Rejoice! Rejoice!

‘Let’s make lots of money’

OZ: You know the reason I left this country in the first place, don’t you? I’ll tell you in a word – Margaret bloody Thatcher, that’s why. I’d had it, I was up to there with what she created. Bloody wasteland. Desolate. Nae joy, nae hope, nae nowt.

Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (1986)

It is no longer true that only very very stupid, vulgar people who went to public school can make money. Now, very very stupid, vulgar people who left state school at sixteen can do too.

Mark Lawson, ‘The Nice Man Cometh’ (1991)

Oi you, shut your mouth and look at my wad!

Harry Enfield as Loadsamoney (1987)

Margaret Thatcher’s first term in office had been characterized by an increasingly divided society and by a major economic recession. Her second term saw little change in terms of bringing unity to the country, but it could at least claim that the economy was recovering and that individuals were benefiting. Inflation remained below 5 per cent during the period, and average wages rose by 14 per cent in real terms. The basic rate of tax had been cut from the 33 per cent inherited by the Conservatives in 1979 to 27 per cent, and in the 1987 budget, not even the duty on cigarettes and alcohol was raised. As the obsession with monetarism gradually faded from the agenda, there were substantial increases in public spending, and the value of the Financial Times index of shares rose rapidly through the period.

On the other hand, unemployment remained – even on official figures – over three million throughout, but this was now being regarded, at least in Westminster, as a fact of modern life. Once there had been a commonly-held belief that high levels of unemployment were politically unacceptable, so that the Conservatives could attack the Callaghan government with the ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster campaign; that era now felt like a long time ago. The consensus that had dominated politics since the Second World War was based not merely on specific policies but also on a shared set of assumptions about how one could judge the success of those policies. It was this that the Thatcherite revolution had swept away, so that, for example, the rate of unemployment was less significant than the rate of inflation. Labour did not yet agree on such values, but it would do so in time and in the interim, the Conservatives simply insisted on their own criteria to the exclusion of all others: many of the areas where Labour criticized the government (increasing inequality in society, the running down of public services, a reduction in social housing) were seen as positive virtues in Thatcherite terms and were proudly proclaimed. This was a government that not only turned its back on egalitarianism, but refused even to pay lip service to the concept of equality.

‘I am sure that Margaret Thatcher does not believe it is possible to provide free public services of a quality that will satisfy everyone – so that even the rich prefer to use them,’ argued Nicholas Ridley. ‘If council housing were made so good that nobody wanted to own their own home, how much would that cost? Nor would it be desirable, because it would remove choice from people in deciding in which house and where they want to live.’ The same was true of education and of health, with Thatcher refusing to cede any ground when challenged on her own use of private medical cover rather than the National Health Service: ‘I exercise my right as a free citizen to spend my own money in my own way, so that I can go on the day, at the time, to the doctor I choose and get out fast.’ Taking care of oneself and one’s family was seen as the ideal to which all should aspire, leaving the welfare state to survive simply as a basic safety-net, providing essential services to those unable to afford to look after themselves. There were some limits to this philosophy – although the wealthy could also presumably pay a security firm for protection, the role of the police was never called into question – but the essential argument remained. In the words of Mark Lawson’s character Garry McKenzie: ‘It’s like teeth, isn’t it? If you can pay for gold fillings, then you get them. If you can’t, then, no question, a man-made substance should be available to the work-shy, who are in genuinely life-threatening pain.’

The extent to which this perspective was accepted by the general public was hard to gauge. Certainly in terms of housing, it was broadly recognized that council housing was not the preferred option for the majority – the success of the right to buy scheme was evidence of that – and by the end of the decade two-thirds of households were owner-occupied, with over half of manual workers owning their homes (the phrase ‘property ladder’ entered the language in the 1980s). But the requirement for publicly provided health care and education remained high on most people’s agendas, During the course of the decade, the number of Britons with private health insurance doubled, but this still meant that only 5.4 million were covered, just below a tenth of the population and around the same proportion as there were children in private education. For everyone else, the state system was not simply a safety-net, but a fundamental part of life. In 1983, at the height of the debate over nuclear weapons and with the Falklands War fresh in the memory, Thatcher had elided over this stubborn refusal by the public to accept her position by arguing the case for a strong defence policy: ‘If we were to sacrifice defence to the needs of the welfare state, the day might come when we should have neither peace nor freedom.’ But in her second term, a new angle was needed, and Thatcher found it in the appropriation of yet another leftist slogan from the past, adopted from either John Lennon or Robert Lindsay’s portrayal of Wolfie, leader of the Tooting Popular Front in the television sitcom Citizen Smith, depending on one’s generation: ‘We Conservatives,’ she told the 1986 conference, ‘are returning power to the people.’

The successes she was trumpeting in that speech were council house sales and the privatization of many industries that had formerly been under state control. This latter programme had begun tentatively in the first years, with the sale of shares in BP and British Aerospace – leaving the government with minority holdings – and some peripheral parts of British Steel and British Rail. But it was after the second election victory in 1983 that it really began to take off: British Telecom, Jaguar Cars, British Gas, the National Bus Company, the British Airports Authority and British Airways were all floated on the stock market during the second term, to be followed by Rover Group (as the former British Leyland was now known), British Steel and the electricity industry. Some of this was actively welcomed by the public, either because, as with British Leyland, the company had become seen as a bottomless pit into which tax revenue was poured and second-rate products emerged, or because a lack of any competition at all was seen to allow a poor service; in 1976 Shirley Williams had commissioned a survey into customer satisfaction with the nationalized GPO and found that 40 per cent of people condemned the standards of postal services and telecommunications. Tom Jackson, leader of the post office workers, had warned in the early days of Thatcher, as the Post Office was split into separate post and telecom sections, that if the telecom monopoly was ended, there would be a flood of imports of ‘Mickey Mouse phones’, but few really believed they would be any worse than the current state-approved equipment.

While there was public approval in specific instances, however, the concept of privatization was regarded with some suspicion when it was turned into a general article of faith. ‘How much more of our infrastructure is to be turned over to state-licensed spivs?’ lamented the journalist Philip Norman, as rumours spread about the possible privatization of the London Underground. The former Conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan, now ennobled as the Earl of Stockton, was amongst those outraged by the process, drawing an analogy with a family in financial difficulties that finds itself obliged to sell its assets: ‘First of all the Georgian silver goes. And then all that nice furniture that used to be in the salon. Then the Canalettos go.’ His son, Maurice Macmillan, made the same point in less exalted terms: ‘selling the furniture to pay for the food’. Thatcher responded by taking the image literally, snorting that, unlike the Macmillans, her family had never had any silver to sell, while Ridley was later to stretch the metaphor to breaking point: ‘the “family silver” was costing a great deal in anti-burglar precautions, insurance, cleaning and maintenance. The sale proceeds were not what counted – it was avoiding the running costs.’

To many of those without Canalettos, or even a salon in which to put their nice furniture, the share issues were frequently seen as a fine opportunity to make a little money. The offer price tended to be below the market value, so it was possible to apply as a small shareholder and then sell swiftly at a profit; more than a fifth of adults in the country bought into at least one of the privatizations. For those who lacked the disposable cash to do this, however, there seemed very little gain in the entire process, save for the promise of better services and the certainty of higher prices. A more democratic option had been proposed by the economist Samuel Brittan, whereby the shares would be divided equally between all British adults and simply given to them to do as they wished, but David Owen was one of the few senior politicians to embrace the proposal and he failed to convince his own party of its appeal.

The effects of the privatization programme, and of the measures taken to ensure that the companies were attractive to private enterprise, were widespread. For employees, there was a loss of jobs and of job security. ‘He has this future in British Steel; Nigel’s whole future is as good as sealed,’ sang XTC on their 1979 hit single ‘Making Plans for Nigel’. But by the time of the sell-off in 1988, some 70 per cent of jobs in British Steel had been lost, and Nigel, if he were still there, would have been distinctly nervous about his prospects. The process of ‘rationalization’, of reducing the workforce in anticipation of selling the company off, was satirized in an Alexei Sayle sketch that showed a publishing firm, Prucock & Limpet, cutting down on over-manning in the novels of Charles Dickens: ‘We simply don’t need 127 characters in Martin Chuzzlewit anymore, doing the job that Jeffrey Archer can do with a couple of MPs and a prostitute.’

Then there was a massive increase in the numbers of people owning shares, trebling in the first ten years of Thatcher’s time in office, so that by the end of the decade there were more shareholders than trade unionists in the country. In 1987 Rupert Murdoch discovered that around 20 per cent of Sun readers had bought shares for the first time in the previous months, and told the editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, to introduce a Sun Money page. The Daily Mirror also had a financial section every week, and even the Daily Star made a token effort in the same direction. Talk of bear and bull markets, of options and futures, was briefly heard in the tabloid world. Other changes feeding into what was sold as a new era of popular capitalism included the Building Societies Act of 1986, which allowed societies such as the Abbey National to convert themselves into banks, and a 1988 change in regulations that permitted employees to opt out of the state earnings-related pension scheme (SERPS), prompting a huge growth in the number of those seeking help from financial advisers.

Privatization also injected a flood of new money into advertising, since many of the share issues came with massive publicity campaigns (‘If you see Sid, tell him’ was the slogan for the most famous of these, a British Gas campaign that came with a budget of £22 million). The result was the further bloating of an already excessive industry, for advertising in Britain was enjoying its most spectacular era, feeling confident enough to call in big-name film directors to make television commercials: Ridley Scott for Barclays Bank, Hugh Hudson for the Fiat Strada and, most bizarrely, Ken Russell for Shredded Wheat. Much of this looks in retrospect to have been simply big-budget posturing, for none were as naggingly memorable as the contemporary low-tech campaigns for the likes of Shake ’n’ Vac (applied to one’s carpets, it ‘put the freshness back’) or Kellogg’s Bran Flakes (which were ‘tasty, tasty, very very tasty’). Nor were they as well received, let alone remembered, as the Hovis advert, complete with brass band playing Dvorak’s New World Symphony, which had been made by Ridley Scott in 1974 before he went to Hollywood. (It was parodied in 1981 by comedian Tony Capstick on his hit single ‘Capstick Comes Home’, seeking to put the record straight on the nostalgic mythology being purveyed: ‘We had lots of things in them days they haven’t got today – rickets, diphtheria, Hitler . . .’) But the advertising boom, the instant shininess of a typical commercial break on prime-time ITV, together with the genuine affluence being enjoyed by a substantial proportion of the population, did help change the country’s image of itself.

There was a new feeling that almost anything and everything was for sale, from state-owned industries downwards. Conspicuous consumption was embraced by the media and a whole range of designer brand names became household names, at least in those households where mere consumption failed to bring satisfaction in itself; for in some circles it was no longer sufficient to buy expensive things, now one was obliged to flaunt the labels upon them, as if one feared that others wouldn’t recognize good taste when they saw it and required some form of subtitling. From Lacoste and Fila to Giorgio Armani and Dolce and Gabbana, clothing firms began to proclaim their names on the outside. The most exclusive brands responded by making their name more easily available to those prepared to pay to be used as an advertising hoarding: ‘A pair of faux pearl earrings, a quilted handbag, a bottle of Coco; for a fraction of the price of the Chanel suit, a “wannabe” could access the Chanel aura,’ noted Bevis Hillier in his survey of the era. (The word ‘wannabe’ was characteristic of the times, first spotted as a description of those young female fans of the American pop singer Madonna, who copied her look and sought to emulate her behaviour.)

It wasn’t merely luxuries that began to be marketed in earnest. Things that had previously been thought of as free – or at least free at the point of delivery – were now being packaged for sale: water came not from taps but in bottles, exercise was no longer confined to a jog around the park but involved membership fees at a club or gym, and soon television services were to become available for a monthly subscription. Those who had spent years building a record collection were persuaded to buy it all over again, this time on compact disc, and time itself was available at a price: British Telecom’s speaking clock service now announced that ‘The time sponsored by Accurist will be . . .’, while reproduction furniture was marketed as being pre-distressed, to provide instant patina for those wishing to buy the illusion of history. And in one of the most controversial stories of the era, a woman named Kim Cotton reluctantly became a household name when it was revealed that she had acted as a surrogate mother for another couple, and had been paid £6,500 for her work in carrying their child; the widespread coverage she received ensured that such payments were made illegal.

Nor were the few traces left of the Corinthian sporting ideal immune to the new world of the market-place. Athletics had effectively abandoned its tradition of amateurism in 1981, with Sebastian Coe going on to become the first ‘amateur’ track and field athlete to advertise a product on television (he was selling Horlicks); by 1987 Steve Cram, his successor as Britain’s best middle-distance runner, was reported to be charging £15,000 a time to appear on a British track. That same year an unedifying dispute soiled the image of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race: five American rowers mutinied against the coach and club president of Oxford, thus drawing slightly shocked public attention to the practice of bringing in established foreign athletes on short post-graduate courses to strengthen the teams. And yet there was a glimmer of hope to be found here, for a reserve Oxford team, without the ringers, went on to win the event.

Similarly the world of publishing began to experience a revolution that would be completed the following decade with the abandonment of the Net Book Agreement, the practice that prevented books from being sold below their cover price. This time-honoured agreement was still precariously clinging on to existence in the 1980s, but elsewhere there were signs that the industry was about to be transformed out of all recognition. Indeed it might almost be claimed that it was finally becoming an industry, leaving behind the image of committed amateurism that it had purveyed for so long. A wave of mergers and takeovers saw a succession of smaller publishing houses swallowed up by conglomerates with the reputation of being run by faceless financiers rather than by the kindly, author-friendly old gentlefolk of the fabled past. In 1986 the company Bloomsbury Publishing was founded, claiming that it would cherish the publisher-author relationship as the heart of its business practice, and yet it too represented a major break with the past; boasting what The Times described as ‘an acceptable management mix of smooth marketing men and sympathetic editorial types’, it was launched with a barrage of publicity, backed by a £2 million investment from the City – publishing was now seen as an area of interest to venture capitalists.

As the industry changed, so marketing and promotion, once regarded as being a trifle vulgar, became desirable attributes when publishing a book. Scale was now all-important, so that when Clive Barker was launched as a first-time author with the simultaneous publication of three volumes of short stories, The Books of Blood, it was the biggest event in horror fiction since the emergence of Stephen King the previous decade, and made Barker an instant star. Even in the world of literary fiction, things were not as they had been. The Booker Prize for the best novel by a writer from the Commonwealth or from Ireland, which had been pottering quietly along since 1969, suddenly became a news story in 1980 when two of the biggest names in British literature were seen as slugging it out for the award: Anthony Burgess with Earthly Powers and William Golding with Rites of Passage. The coverage was aided by the fact that the two men each had a book in his back-catalogue that was instantly recognizable to the public through cinematic adaptation (A Clockwork Orange and Lord of the Flies) and both benefited from the resultant publicity, but the real winner was the Booker itself. The following year Salman Rushdie became a major figure in literature when his second novel, Midnight’s Children, won the award, and from that point on the phrase ‘Booker-shortlisted’ was not merely a boast on a paperback jacket, but a guarantee of sales. The annual rigmarole of the long list and the short list and the squabbles between the five-strong judging panel became a regular fixture for the press and the reading public, provoking in equal measure bafflement, as when Keri Hulme’s impenetrable The Bone People won, and outrage, as when Robertson Davies’ What’s Bred in the Bone lost out to Kingsley Amis’ The Old Devils. Like the Oscars, the Booker had become primarily a marketing exercise. And the selling of books was also changing. In 1982 Tim Waterstone, a former manager at W.H. Smith’s, opened the first Waterstone’s bookstore, initiating the move away from the small independent shop towards the American model of supersized retailing. It would take some time for this to become the norm, but the template had been created.

It would be an oversimplification to see the mid-1980s as witnessing the loss of traditional British business virtues of decency and courtesy, where a gentleman’s word was his bond, in the face of a voracious American ethos, with the pursuit of profits at all costs, but there was undoubtedly a sense that an honourable code of values was being left behind. And yet even in those places where American culture was at its most obvious, such as the public’s embrace of television series such as Dallas, Dynasty and Fame, money did not always win the day. The enthusiasm for these shows reached fever pitch in 1980 with 24 million watching on BBC1 the season’s cliff-hanger episode of Dallas in which J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman) was shot; the next episode, which revealed who had done the shooting, was screened some months later, following a summer of fevered speculation in the media, and added another 3.5 million to that total. So big had Dallas become that in 1985 Thames TV put in a secret bid to buy the forthcoming series, offering nearly half as much again as the BBC were then paying. The resultant outcry came not merely from the BBC, but from the other ITV companies, worried that once the informal agreement not to poach shows from another channel was broken, a price war for successful series would result. The IBA threw its weight against Thames, sparking rumours that the company might be stripped of its franchise, and insisted the series be returned to the BBC. The era of the gentlemen’s agreement, it appeared, was not quite over, even if the decision was primarily motivated by self-interest: in the face of the coming threat from multi-channel satellite broadcasting, the established duopoly had chosen to resist the lure of quick money and to close ranks, defending their established practices.

Alasdair Milne, director general of the BBC, called it ‘one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of television’, but it was also one of the more unusual episodes of the mid-1980s generally, for it was seldom that such an outcome was reached. ‘We’re living in a land where sex and horror are the new gods,’ proclaimed Frankie Goes to Hollywood on their 1984 hit ‘Two Tribes’, but they were, as ever, getting a little over-excited; in fact, the moral campaigners had done their best to sweep sex and horror out of sight, and now money ruled virtually unchallenged, as the massive marketing and merchandising campaign for Frankie themselves demonstrated. The new gods were actually the recently discovered tribe known as yuppies, a term born in America to describe the supporters of Gary Hart’s presidential campaign in 1984, and standing for young urban (or upwardly-mobile) professionals.

The concept of the yuppie was initially intended to be positive, to reflect the aspirations of those who had grown up in the shadow of Vietnam and Watergate and now wanted what Hart called ‘a new generation of leadership with new ideas’. By the time it caught on in Britain, however, it had transferred meaning and was instead used in the context of the newly-rich traders in the City of London, following the deregulation of the financial markets in the so-called Big Bang of October 1986, which saw traditional trading floors replaced by computer screens and fusty old business practices driven out by international investment banks. Yuppies too were to be found in the worlds of advertising, public relations and the media, identifiable, it was said, by their fondness for the cumbersome early mobile phones and for massive Filofaxes – a small looseleaf binder intended for the storage of personal information that had been around since the 1920s but suddenly and inexplicably became essential. Frequenting wine bars and bistros, and talking loudly of money in multiples of thousands (now known as Ks), yuppies were noted more for their ostentatious flaunting of newly-made wealth than for their idealism, taste or culture. ‘In the beginning Victoria had been amazed at the depths of his ignorance,’ notes a character in Justin Cartwright’s novel, Look at It this Way, of a successful art director working in advertising: ‘history, literature and science were to him simply sources for visual ideas. They had no standing of their own. He had once asked Victoria who Einstein was “in real life”. He had seen images of him with his electric-shock hair, but had no idea what his day job had been.’

In the second half of the decade, the term came to be self-applied by yuppie wannabes, including most famously Del Trotter in Only Fools and Horses, cheerfully adopting the trappings believed to be essential for the role: ‘Del thinks all you need is a Filofax and red braces,’ mocks his brother, Rodney. Another such was Lynn Packard in Robert Barnard’s novel A City of Strangers: ‘Lynn had many of the characteristics of a yuppie: he dressed like one, he spoke like one (his voice high, somewhere between the hectoring and the hysterical, the vowels twisted by some invisible vocal screw), he played squash and computer games, and got boisterous or objectionable in night-clubs and casinos. But when it came down to it he was not quite young enough, or, crucially, quite upwardly mobile enough to be a yuppie. He was manager of the Foodwise supermarket in town.’ It was hard for the term ‘yuppie’ to survive such bathos, and it largely faded from the vocabulary of all but the laziest of journalists and the activists of the left, for whom it became a cherished insult.

Nevertheless it was possible to discern a definite cultural shift; in the 1960s the Conservative MP Gerald Nabarro had bemoaned the way that in post-war Britain ‘it has been considered in many circles to be slightly “off” to be eager, slightly improper to be thrusting, not done to be ambitious’. Now, such qualities were increasingly looked upon as being acceptable, desirable and celebrated in the highest circles in the land. Of those who graduated from Oxford in 1971, just 59 per cent had found employment in the private sector; a quarter-century later, the proportion had risen to 81 per cent, with the call of public service proving considerably less attractive than that of the City.

The idea that a new tribe, perhaps even a sub-class, was emerging took root and the thrusting young Thatcherite became a staple of 1980s fiction. The purest example was probably Alan B’Stard in the television sitcom The New Statesman, a Conservative MP, blue in tooth and claw (‘nouveau riche little parvenu,’ snaps his father-in-law), whose entry in Who’s Who lists his recreations as: ‘Making money, drinking, driving, dining out on other people’s expenses, boogying, bonking, droit de signeur, grinding the faces of the poor.’ Under criticism from his own leader after being caught out in yet another political outrage, he whines, ‘I was just trying to be true to the spirit of Thatcherism,’ and she snaps back: ‘All you care about is number one.’ At which he’s genuinely baffled: ‘I thought that’s what Thatcherism’s all about.’ Inevitably a platoon of real Conservative MPs was soon drummed up by the newspapers to condemn the series, with Geoffrey Dickens explaining that, although he hadn’t actually seen the series, it was ‘destructive to the fabric of society’.

Synthetic fury also greeted the television drama, Paradise Postponed, written by John Mortimer, of whom MP John Butcher thundered: ‘This oily member of the TV establishment has made money for fifteen years by eroding the self-confidence of the British. Now this up-market punk is making another pile complaining about the loss of self-belief. Inevitably, he pokes elegant fun at loss of socialist conviction but the true venom is reserved for the portrayal of the Tory as an out-and-out twit.’ The twit in question, Leslie Titmuss, was a grammar-school boy whose inexorable rise made him a rich man in the property boom of the early 1970s, then a Conservative MP and ultimately a cabinet minister under Thatcher. The son of a clerk in a brewery, he appeals to a constituency selection meeting on purely Thatcherite terms: ‘You know what my parents are? They’re the true Conservatives! And I can tell you this: they’re tired of being represented by people from the City or folks from up at the Manor. They want one of themselves! You can forget the county families and the city gents and the riverside commuters. They’ll vote for you anyway. What you need to win is my people. The people who know the value of money because they’ve never had it.’ His success is built on his absolute self-confidence, as another character recognizes, wondering ‘what it must be like to have been born without a sense of doubt. Would that be a blessing or a curse or a mere physical deprivation, like being born without a sense of smell?’ Titmuss was believed to have been inspired by Peter Walker, with just a pinch of Norman Tebbit.

The idea that such characters derived personal pleasure from their heartless pursuit of profit seemed to haunt the imagination of their chroniclers. ‘Charles had always enjoyed dismissing people,’ wrote Margaret Drabble of Charles Headleand in her novel The Radiant Way. ‘He had cleared the stables not of filth and corruption but of nice woolly ageing men in their fifties, polite, gentlemanly, incompetent men. He had done it in the name of progress once, in the name of productivity now, but his own impulse had remained the same: the prospect of confrontation or a dismissal, be it of a fellow-director or of a hundred or two employees had stiffened his sinews and made his spirits rise.’ Just to be clear that we should know where to stand, Headleand continues to fight the good fight at home, where he enjoys a sado-masochistic relationship with his wife, Liz. Likewise Robert Barnard’s risible character Lynn Packard, the yuppie manager of Foodwise, also had a new spring in his step as the sun shone brightly in the high noon of Thatcherism: ‘Previously he had been aggressively out for himself. Now that had widened, had become an article of faith: self-interest was the guiding principle of life, the market was supreme, and people who disregarded that fact were heretics, or just plain ignorant. He had become a born-again free marketer.’ Sadly, in this instance, his wife is less taken with this development than he might have hoped: ‘The thrusting young man she had found exciting; the strident evangelist, she had to admit, was something of a bore.’

In truth, of course, the character type was far from new. Edward Fox-Ingleby, the Conservative MP who narrates A.G. Macdonell’s 1938 satirical novel Autobiography of a Cad, is almost indistinguishable from Alan B’Stard: ‘I am, and have always been, a friend of the people, and a democrat of democrats, but that has never prevented me from detesting and execrating the people at the same time with all my heart.’ Like his counterparts in the 1980s he too was in thrall to financiers, as he showed when he became responsible for planning the future shape of the City of London: ‘The redundant churches in the City were to be pulled down, with all the reverence due to Wren’s reputation and, of course, to the sacredness of the sites; the sites were to be reverently deconsecrated and sold to the banks and insurance companies, the financial stability of which is the cause of the eminence of London as the money centre of the world.’ All that had changed was that what had once been the exception now seemed more like the rule.

As if to ensure that parallels were drawn with the bad old days, the television comedy series Brass revived all the old clichés of callous 1930s industrialists in a spirit of gleeful caricature, with Timothy West’s portrayal of arms manufacturer Bradley Hardacre a particular joy. ‘If it’s a crime to have initiative and enterprise, and take pleasure in the exhilarating cut and thrust of the marketplace, where this country sinks or swims – very well, I plead guilty,’ he declares piously, before looking at his watch and adding: ‘I can’t stand here talking all day; I’ve got men to lay off.’ Little excites him more than ‘the thrill of stripping underused assets away from the body of some moribund company to reveal the vital, throbbing, profitable form within.’

A similar, if more high-minded, attempt to satirize the present by use of the past came in Caryl Churchill’s play Serious Money (1987), which emerged from the Royal Court Theatre to enjoy success in the commercial world of the West End. Written in rhyming couplets, with deliberate reference to the seventeenth-century genre of the city comedy, it even incorporated some of Thomas Shadwell’s 1692 drama The Volunteers as a prologue, as though suggesting that, despite Thatcher’s claim to Victorian values, the modern world was reverting to an even earlier stage of naked money-worship. Certainly the greed depicted here had little in common with any nineteenth-century version of conservatism that, say, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury might have recognized.

But the most successful marriage of present standards to past situations came in the unlikely form of the historical sitcom Blackadder. The first series, The Black Adder, created and written by Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis, was set in an alternative history, in which Henry Tudor lost the battle of Bosworth in 1485, with Atkinson in the title role as an ineffectual and vain member of the Yorkist royal family. As the first major piece by one of the stars of Not the Nine O’Clock News, it had great hopes vested in it, but although it attracted an audience (a larger one, indeed, than any other comedy show during its run, with the exception of the venerable Candid Camera), there was a sense of disappointment when it was discovered that it wasn’t really very funny. But the BBC kept faith and commissioned a new series. Atkinson moved to focus exclusively on acting, allowing the recruitment of Ben Elton to become Curtis’ co-writer, a dream-team combination of the Oxbridge and alternative currents in comedy, and the subsequent series – Blackadder II, set in Elizabethan times, Blackadder the Third, in Regency Britain, and Blackadder Goes Forth, in the trenches of the First World War – established it as one of the great television sitcoms.

Where the first Blackadder had been notable for his stupidity, his descendants (all played by Atkinson) were cut from a very different cloth. Edmund Blackadder, in the Curtis/Elton incarnation, was a Thatcherite parody stranded out of his time: a ‘lower-middle-class yobbo’, as Pitt the Younger calls him. Clever, casually callous and desperate for social and financial advancement, he would have enjoyed the company of Leslie Titmuss and Alan B’Stard, but has the misfortune to be born (and re-born) in a world where he’s surrounded instead by entrenched interests, facing alone an establishment that always beats him back into place. His constant attempts to improve his situation are repeatedly thwarted by the whims and stupidity of those with authority over him, so that his only recourse is to outdo them with the wit of his repartee, score snide points where possible and vent his rage on his even more stupid servant, Baldrick (‘the Creature from the Black Latrine’), played by Tony Robinson, a future member of Labour’s national executive committee. His powerlessness in the face of his superiors became the central theme in particular of Blackadder Goes Forth, the last episode of which, ‘Goodbyeee’, ended with him and Baldrick, together with Lieutenant the Honourable George St Barleigh (Hugh Laurie) and Captain Darling (Tim McInnerny), advancing into No Man’s Land to their certain death. That episode was also one of the most powerful anti-war statements to emerge from a generation that had been partially shaped by the revival of CND.

The fictional Thatcherites were matched in real life by concerns that the next generation of Conservatives was drifting ever further from One Nation traditions. The Federation of Conservative Students was closed down in 1986 by Norman Tebbit, himself no moderate but nonetheless horrified by a libertarian tendency that ventured beyond such straightforward issues as the support for apartheid and the repatriation of immigrants into much more charged areas: the legalization of drugs and the abolition of the age of consent. Such arguments never quite came in from the fringes, but even in the parliamentary party, there was a new kind of Tory receiving the leader’s patronage who wasn’t to everyone’s tastes. Thatcher, wrote Edwina Currie in her diary, was ‘wide open to the ideas of people like John Redwood and David Willets (blond prat), all young, fit, wealthy and ignorant, and, when they’re not wealthy yet, at least trying to forget their poor past’. A few days later she added Peter Lilley to the list, with an almost audible shudder, as she looked on the future of Toryism: ‘Those staring eyes, those faces inappropriately young (Lilley is older than me) without smile lines or wrinkles, those unlived-in bodies. Not my kind of people.’

The fictional images of Thatcherite characters were, of course, largely created by those who opposed everything the modern Conservative Party represented, and as such were most revealing of the prejudices and concerns of their makers. Thatcher’s endorsement of materialism was regularly attacked – though seeking to improve living standards for the majority is not an entirely dishonourable aim for a government – while there was also a horrified but irresistible fascination with the alchemical ability of financiers and bankers to conjure up money where none had previously existed. And that fascination itself was satirized in David Lodge’s novel Nice Work, where an academic specializing in post-structuralist theory finds himself getting interested in the processes of the City: ‘This isn’t business,’ he explains to his partner. ‘It’s not about buying and selling real commodities. It’s all on paper, or computer screens. It’s abstract. It has its own rather seductive jargon – arbitrageur, deferred futures, floating rate. It’s like literary theory.’ So seduced does he become that he ultimately abandons his career to become a merchant banker instead: ‘I regard myself as simply exchanging one semiotic system for another.’

Even if the caricatures were inevitably simplistic, they should nonetheless have caused some concern to the right, for by sheer weight of numbers, if nothing else, they suggested the aim of establishing a new social consensus was not being achieved. The slogan ‘greed is good’ had, it seemed, limited cultural resonance; it might motivate behaviour but was seldom to be acknowledged even to oneself. That slogan came from Michael Douglas’ character Gordon Gecko in Wall Street (1987), one of a string of major American films that ran through the decade – Trading Places (1983) and Pretty Woman (1990) were others – and that explicitly rejected the new orthodoxy, offering romantic images of solid old business values in opposition to the modern world of corporate raiding and insider trading. The moral coming out of Hollywood was, in the words of Gecko’s antithesis Carl Fox in Wall Street, that one should ‘create instead of living off the buying and selling of others’. Even in the land of the free market, it seemed, the message of Reaganomics and Thatcherism was struggling to combat older myths. And as the decade wore on, and stories of corruption and insider dealing began to circulate, so it began to seem to some of the more astute commentators that the Conservatives were storing up trouble for themselves by associating too closely with ‘that stinking, sweating, heaving mess of the square mile of the City’ (as a character in the television series Bird of Prey described it).

‘Here are a group of their chums earning enormous sums,’ warned Peter Kellner in the Independent in December 1986, ‘and the impression is gaining ground that many of them are spivs.’ The following month the story broke of dubious practices in the attempted takeover of Distillers by Guinness, which ultimately led to several prominent businessmen being jailed for false accounting and theft. Such stories – if not court cases – proliferated as the decade progressed. Most famously, in 1990 inspectors from the Department of Trade concluded Mohamed and Ali Fayed had ‘dishonestly misrepresented their origins, wealth and business interests’ when buying the company House of Fraser, including Harrods department store, in 1985. There were calls for the Fayeds to be banned from holding company directorships, but no action was taken.

Kellner’s description caught the mood of the times: the yuppies and the City traders never endeared themselves to the general public, being widely seen as barrow-boys who had simply switched from selling women’s tights to dealing in oil futures. But those on the other side of the Thatcherite revolution in business, where old-fashioned entrepreneurial activity was being encouraged, enjoyed a much higher status, regardless of their personal political persuasions. Figures such as Anita Roddick of the Body Shop, Andrew Lloyd-Webber of the Really Useful Group and Alan Sugar of hi-fi and electronics firm Amstrad were celebrated as the creators of their own companies and therefore deserving of their wealth. Recreating the great capitalist icon of the self-made businessman, they were, unlike the yuppies, perceived as being on the side of Carl Fox, not that of Gordon Gecko.

The occasional impression of misguided amateurish enthusiasm only enhanced the appeal, as when Clive Sinclair, the man who had brought the pocket calculator and the home computer to the mass market, launched the C5, billed as the first electric car. Actually it was a battery-powered tricycle that seated a single person, was open to the elements and, though marketed for use on the streets, resembled nothing so much as the wooden crates on wheels made by Wellington in the Daily Mirror’s comic strip The Perishers; it was of comparable power as well, with a top speed of just 15 miles per hour. A commercial disaster, it attracted barely more than 15,000 purchasers, despite retailers like Comet slashing the price from £400 to £250, and within ten months of the launch in 1985 the company, Sinclair Vehicles, had gone into receivership. The Sinclair C5 immediately became the butt of comedians’ jokes, and the image wasn’t improved when a Bristol man named Anthony Thompson became the first person convicted of taking and driving away one of the vehicles, having not perhaps fully thought through the problems of fleeing from the scene of the crime; the owner ‘reported it missing and police caught Thompson nearby with the machine’.

Biggest of all these entrepreneurs was Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin company at the tail-end of 1960s idealism. Through the following decade Virgin had built a substantial brand, retailing and then releasing records, and Branson had become a major figure within the music industry, particularly when he signed the Sex Pistols, then on the rebound after being sacked by EMI and A&M. There had been further ventures into book publishing and film production, but to the wider world he was largely unknown, to the extent that when, in 1984, he announced he was launching a new transatlantic airline, he was invariably described in the press as a ‘pop tycoon’ or a ‘pop millionaire’, identified principally as the label-boss of Boy George (Culture Club had accounted for 40 per cent of Virgin’s profits the previous year). The enhanced status that the airline gave him was seized with great gusto, as he discovered an appetite and aptitude for publicity, and thereafter he missed no opportunity for self-promotion; aided by such stunts as breaking the record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic by boat, and making the first Atlantic crossing by hot-air balloon, he ended the decade as the best-known businessman in the country. He was also one of the few with genuine popular appeal; his boy-scout enthusiasm was irresistible to the media, and his informal, jumper-clad image, complete with shaggy blond hair and beard, fed into the veneration of amateurism, giving him the appearance of being the capitalist equivalent of a trendy Church of England vicar. In fact, he fitted perfectly the original Gary Hart definition of a yuppie, but benefited from sharing little in common with yuppies as commonly understood in Britain.

So rapidly did his profile rise that when, in 1986, he decided to follow the example of the likes of the Body Shop by floating Virgin on the stock market, there were more applicants than for any other share issue that decade, apart from the de-nationalized companies. It did not, however, prove to be a happy experience. Branson had previously operated on instinct, approaching business ventures with the same approach that prompted him into ballooning: he enjoyed, he said, ‘setting myself huge, apparently unachievable, challenges and trying to rise above them.’ That, he discovered, was not how the City worked, and he rapidly found himself stifled by the short-term caution of his new directors. ‘I began to lose faith in myself. I felt uneasy about making the rapid decisions I have always made,’ he wrote. ‘In many ways 1987, our year of being a public company, was Virgin’s least creative.’ By 1988 he had had enough, and a management buyout brought the company back into private ownership. His evident sense of relief at being free again to pursue his own ventures reinforced public suspicion of the City.

With the reduction of council housing, and with changing social attitudes, the concrete tower blocks that had typified the 1960s and early 1970s also receded from view, many of them demolished to be replaced by low-rise blocks constructed in traditional, uncontroversial bricks and tiles. Supplanting the tower block as the most familiar architectural image of the period was arguably the out-of-town Tesco superstore, normally built in a vernacular style that might have made sense in a market town but which looked decidedly odd as a single-storey building sprawling over 70,000 square feet and adrift in the midst of a vast car park.

Or perhaps the icon of the times was the ‘themed’ shopping mall, as seen in historic cities like Bath, York and Winchester, and from which not even Ruth Rendell’s fictional Kingsmarkham could escape, with the construction of ‘the Barringdean Centre, the new shopping centre built to look like a castle. That was the style modern planners thought suitable on the outskirts of an ancient Sussex town where nothing genuinely medieval remained’. Despite the intentions, it ‘looked less like a real castle than a toy one, the kind you have to assemble from a hundred plastic bits and pieces’. The largest of the new malls – the largest in Europe – was the Metro Centre in Gateshead, a vast temple to consumerism. There was a time, reflects a character in David Pinner’s novel There’ll Always Be an England, when ‘we built cathedrals to the greater glory of God and as monuments to our own artistic genius. Today we build glittering shopping centres that sell things that we don’t really need to buy, in order to convince ourselves we’re living life to the full’. Others were also worried by what these developments revealed about modern Britain. ‘With their sanitized environments, crowd control systems, air-conditioning and surveillance cameras,’ noted i-D magazine, the malls ‘have become a vision of a free market future, where there’s nowhere to go but the shops, and all you have to do is spend.’ In 1976 Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols had sneered, ‘Your future dream is a shopping scheme’; in 1989 the Design Museum, funded by private money, was opened by Margaret Thatcher and proclaimed, as part of its ethos, that shopping was ‘one of the legitimate cultural pursuits of the eighties’.

What was officially intended as the architectural embodiment of the age was the regenerated area of east London that had once been known as the docks but was now rebranded Docklands, almost as though, in the absence of any working docks, they were to become a theme park. A new quango, the London Docklands Development Corporation, was set up, charged with encouraging private enterprise to relocate to the area and thereby to restore its fortunes. To this end, virtually all planning restrictions were removed, though huge amounts of public money were required to sugar the pill and to provide the necessary transport infrastructure. Even so, it was hard to claim that the results were particularly impressive in architectural terms: One Canary Wharf – for which Thatcher laid the foundation stone in 1987 – may have been Europe’s tallest office block, but it was also a profoundly boring building. More emblematic still, some thought, was the News International print works in Wapping, which even the official history of The Times admitted ‘could lay a reasonable claim to being one of the most ugly superstructures in London’.

Other projects to regenerate former docks were undertaken in Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow and Liverpool. Combined with the retail parks and super stores, and with the inexorable spread of McDonald’s and subsequently Burger King restaurants, the result was a built environment that looked very different to that which had gone before. The 1984 Virgin Films’ production of George Orwell’s novel 1984 starring John Hurt and Richard Burton made the point in reverse. Slightly dull and uninspired though the movie was, it remained true to the look and culture of the novel: the weaponry is old-fashioned, television screens are black and white, the clothing is drab, and middle-class housing is based on modernist blocks while the proles still live in back-to-backs. Writing in an era of austerity, and with the imagery of war and Stalinism uppermost in his mind, Orwell had conjured up an England that was a clear extension of the 1940s: a monocultural society crippled by rationing, emasculated by an institutionalized fear of sex and stifled by enforced conformity. Even as recently as the end of the 1970s, this was still recognizable as a potential vision of a future Britain, but by 1984 itself, the year that had stalked the British cultural imagination for so long, it was starting to look hopelessly dated, rendered obsolete by the shiny new consumerism of rampant Thatcherism.

Part of the new Britain that was being built was a desire to take centre-stage in the sporting world, reflecting the growing financial muscle of what was now known as the leisure industry. Given the country’s history and reputation for hooliganism, football tournaments were clearly not an option, and attention turned instead to the Olympic Games. In 1979 Horace Cutler, then leader of the GLC, suggested that London might try to stage the Olympics in 1988, not having hosted them since the Austerity Games of 1948, and a proposal was costed out, with a new stadium in Docklands, though the projected loss of £221 million (expected to double if inflation continued on current trends) seemed somewhat less than attractive, and the bid was ultimately not submitted. Then it was Birmingham’s turn, bidding for the 1992 Games; when the votes were cast, the city came fifth in a field of six, narrowly beating Amsterdam but easily losing out to Barcelona, a result matched next time round by Manchester, which lost out to Atlanta, though it did manage to attract more support than Belgrade.

The fact that it was Birmingham and Manchester rather than London making the bids probably doomed the attempts, but was revealing of the ambitions of cities beyond the capital to reinvent themselves. Birmingham in particular, having recently built the National Exhibition Centre, was keen to promote itself internationally, a project that came with some successes as well as some humiliating failures. The appointment of Simon Rattle as the principal conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was a major coup, as was the subsequent relocation of Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet to become the Birmingham Royal Ballet, but the Birmingham Superprix, a short-lived experiment to stage a Formula 3000 road-race in the city, could hardly claim the same.

More consistently impressive was the marketing campaign launched in 1983 under the slogan ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’, which came with an image of Mr Happy from Roger Hargreaves’ ‘Mr Men’ books, and was intended to give Scotland’s biggest city a more friendly image for business and tourism. (A car sticker for its nearest rival proclaimed ‘Edinburgh’s Slightly Superior’.) The success of the campaign was partially responsible for Glasgow being named Cultural Capital of Europe for 1990, a decision that initially attracted much media derision – previous recipients of the honour had been somewhat more obvious choices, including Florence, Athens, Berlin and Paris – but which proved to be highly successful. In the build-up to that event, the city was chosen as the venue for a national garden festival in 1988, following on from Liverpool in 1984 (in the interim there had been a similar festival in Stoke-on-Trent). Again, it was not received with whole-hearted enthusiasm by everyone: ‘City of Culture,’ moans a character in Iain Banks’ novel Espedair Street (1987): ‘bloody garden exhibitions; just mair excuses fur the businessmen tae make a killin. Fresh paint on the double yellow lines an a bigger subsidy fur the opera.’

The rise of other cities was primarily at the expense of Liverpool, which had once been unquestionably the second cultural capital of the country, or possibly the first, if American poet Allen Ginsberg was to be believed: ‘Liverpool is at the present moment the centre of the consciousness of the human universe,’ he had declared. But that had been in the mid-1960s, and even then, at the height of the Merseybeat boom that made the city internationally fashionable, there had been problems; while the rest of the country was largely prospering, Liverpool’s unemployment stood at 30,000 and decline was setting in. The two decades to 1985 saw the population of the city fall by a third, with the downturn becoming particularly sharp in the Thatcher years, resulting in the loss of 65,000 jobs, most of them in manufacturing and in the docks, as Britain’s trade turned away from the Atlantic and towards Europe. Little of this was unique to Liverpool – Birmingham, for example, lost 40 per cent of its manufacturing jobs and 20 per cent of its population between 1973 and 1983 – but it was Merseyside that became symbolic of the depressed north, perhaps because it had further to fall. For here the economic slump was matched by a cultural waning, as film critic Alexander Walker noted when writing of the 1985 movie Letter to Brezhnev, set in the city: ‘Liverpool, once the pride and a great part of the profit of 1960s Beatlemania, is now a city ousted from its place in pop mythology by the depression of the 1980s.’

Whatever the show’s merits, however, its relentless depiction of hard times did little to enhance the national image of Liverpool. Nor did Bread, a hugely popular sitcom created by Carla Lane and first broadcast in 1986. Centred on Nellie Boswell (Jean Boht) and her five grown-up children, its principal contribution can be seen in retrospect to have been the blending of sitcom and soap conventions. To the Manor Born had earlier made popular the concept of a story arc, with the courtship and ultimate marriage of Audrey fforbes-Hamilton and Richard DeVere offering a way out of the traditional sitcom impasse, but Bread took this considerably further, giving all the major characters continuing storylines. Significantly the highest viewing figures came with a 1988 episode that saw the wedding of Nellie’s sole daughter Aveline (Gilly Coman) to Oswald, the climax to the fourth series but not an ending, for this was only halfway through the show’s run. Such developments had previously been seen in American series – the appeal of shows like Taxi and Cheers, for example, lay almost as much in their plotlines as in their jokes – but were still new to British television.

At the time, however, attention was more focused on the family’s resilience in the face of adversity. ‘We run a business, a survival business,’ insists Nellie. ‘Everyone pulls their weight. We don’t want any weak links in the chain.’ And the need for survival tactics is evident in a society that is looking decidedly shakey, so much so that even the Catholic church is seen in decline: ‘Oh Lord, where has the fear gone?’ laments a priest. Some critics praised the series for showing that ‘the famous Liverpool sense of humour and the famous Liverpool capacity for family loyalty are proof against all the vicissitudes of inner-city decay’. Others were less impressed, and denounced it either for celebrating welfare fraud, or for perpetuating the image of the city as being full of scroungers. Its most striking character was the leather-trousered Joey (Peter Howitt), who drove a Jaguar but was seldom seen earning money except by exploiting the benefits system, a theme that dominated much of the family’s existence: ‘We got a booklet from the Social Security office, and we read it from cover to cover,’ says Aveline. ‘It’s amazing, the things you can claim for.’ It was, as it happens, an overly rosy picture of the system, which was primarily based on discretionary grants. More common in real life was the experience of a Coventry man, reported by Beatrix Campbell, who applied to the DHSS for a clothing grant to replace his one pair of trousers which had acquired holes: ‘They told me that the trousers would need to be stolen from me to qualify. But they couldn’t be because I never take them off.’ (Those grants that did exist would later be replaced by loans from the Social Fund.)

It all amounted to a very negative portrayal of Liverpool, and the popular image of the city was adversely affected during the 1980s. ‘People in other parts of the country are actually frightened of us,’ said Bobby Shack, a locally popular nightclub comedian. ‘If you meet Londoners, they don’t want to know you.’ Yorkshire-born Alan Bennett referred to it as ‘that sentimental, self-dramatizing place’, an impression that was hardly corrected by Beryl Bainbridge’s book English Journey (inspired by J.B. Priestley’s 1934 classic), which said that the question of who was responsible for the city’s decline wasn’t important: ‘It hardly matters now. It’s too late. Someone murdered Liverpool and got away with it.’ The city’s depressed state inspired a series of terrace chants from fans of other football clubs: ‘You’ve got one job between you’, sung to the tune of ‘Guantanamera’, and a rewriting of Liverpool FC’s anthem ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’:

Sign on, sign on

With no hope in your heart

And you’ll never work again,

You’ll never work again.

Such taunts were, in part at least, a tribute to the continuing success of Liverpool and Everton football clubs, who, between them, won the league championship every year from 1982 to 1988. For much of that period too, a generation of Liverpool bands inspired by punk continued to innovate: Teardrop Explodes, Echo and the Bunnymen, Dead or Alive, Frankie Goes to Hollywood. But in both football and rock and roll, the baton was ultimately to be passed to north-eastern rivals in Manchester, even if the change wasn’t immediately apparent in either instance. No one suspected in 1986 that the arrival of manager Alex Ferguson at Manchester United was to herald an unprecedented period of domination by a single club in English football, even if he did make it clear early on that his ambition was ‘to knock Liverpool off their fucking perch’.

Nor was it obvious in November 1983 when Frankie Goes to Hollywood broke into the charts with their debut single ‘Relax’ that, although it would go on to reach No. 1 and sell a million copies in Britain, it would be eclipsed in cultural terms by the achievement of a Manchester band also enjoying their first hit that same month: the Smiths with their second release, ‘This Charming Man’. That record never got higher than No. 25 and during their lifetime the group only managed two singles that reached the top ten, but even in 1980s pop music, sales figures were occasionally deceptive, and it was the Smiths, not Frankie, who were to go down in rock history as the Beatles of their generation. That status was not entirely justified, for the Smiths never had the same cross-class appeal enjoyed by the biggest rock acts, as the Style Council’s Mick Talbot pointed out when it was put to him that the band’s singer Morrissey was a spokesman for youth: ‘He’s only a spokesman if you go to college or university.’ Nonetheless, Manchester did, for a while at least, take on the mantle of being the country’s most important rock city – not least because of the promotional abilities of Tony Wilson, the head of Factory Records – while Liverpool never regained its pre-eminence.

Neither Frankie Goes To Hollywood nor the Smiths, as it happened, were present for the defining musical event of the mid-1980s, Live Aid, the concert set up to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. Frankie didn’t appear because they turned down the invitation, though vocalist Holly Johnson had sung on the preceding Band Aid record ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, and the Smiths didn’t appear because they weren’t big enough to be invited in the first place; if they had been considered, Morrissey’s condemnation of that single might possibly have scuppered their chances: ‘One can have great concern for the people of Ethiopia,’ he explained, ‘but it’s another thing to inflict daily torture on the people of England. It was an awful record considering the mass of talent involved.’

He was perfectly correct about the quality of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’. Co-written by Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats and Midge Ure of Ultravox, it featured the cream of the current chart stars, and judged on musical merit was very poor indeed. But, as Geldof repeatedly pointed out, ‘This is not just any record. It is a way of helping to stop people from dying.’ The record went on to sell three and a half million copies and did undoubtedly did save lives, while Live Aid, the subsequent all-star concert, raised an estimated £150 million for the cause. Staged in July 1985, Live Aid started at Wembley with the Band of the Coldstream Guards, ended some seventeen hours later in Philadelphia with a performance by a mixed crowd of stars singing the American charity single ‘We Are the World’, and was punctuated by Geldof appealing for donations (though, despite popular memory, he never actually called on people to ‘Give us your fucking money’). It was televised in its entirety on BBC, and so successful was the broadcast that it was reported that shops experienced the worst day of Saturday trading ever recorded.

It was an extraordinary occasion, and one that most of the population embraced with enormous enthusiasm, though inevitably there were some doubters. ‘In a period where the very ethos of a planned, socialized and welfarized society is running down,’ wrote New Socialist, ‘a happy story where an individual can be seen to put the world to rights is of tremendous ideological value. Value, that is, to an interest group which depends on fostering Victorian charity and free-market fantasies.’ More entertainingly, it aroused the ire of playwright John Osborne: ‘A generation of self-besotted yoof that can be gulled by such dismal stuff deserves the fine mess they’ve gotten us into,’ he ranted, though his charge seemed a little unfair; the state of British society, let alone of the catastrophe afflicting Ethiopia, could hardly be blamed entirely on the youth of the nation. There were also those who pointedly drew attention to the fabulous career boost that the concert gave to the acts that appeared, though Geldof, whose inspiration the entire project had been and whose motives were impossible to impugn, was one of the very few who benefited not at all in terms of sales. And as a musical spectacle, some critics argued, it was not all that one might wished. ‘A shambles,’ wrote Terry Coleman in the Guardian. ‘One of the worst shows I’ve ever seen,’ added Jonathan King in the Sun, denouncing the ‘self-interested motives of the bands involved’.

The effect on the industry, however, was profound, bestowing upon it legitimacy and respectability, qualities that have seldom been productive of great rock and roll. Joan Baez, who opened the Philadelphia show, wrote of looking out at a much more homogenous audience than she was used to; she dubbed them yumarfs, ‘young upwardly mobile American rock fans’, and their taste was to dominate the next generation of rock, with its ever bigger tours of the world’s sports stadia. Music was already beginning to turn away from the political engagement that had characterized the early years of the 1980s, but Live Aid hastened that process, replacing politics with charity, abandoning commitment for the more nebulous concept of caring. And while receipts had always a key part of pop – it is the only field of artistic endeavour that has always defined itself by weekly charts of comparative sales – there now seemed to dawn an era where a veneration of sheer size was the only measure of success. Even during Live Aid itself, Midge Ure found himself worrying that industry egos were destroying the purity of the project: ‘All of us had built this organization to fight against huge, big conglomerates, to cut through the red tape. Now we were doing the exact same thing, becoming what we vowed never to be.’ The following year, Norman Tebbit turned up at the British Phonographic Institute award ceremony (later known as the Brits) to present a BPI outstanding contribution award to Elton John and to Wham!, congratulating them on breaking open new markets with their concerts in the Soviet Union and China respectively. It was a far cry from the Specials denouncing the ghost towns of the Thatcherite recession.

By the end of the decade the Glastonbury festival, one of the last great survivors of the idealistic hippie era, had also been transformed. It had long ceased to be a free event, but had retained its radical credentials by donating profits to CND from 1981 onwards. But in 1987, remembered the organizer, Michael Eavis, ‘We had an invasion of drug dealers. They arrived in their new BMWs, and we knew we had to do something about them.’ The festival was not staged the following year and when it resumed in 1989, at a time when the music scene was dominated by illegal free raves, it had become a far more respectable event: for the first time, the police were involved in the planning and monitoring of the event, with the result that there were 356 arrests for possession of drugs. ‘It made the world of difference,’ reflected Eavis.

Where rock music led, comedy was not far behind; indeed each exerted a reciprocal influence on the other. There had been a series of high-profile benefit gigs for Amnesty International dating back to the Secret Policeman’s Ball in 1976, primarily comedic in their casts but with musical contributions that had included Bob Geldof in 1981, while Bono, singer with Irish band U2, was later to cite the events as a key inspiration on his own campaigning: ‘I saw the Secret Policeman’s Ball and it became a part of me. It sowed a seed.’ The first Comic Relief, in 1986, followed the same course: live shows at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London that were then edited down for television, raising funds for famine relief. But two years later Comic Relief turned itself into a conventional telethon, taking up seven and a half hours of primetime television on BBC1, in imitation of the already established Children in Need, though with a plastic red nose replacing Pudsey Bear as a logo; some six million people were estimated to have taken part in fund-raising around the event. Dominated by the likes of Lenny Henry, Griff Rhys Jones and Rowan Atkinson, the television coverage also featured some of the more traditional acts from the older variety tradition, leading to some unlikely encounters backstage as, for example, when Ben Elton found himself chatting with Jim Davidson and asked if he was going to stay all evening. ‘No,’ Davidson replied deadpan, playing up to his stereotype on the alternative circuit. ‘I’ve got a National Front meeting at nine.’

As with Live Aid, there were critics: ‘every programme had idiots wearing plastic noses and behaving stupidly,’ wrote Kenneth Williams in 1988. ‘I have never been more sick of all this charity crap than in the last few years! It has become a mundane gimmick now and lost all the novelty value it once possessed: just an excuse for a lot of people to indulge themselves.’ And again there was the danger of charity and commerce combining to draw the teeth of a dissident art form. In a parallel development, the former chaos of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival was fast being turned into a corporate event, serving as annual auditions for alternative comedians seeking to break into television: ‘Agents and directors of production companies with Filofaxes would sit frowning through shows,’ recalled Mark Steel, ‘occasionally consulting each other to ask, “Could we use this?”’

There was, however, one major exception to youth culture’s turn away from politics. Red Wedge, launched in 1985, was an initiative led primarily by Paul Weller and Billy Bragg that was intended to encourage political participation by young people. Closely associated with the Labour Party, though never officially a part of it, Red Wedge staged a series of concerts through the country that featured a range of acts including the Communards, Aswad, Madness, Lloyd Cole and even the Smiths, before going on to work at a grassroots level, setting up local youth projects. Comedians like Dawn French and Lenny Henry, as well as the inevitable Ben Elton, also showed up at various events, as did David Yip of The Chinese Detective. Bragg saw it as essentially a one-way street (‘we’re doing the party a mega fucking favour’), and Weller was later to express scepticism about the Labour politicians who were supposed to be behind the project: ‘They were all in for themselves,’ he said. ‘It was all firm handshakes and distant eyes.’ But Neil Kinnock at least was an enthusiastic supporter, perhaps seeing it as a chance to redeem his musical credibility after appearing in a video for comic actress Tracey Ullman’s version of ‘My Guy’ the previous year, a collaboration that did neither any favours – coming off the back of three consecutive top ten hits, the record failed to make the top twenty, and Ullman’s recording career was never to attain the same heights again.

Red Wedge was at least more successful than that, though it was to produce its own disappointments. On the night of the subsequent general election in 1987 (Kinnock was on the cover of the NME that week), a party was held at the Mean Fiddler in London, which sank slowly into gloom as the results came in. ‘The way I felt,’ said Billy Bragg, ‘was that somebody who I had great faith in – the British public – had betrayed me. It wasn’t a personal betrayal but I had to accept that 42 per cent of the people who I sit with on the tube or the bus would actually vote for Thatcher.’ But if the initiative didn’t succeed in swinging the electoral arithmetic to Labour, it did have an impact on the party itself, according to Annajoy David, a former vice-chair of CND who ran the campaign: ‘Red Wedge gave the Labour Party its confidence back,’ she insisted, adding that ‘the big cultural message did get through.’ That was certainly true in the longer term, for just as Rock Against Racism had made the National Front a deeply unattractive option for youth in the late-1970s, so the campaigning of various leftist musicians in the mid-1980s helped shift public opinion back towards liberalism and away from the moral right. LABOUR USES GAY JIMMY TO WIN OVER THE VOTERS screamed a Sun headline and, though it was hardly a shock revelation – for surely there were few pop fans who didn’t know that Jimmy Somerville, formerly of Bronski Beat and now of the Communards, was homosexual – the paper had the makings of a point: the fact that no comparable rock star would have dreamt of campaigning for the Tories did ultimately make a difference to cultural sensibilities. (In 1986 the Sun also revealed that two members of the Hull band, the Housemartins, were gay, which was news to the group, who all happened to be heterosexual.)

As it turned out, Red Wedge was the last great flourish for politically committed rock music, eclipsed in the election year of 1987 by the success of the songwriting and production team of Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman. Having already established themselves as makers of hi-NRG hits for the likes of Hazell Dean and Divine, and scoring a No. 1 hit with Dead or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)’, Stock Aitken and Waterman re-emerged in 1987 as purveyors of lightweight dance-pop, with a succession of new acts – Mel and Kim, Sinitta, Sonia – as well as the already established Bananarama and Samantha Fox, the latter having graduated from Page Three, and two Australian soap stars, Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue. There was also Rick Astley, who joined the company on the Youth Opportunity Programme, one of the government’s schemes for the young unemployed, and ended up with a short-lived but incredibly successful career, reaching No. 1 around the world with ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ and ‘Together Forever’.

Little here was new – there were strong echoes of Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, who had been similarly ubiquitous in the days of glitter pop the previous decade – but the sheer inanity and production-line quality of the records aroused the ire of many critics. This was, many claimed, nothing more than cynical exploitation of artists and audiences alike – again hardly a novel development in pop music – but the instantly identifiable sound was undeniably popular and it even exported successfully to America, to the distress of critics everywhere. ‘I think all that is coming to an end,’ reflected Mark Ellen, the editor of Q magazine in August 1988, ‘and we are seeing the rise of singer-songwriters like Tracy Chapman with songs that are actually about something.’ He was wrong; the following year Stock Aitken and Waterman scored seven No. 1 hits in Britain, ending the decade with their inferior remake of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ at the top of the charts.

Even as those records were providing the soundtrack for the latter years of Thatcherism, there emerged on Friday Night Live in the spring of 1987 the comedy character who seemed to capture the mood of the times. Created by Harry Enfield and known only by his catchphrase of ‘Loadsamoney’, the character was intended to satirize the greed of the boom, a loutish London plasterer who shouted with a kind of infantile aggression about his restricted areas of interest – cars, women and money – while waving a huge wad of banknotes in the faces of the audience. (The fistful of cash was inspired by the behaviour Enfield had seen on the terraces of Tottenham Hotspur, as London fans taunted supporters of visiting clubs from the impoverished north in the same manner as police officers had goaded striking miners.) ‘All you need to know about politics,’ he leered, ‘is that Mrs Thatcher’s done a lot of good for the country, but you wouldn’t want to shag it.’

Like Johnny Speight’s creation Alf Garnett, however, Loadsamoney was picked up by those he was supposed to be satirizing, much to Enfield’s displeasure. ‘I think he’s a complete bastard,’ he insisted, outlining his distaste for rampant capitalism: ‘You go to Canterbury and the whole town stinks of American fast food. You know: flash cars and everyone living in Barratt homes.’ Nonetheless the character did become seen as in the words of the lexicographer Jonathon Green, ‘Thatcherism’s shameless golem’. When a picture of Loadsamoney was used without permission on the front page of the Sun to advertise a bingo promotion, Enfield instructed solicitors to seek a published clarification that he did not endorse the paper, but found the Sun unwilling to let go of such a potent symbol: ‘We believe you ought to buy yourself a sense of humour,’ a leader column advised, and Enfield backed off, recognizing that this was a battle he was unlikely to win.

The character didn’t survive the decade, being killed off in a 1989 evening of Comic Relief, and had actually enjoyed very little television exposure during his lifetime – no more than a handful of five-minute spots within other programmes. But despite his brief existence, Loadsamoney made more of an impact than almost any other comic character of the 1980s. And he came as close as anyone to encapsulating what was for many the vulgarity of the naked, self-promoting, essentially unBritish greed of Thatcherism in its boom years; even if some did find it regrettable that he should be a plasterer and not, say, a banker or a futures trader.

10

Boom

‘Let’s make lots of money’