per cent of the population went to the theatre, 4 per cent to a gallery, 2 per cent to a classical concert and 1 per cent to the ballet.
The subsidies had continued despite the horrified cries that accompanied the sacking of Norman St John-Stevas as arts minister in 1981. (To be strictly accurate, he was sacked from his position as leader of the House, and then took umbrage, refusing to stay on as arts minister without a seat in cabinet.) It was ‘bad news for anyone who cares for the arts,’ noted Lord Longford in his diary, adding that the man was ‘an aesthete amongst philistines’. The outcry that accompanied the departure of St John-Stevas was such that one might justifiably have feared that henceforth all writers would lay down their pens, musicians cast aside their instruments and painters turn despondently away from unfinished canvases. For where now was the point in self-expression if the cabinet were to be open only to barbarians and, more importantly, if there was to be no champion fighting to ensure that government money be made freely available to the creative industries? It could, however, have been much worse for the artistic establishment. Nicholas Ridley was at different times offered the job of arts minister by both Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher, but turned it down on both occasions; given that his opposition to state involvement in industry was such that he made other Thatcherites look positively interventionist, perhaps the arts got off lightly.
Nonetheless the sense of betrayal in artistic circles was real enough, and the opposition to Thatcherism was, if not quite total, then certainly the majority position. It was strengthened year after year as waves of students left further education to find that unemployment was no respecter of academic qualifications. ‘I had an English degree certificate,’ remembered Giles Smith, ‘which, in the shrivelled job market of the 1980s, was about as useful as a brass-rubbing.’ He pursued instead a rock and roll fantasy, playing with unsuccessful band the Cleaners From Venus, before ultimately finding his calling as a sports journalist. There had, of course, long been those who had turned their backs on the career paths mapped out for them, but now it seemed almost as though it were becoming the norm, the result of a society that, having relentlessly expanded university provision over three decades, had now abruptly turned about-face and decided not to put a premium on education for its own sake after all. As Leslie Titmuss, the Tory MP created by John Mortimer, put it: ‘I can’t see how reading English is going to be the slightest help to the economy. It’s not going to produce jobs. It’s going to do damn all for the prosperity of the country.’
This was to become a recurrent theme in the fiction of the decade. Gulliver Ashe in Iris Murdoch’s novel The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) is similarly affected, despite an Oxford education: ‘Gulliver had gone through the routines of pitying the unemployed and blaming the government. Now he was experiencing the thing itself. Often did he think resentfully, it’s not fair, I’m not the kind of person who is unemployed!’ And, being an Iris Murdoch character, he was overwhelmed by it all: ‘It was just absurd to feel so ashamed, so bedraggled, so useless. He just knew that he was being destroyed by an alien force, sinking into an abyss out of which he would never climb.’ Less elevated was Elvis Simcock in David Nobbs’s television comedy A Bit of a Do (1989), who had studied philosophy at university: ‘I’m registered as a philosopher at the job centre,’ he says hopefully. ‘No luck yet!’ And less elevated still was Eric Catchpole in the comedy-drama Lovejoy (1986), who was unimpressed by getting a job working for the eponymous antique-dealer. ‘I don’t reckon I’m going to fancy this antiques lark,’ he complains, and his father puts him straight: ‘Given the state of Mrs Thatcher’s Britain, polytechnic dropouts like you don’t have much choice.’ Others would have been grateful for the opportunity: ‘These days you gotta go to Cambridge just to get a job sweeping the streets,’ despairs a schoolgirl in the series Big Deal (1984).
The feeling of futility was expressed in a letter published in the Guardian in 1981: ‘As a young, unemployed, first-class honours graduate contemplating the amount of “freedom” provided by my weekly £18.50 Giro cheque, I would be very happy to have Mr Benn as prime minister, or even to become part of the Eastern bloc, if this meant I could get a job.’ An editorial in The Times was later to wince at a similar cinematic plotline: ‘the implication in A Letter to Brezhnev is that the teenage heroine would be better off in the Soviet Union than unemployed in Liverpool.’
Related to these was a slew of fictional characters in direct descent from Gordon Comstock in George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, staging their own personal rebellions against society’s values, with an awareness of inevitable defeat: not drop-outs as might have been recognized in the 1960s, but rather opt-outs. The pattern had been set in Guy Bellamy’s comic novel The Secret Lemonade Drinker (1977) with its central figure of a teacher who had abandoned his job and found himself instead running a launderette. ‘I am one of life’s misfits, neither square nor round,’ he declares. ‘There is no hole I fit in.’ Within a couple of years he would have found the field heavily populated, with even characters in period sitcoms joining him. Simon Cadell was cast in Hi-de-Hi! as Jeffrey Fairbrother, an Oxbridge lecturer in the late 1950s who ‘thought that he was being stifled by the academic world and that life was passing him by’, and so goes to work as the entertainments manager in a holiday camp. ‘I’m in a rut,’ he worries. ‘My wife’s left me because she says I’m boring, my students fall asleep in lectures because I bore them. And worst of all, I’m boring myself.’
Rodney Trotter in Only Fools and Horses was almost a parody of the type. Forever being teased because he has two ‘O’ Levels and was briefly enrolled in an art college (he got thrown out for smoking cannabis), he knows he ought to aim higher than being ‘an apprentice fly-pitcher’, but never quite gets round to doing anything about it until his wife pushes him. But the ultimate example was Hywel Bennett’s portrayal of the eponymous hero in the ITV sitcom Shelley (1979), which was created by Peter Tilbury ‘after experiencing life on the dole and finding that his education counted for little’. Shelley has a PhD but no inclination to put it to any use, and is unashamed by his lack of drive: ‘If you are one of those people who think that our Welfare State is a disgrace, that people who sponge off the state are criminal,’ he says by way of introduction, ‘I am one of those scroungers.’ When asked at the dole office, ‘What sort of work would you like to do?’, he replies with absolute honesty, ‘None. I don’t like work.’
To some extent this vein of opting out was an attempt to laugh off the harsh social climate of a country that found little room for those who didn’t quite fit, a trend that didn’t apply solely to the newly graduated. In 1982 Britain’s best radio disc jockey, Johnnie Walker, returned from a self-imposed five-year exile in America to take up a job on a proposed re-launch of the old pirate station, Radio Caroline, where he had defied the law in the 1960s. When that opportunity fell through, he found himself unemployed and becoming so demoralized that even applying for jobs began to seem beyond his reach: ‘Being on the dole, turning up to sign on – it was all such a dispiriting experience and my confidence was at a very low ebb. It seemed an absolute age since I’d done a live radio show. Maybe I just couldn’t do it anymore.’
But there was too a growing weariness amongst the more politically motivated of Walker’s generation, the radicals of the 1960s generation, a sense that their dreams of progress towards a new Jerusalem had been cruelly crushed. The theme of disillusion was to become almost a commonplace in the decade. ‘You start asking yourself: all this activism and commitment – where does it get you, what good does it ever do?’ asks a 52-year-old university lecturer in Robert Barnard’s novel A City of Strangers towards the end of the 1980s. ‘Remember when we used to laugh at Feiffer and Peanuts, and sing “Little Boxes”? And where did it all get us? A decade of Thatcher and the market as God.’ The despondency passed on to a younger generation of characters, including Charles in David Lodge’s Nice Work (1988), who explains to his partner why he’s giving up an academic career to become a merchant banker: ‘You and I, Robyn, grew up in a period when the state was smart: state schools, state universities, state-subsidized arts, state welfare, state medicine – these were things progressive, energetic people believed in. It isn’t like that anymore. The left pays lip-service to those things, but without convincing anybody, including themselves. The people who work in state institutions are depressed, demoralized, fatalistic.’ As Loretta Lawson, the central figure in Joan Smith’s crime novels, says: ‘I’ve got no money – I work in the public sector.’
Mostly, though, it was the middle-aged who were experiencing a loss of faith. ‘I don’t believe in anything,’ despairs Alix in Margaret Drabble’s The Radiant Way (1987). ‘I believe it’s all hopeless. Hopeless. It’s all over. There’s no way back, and no way forward that we can go. We’re washed up.’ Even those who didn’t quite give in to such levels of misery were often just going through the motions. ‘He had been too publicly committed and for too long to renege now,’ wrote P.D. James of her left-wing character Maurice Palfrey in Innocent Blood (1980). ‘He felt like an old campaigner who no longer believes in his cause but finds it enough that there is a battle and he knows his own side.’ It was not just the triumph of the right that was giving concern, for the new, more aggressively proletarian left was equally threatening. Palfrey feels an instinctive antagonism towards those in the next generation with whom he might once have sided: ‘He had become increasingly petty, irritated by details, by the diminishing, for example, of their forenames, Bill, Bert, Mike, Geoff, Steve. He wanted to enquire peevishly if a commitment to Marxism was incompatible with a disyllabic forename.’ In John Mortimer’s novel Summer’s Lease (1988) the elderly Haverford Downs, played in the television adaptation by John Gielgud, although still writing a column for a leftist magazine, notes ‘with a sense of humiliation and disgust that the pages of the Informer were now given over to articles on gay rights, the “politics of feminism” and peer pressure towards glue-sniffing in the inner cities’.
This feeling that the young left – whether they were attracted to Trotskyism, Bennism or identity politics – no longer respected their elders and betters was not confined to fiction. In a 1979 essay in Encounter magazine titled ‘Inquest on a Movement’, David Marquand, a former Labour MP and a leading disciple of Roy Jenkins, had complained that the party had become dominated by a proletarianism that allowed little room now for the middle-class intellectual strand that had been part of the left from the outset. In the words of Jenkin Riderhood in Murdoch’s The Book and the Brotherhood: ‘Learned people, intellectuals, have lost their confidence, their kind of protest is being esoteric. And at the other end it’s smashing things. There’s a gap where the theories ought to be, where the thinking ought to be.’
Perhaps the inevitable conclusion came with the 1981 television version of Malcolm Bradbury’s 1975 novel The History Man about Howard Kirk, a self-regarding sociology lecturer whose radicalism had made him a big fish in the small pond of his redbrick university, but who is starting to feel the pinch. The last episode ended with a caption explaining that Howard voted for the Conservatives in 1979. Similarly, when Henry Simcox, in John Mortimer’s Paradise Postponed (1985), had published his first novel ‘his name had been connected with a group of angry young men; now he was a grumpy, late-middle-aged man. Once his political ideas had been thought as red as his hair; now he gave many warnings on the menace of the left and wrote articles for the Sunday papers on the moral disintegration of life in Britain today.’ In real life too there had been a drift to the right on the part of former radicals like Hugh Thomas, Paul Johnson and Kingsley Amis. (‘Bloody good, eh?’ wrote the last to Philip Larkin on the occasion of Thatcher’s election victory.)
Many such figures tended to insist that they had not abandoned their radicalism, nor discarded their youthful idealism. As the former Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt was keen to point out: ‘I would not like posterity to believe I ever joined the Tory party which has been anathema to me all my life.’ Rather, his intense devotion to Thatcher was ‘because she is not a conservative either. She’s nothing like those wets like Ian Gilmour, Jim Prior and [Francis] Pym. She is a radical making a revolution which horrifies many conservatives.’ There was an element of self-delusion here, but also a kernel of truth, confirming the position adopted by the newspaper that would become most closely associated with Thatcher’s period in office. ‘The Sun is not a Tory newspaper,’ declared a front-page editorial on the day of the 1979 election. ‘The Sun is above all a RADICAL newspaper. And we believe that this time the only radical proposals being put to you are being put by Maggie Thatcher and her Tory team.’
This proclaimed radicalism was a key element in the appeal of Thatcher. She effectively annexed much of the language of the 1960s left and claimed for herself the role of challenging the monolithic, centralized state. ‘The balance of our society has been increasingly tilted in favour of the state at the expense of individual freedom,’ she argued in the introduction to the 1979 manifesto. ‘This election may be the last chance we have to reverse that process, to restore the balance of power in favour of the people.’ Her ministers continued to stress the theme. ‘Less government is good government,’ declared John Moore, echoing Henry David Thoreau’s hallowed anarchist dictum: ‘That government is best which governs least’. Her opponents on the left fiercely rejected such claims, of course, citing as evidence of her contempt for democracy such developments as the centralization of the police force, the transfer of power from local councils to Whitehall, the withdrawal of trade union rights from workers at the intelligence agency GCHQ, the abolition of elections to the Greater London Council. But then, as she herself pointed out, in a manner reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty: ‘Sometimes when you use the same words, they may not have the same meaning.’
It was a battle that Thatcher largely won, the rhetoric of rights and choices and freedoms appealing to a large section of the public. Thatcher’s identification of the unions with the state, and her portrayal of herself as the radical outsider, intent on challenging institutionalized authority, was a vote-winner. It threw the left on the defensive, so that the Labour Party seemed constantly to be fighting rearguard actions, seeking to protect a status quo from which support was fast draining away. This remained an issue throughout the decade, with change after change being opposed until it had been implemented and had been seen to win popular approval, at which stage Labour accepted it. The impression given was that the party was hidebound and dogmatic, and yet paradoxically lacking in principle.
Even more worrying for the left was the fact that it was losing the argument in places that it should have been able to take for granted. Despite the hostility of alternative comedy and of rock and roll, Thatcher was proving popular amongst a substantial number of those who would shortly enter the voting booths for the first time. In November 1982 Tony Benn met a group of sixth-form students and was depressed by the experience. ‘I notice now that there are Thatcherites in every audience. She has armed a lot of bright young people with powerful right-wing arguments,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I am no longer dealing with the old consensus but with a new breed of right-wing concepts.’ At the other end of the spectrum, there was a mirror image of the right’s victory. Mark Steel was later to reflect on the south London squat culture that he inhabited at the time, the very epitome of alternative society, and to conclude that those who professed themselves to be anti-establishment were simply self-delusional: ‘There was little interest in trade unions and still less in the values of socialism, because “they’re just more institutions telling us what to do”. It occurred to me that the aspirations of the armchair anarchists amounted to a belief that everyone should get on with their own thing, or to put it another way, alternative Thatcherism.’
Mike Leigh’s 1988 film High Hopes showed the inevitable outcome as the central character Cyril (Philip Davis), a motorcycle courier living on a north London council estate, rails against the dying of the socialist light, worries about the personal effects of disillusion (‘I’m scared of getting bitter’), and admits the futility of his life: ‘I’m a dead loss. Don’t do nothing, just sit here moaning.’ That feeling of futility was captured too in Edward Fenton’s novel Scorched Earth (1985), which told the story of ten days in the lives of a group of unemployed youth in London, united by a fondness for cannabis, a hatred of the media, a need to fill up time and a feeling of being excluded from the new Britain. When one of the characters is told that there’s no point banging your head against the wall when you could knock on the door and ask to be let in, he replies despondently, ‘There’s not too many doors being opened at the moment. And there’s a hell of a lot of people banging on the walls.’
And as the left continued to fight amongst itself, both within the Labour Party and between Labour and the SDP, large numbers simply walked away from the squabble, so that half of all those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six simply didn’t vote in the 1983 general election. Worse still, a MORI survey revealed, amongst those who did vote, 27 per cent of the young unemployed – those assumed to have the greatest reason of all to dislike Thatcherism and all its works – gave their support to the Conservative Party.