Rejoice! Rejoice!

‘When will I see my picture in the paper?’

British newspapers, by and large, are now more prejudiced than they have ever been, more irresponsible in their use of facts than they have ever been, and in some instances more dishonest than they have ever been.

Roy Hattersley (1986)

What shall we do with Rupert Murdoch?

What shall we do with Rupert Murdoch early in the morning?

Burn, burn, burn the bastard . . .

Picket-line song (1986)

There is a new channel on television. It is called Channel Four and it is for minorities, like intellectuals and people that belong to jigsaw clubs. At last I have found my spiritual viewing home.

Sue Townsend, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1984)

‘We are accustomed to suffering,’ wrote the Daily Mail’s television critic, Peter Paterson, in 1988, ‘as television grabs more hours of airtime without the talent to fill it.’ It was a comment that might have been seen as applying across the whole range of broadcast and print media in the 1980s, for there was an explosion of new outlets, facilitated by advances in technology, changes in government policy and the breaking of union practices, without there always being any readily discernible increase in quality. When Margaret Thatcher came to power, there were just three television channels available, broadcasting for around fourteen hours a day each – by the time she left Downing Street, there were four terrestrial channels, many more available via satellite, and the schedules had expanded in both directions, backwards to take in breakfast, and forwards past the traditional closedown around midnight. During the same period, dozens of new magazine titles were launched, and a slew of national newspapers, both dailies and Sundays, appeared for the first time, some of which (the Mail on Sunday, the Independent, the Sunday Sport) were to find a market, while others (the Post, Sunday Correspondent, News on Sunday) fell by the wayside. It was, in short, an era of almost unprecedented expansion in the media.

In terms of newspapers, at least, the first mutterings of revolution were heard in 1978, just prior to Thatcher’s election, when the Daily and Sunday Express were bought by Trafalgar House, with Victor Matthews becoming chairman of a group that was renamed Express Newspapers. Arguing that ‘Fleet Street is not overmanned, it is underworked’, Matthews identified spare capacity at the group’s plant in Manchester, previously used only for printing the Sunday Express, and decided to utilize the machinery to produce the Daily Star, a tabloid that became the first national daily to be launched since the Daily Mirror back in 1903. It was seen from the outset as a plunge downmarket for Lord Beaverbrook’s old company. ‘No newspaper in history lost sales by projecting beautiful birds,’ insisted founding editor, Derek Jameson. ‘Sex sells – that goes for pictures and words. So the Star will have its daily quota. Bigger and better than anyone else.’ The paper was so enthusiastic about salacious stories and topless pin-ups (they were known as Starbirds) that it rapidly acquired a reputation for making the Sun look classy; a sketch on Not the Nine O’Clock News saw a customer buying a copy and then hiding it inside an edition of Men Only to avoid embarrassment. It was controversial from the outset. The communist daily, the Morning Star, attempted to get a court injunction against the paper’s use of the title, but the judge refused, commenting that ‘only a moron in a hurry’ would mistake the two products, while feminist campaigners in Manchester targeted the launch posters so that instead of reading A STAR IS BORN, they read A STAR IS PORN.

That reputation survived, though for a brief period in the early 1980s, under the editorship of Lloyd Turner, the paper made a bold effort to outflank the Daily Mirror on the left. Aiming itself at the young ‘factory-gate reader’, it provided not only serious coverage of unemployment and the plight of pensioners, but also wholehearted support for the Labour Party; in fact it was the only national paper to back Michael Foot in his bid for the party’s leadership. The experiment wasn’t to last, and management pressure brought about a volte-face in time for the 1983 election, when Turner wrote a front-page leader headlined SORRY MICHAEL, WE CAN’T VOTE FOR YOU, blaming the change of position on: ‘The militants with hard eyes and closed minds who want to put a stranglehold on the party and shackle its leaders to a manifesto which owes more to Marx than the facts of modern life.’ Thereafter the Star reverted to type.

Indeed in 1987, following its humiliation in the law courts at the hands of Jeffrey Archer, it went considerably further downmarket than any daily had yet managed, when it merged with the Sunday Sport. This latter had recently been launched by the pornography entrepreneur, David Sullivan, on a skeleton staff (there were reportedly just nine journalists employed) and blended a high nipple-count with the implausible sensationalism pioneered in America by the National Enquirer and the Weekly World News. The sport element of its title initially included the presence of a column by World Cup-winning captain, Bobby Moore, but it was the ‘news’ stories that gained the paper a cult following, with its love of UFOs, dead celebrities (from Elvis Presley to Adolf Hitler) and bizarre juxtapositions; headlines included MUM GIVES BIRTH TO AN 8lb TROUT, VIRGIN MARY BUILT OUR SHED and the inevitable LUCAN SPOTTED ON MISSING SHERGAR.

The marriage of the Daily Star and the Sunday Sport brought together the two crudest and least subtle national papers to create what veteran journalist Charles Wintour called ‘the most vulgar and unpleasant daily tabloid in the country’. It should have been a perfect match but, as Derek Jameson pointed out: ‘Tabloid readers are all for spicy pictures and stories, but they don’t want tits leaping out at them from every page.’ The new version of the Star provided precisely that, achieving a higher nipple-count than some top-shelf magazines and hitting an historic low with the debut of topless model Natalie Banus. Born Natalie Jay, she had studied at the Royal Ballet School until her breasts grew too large for a career in ballet to be a serious option, and she moved instead to the Italia Conte stage school. It was while she was a pupil there, at the age of 15 years and 11 months, that she first appeared in the paper, wearing just bikini bottoms, with her arms crossed her chest, accompanied by the salivating slogan: ‘Just 30 days till Natalie goes topless’. And a topless photo was duly published on her sixteenth birthday, which meant, of course, that it was taken while she was still underage and was therefore in breach of the 1978 Protection of Children Act, though no prosecution was ever mounted. (Banus later starred in a short-lived West End play titled Page 3.) It was all too much for the delicate sensibilities of Star readers and the paper lost half a million daily sales, nearly half its circulation, in the space of six weeks. Journalists also made their excuses and left and, most worryingly of all, Tesco led a movement of big name advertisers withdrawing their business. The association with the Sport was promptly ended, but by then the damage had been done, and the Star never quite recovered from the shock.

Apart from the short-lived attempt to provide a populist voice for the left, and the even shorter-lived search to find a lowest common denominator, the Star’s major contribution to the culture of newspapers was the introduction early in the decade of bingo; millions of cards were distributed, numbers were published daily in the pages of the paper, and huge sums in prize money were offered in an effort to lure readers away from rival publications. There were two obvious stumbling-blocks to the concept: first, the danger that it would prove prohibitively expensive, which could be dealt with by ensuring that hardly any winning cards were ever printed, and second, that it fell foul of the Gaming and Lotteries Act, since it was purely a game of chance with no skill involved and was therefore illegal. Officially the defence against this was that checking numbers and crossing them off represented a basic skill, though in reality, as Jameson predicted to his legal advisers, it wouldn’t ever prove to be an issue: ‘Who the hell do you think is going to sue us for giving away money?’ Sales of the Star, which had stabilized below a million, briefly rose to 1.9 million, mostly at the expense of the Sun, which responded by hitting back with its own game. And so were born the bingo wars, one of the defining features of Fleet Street in the 1980s, with other papers launching variations on the same basic theme, reaching something of a nadir when The Times created its own version, Portfolio, based on the stock market. ‘Bloody hell, it was a knockout,’ remembered Jameson. ‘And it’s worked wonders for every other paper that’s applied it.’

The initial wave of competitions gradually died out, but there was a resurgence in 1984 when Robert Maxwell bought the Daily Mirror and offered a million-pound prize in a bid to reclaim circulation that had been lost to the Star and the Sun. The latter again retaliated with the same offer and won the race to produce a winner, with a Bristol man named David Parsons becoming the first person to win £1 million in a British competition. Amongst others who tried out the same strategy was the Star’s elder sibling, the Daily Express, which launched the Millionaires Club, discovering in the process a new flaw, as the then-managing director of Express Newspapers was later to admit: ‘The odds were heavily stacked against there ever being a “reader millionaire”, although eventually we did have a winner – a man of such a doubtful past and reputation that we had to whisk him quickly out of the public eye, and our pages, so we never gained the hoped-for publicity.’

The arrival of Maxwell in Fleet Street, buying Mirror Group Newspapers – as well as the Daily and Sunday Mirror it published the People and the Scottish titles, the Daily Record and the Sunday Mail – realized a long-held personal dream of owning his own national newspaper. It was confirmed in the early hours of Friday, 13 July, and the consequences were enough to make the most rational of his employees become superstitious; Geoffrey Goodman, industrial editor of the Daily Mirror, was to remark in retrospect: ‘I was in the company of someone who was evil, possibly clinically insane.’

The full extent of Maxwell’s megalomania was not immediately apparent, and – thanks to his fondness for litigation – much of his immorality was not to become known until after his death in 1991, but the self-obsession of the man was unmistakable. He announced that there were just two requirements for his editors: ‘One: the papers must retain their broadly sympathetic approach to the labour movement. Two: the papers must and will have a Britain-first policy.’ He omitted to mention a third requirement: that they should promote him and his works at all times, a development that came as no great surprise to those who had encountered him in previous incarnations. Back in 1965, when he was a newly elected Labour MP, Tony Benn had concluded: ‘He really is rather a thrusting man who regards the House of Commons as a place where he can push himself.’ Little had changed since. As a Jewish refugee from Czechoslovakia who had escaped the Nazis, and had built a publishing empire on the back of his own endeavours, Maxwell saw himself in the mould of the swashbuckling populist entrepreneur. His newly acquired papers dutifully purveyed this image. At his instigation, the Daily Mirror adopted the masthead slogan FORWARD WITH BRITAIN, but it might more honestly have said FORWARD WITH MAXWELL: it was Maxwell’s face that was used to launch the Mirror’s bingo campaign, Maxwell who was seen to be seeking a resolution to the miners’ strike, Maxwell who initiated what Bob Geldof called ‘rather melodramatic “mercy flights” to Ethiopia’ during the famine in that country. The relentless coverage made him a nationally recognized figure, but not someone who was ever embraced by the public in the way that, say, Richard Branson was; rather he came across as a rather bluff bully. Nor did the personalization of his papers do much for sales, which fell markedly while his hand was on the tiller.

While Maxwell was courting and creating publicity, his chief Fleet Street rival, Rupert Murdoch, was notably more reticent, seldom appearing in public or giving interviews, while contriving to remain considerably more influential in shaping British culture. He entered the 1980s as the proprietor of the Sun and the News of the World, respectively the biggest selling daily and Sunday papers. Of these, the Sun was probably the single most significant publication of the decade, not simply because of its sales, but because it reached such a vital section of the electorate – members of the working class who generally read no other papers and weren’t compulsive viewers of current affairs television – and because it pushed such a strong political agenda, entirely supportive of Thatcherism and often a step or two ahead of what she was able to do at any given time; it was frequently the Sun that took arguments to the people, securing public support even before many members of the cabinet and the parliamentary party had been convinced.

It hadn’t always been like this. The Sun had started as a Labour paper, chasing the readership of the Daily Mirror, but had switched horses in the late 1970s, around the same time that its circulation overtook that of its rival, and became unshakeably Conservative with the arrival of Kelvin MacKenzie as editor in 1981. MacKenzie, as a former grammar-school boy from south London, evidently regarded himself as Thatcherism made flesh and, despite the prime minister’s popularity then being at a record low, never lost faith. The paper he produced was technically the best tabloid Britain had ever seen, funny, irreverent and capable of creating a real sense of community: if you were part of the Sun’s happy family of readers, there was a security in belonging to a world where common sense and prejudice merged into a single attribute, and where the enemy was clearly defined. The paper was also capable of taking a position on complex issues so succinctly that it was scarcely necessary to read beyond the headline; when the General Synod of the Church of England debated the church’s attitude to homosexuality in the priesthood, the Sun summed up the conclusion with the headline PULPIT POOFS CAN STAY and there could be no mistaking the meaning, whether one agreed with it or not.

In a purely negative sense, as well, MacKenzie’s Sun was one of the more creative newspapers in British press history, most notoriously when it published, under the banner of ‘World Exclusive’, an interview with Marcia McKay, widow of Sergeant Ian McKay VC, a hero of the Falklands War. It was in fact a complete fabrication, cobbled together from existing quotes and from the imagination of journalists in response to what was seen as an external threat: the Daily Mirror had secured a genuinely exclusive interview and the Sun had no intention of being left behind. The Mirror responded with an editorial headlined LIES, DAMNED LIES AND SUN EXCLUSIVES but it made little difference; the Sun went on to repeat the trick with a similarly stitched-together article when it failed to get an interview with Simon Weston, who had received terrible injuries as a Welsh Guardsman when the Sir Galahad was hit during the Falklands: ‘He is so hideously scarred people turn their heads from him in horror in the street,’ wrote the Sun, the paper that boasted of its support for ‘our boys’ during the war in the South Atlantic.

There was some doubt about the extent to which the Sun’s political positions made any impact on its readership; a survey after the 1983 general election found that only 63 per cent of readers thought the paper was pro-Tory, and many, when asked, insisted that they bought it for the sports pages alone. But even there, an impact was made, as a shop steward told Tony Benn in 1982: ‘the men read the Sun from back to front, starting with the sports news, then page 3, then the front page, past eight pages of Tory propaganda,’ he said. ‘This is the real problem. The workforce is conservative, the Sun both shapes and reflects it.’ The paper’s pre-eminence meant that it attracted a great deal of criticism, perhaps the most insidiously effective of which came from the comedian Jasper Carrott who, in his Saturday night BBC1 show Carrott’s Lib (1982), began to mine a new vein of jokes, mocking Sun readers for their stupidity (as in a Sun Readers’ Trivial Pursuit with such questions as ‘Did Britain’s prime minister win the last election?’ and ‘Who wrote Joan Collins’ autobiography?’), but the cultural tide remained with MacKenzie, and the sales and power of the paper remained high for most of the decade: it could almost lay claim to being the theoretical journal of Thatcherism.

To augment this mighty organ, in 1981 Murdoch’s company, News International, added The Times and the Sunday Times to its stable. With the new titles, it could claim around 27 per cent of daily newspaper circulation in Britain (putting it second behind Mirror Group) and 31 per cent of the Sunday circulation. The size of this market share meant that once Murdoch’s interest in the papers became known, there were calls for the takeover bid to be referred to the Monopolies Commission – Harold Wilson was amongst many Labour MPs signing a Commons motion demanding that the bid be ‘stringently examined’ – but the reality was that the most likely alternative to a Murdoch purchase was the closure of The Times, and the leaders of all the main print unions wrote to Michael Foot, asking him not to press for an enquiry since jobs were at stake. Even if he had, it was unlikely that a Conservative administration, so actively supported by the Sun, would have put obstacles in Murdoch’s way, but the support of the unions – whose power in Fleet Street was unequalled anywhere in the private sector – undoubtedly made easier the government’s decision to allow the takeover to proceed. Such support was less forthcoming in later years.

It was not, however, Murdoch who was to strike the first blow against the print unions. Instead it was the hitherto unknown Eddie Shah, a former floor manager on Coronation Street and now the owner of the Stockport-based Messenger group, a collection of six local newspapers.

The problems faced by the newspaper industry in the early 1980s were twofold: on the one hand, battles with unions were endemic (as witnessed most spectacularly by the dispute that had prevented The Times from publishing for nearly a year); and on the other, the technology that was used, compared with that available in other industrial countries, was primitive in the extreme, largely unchanged in nature since the nineteenth century. The two issues were, of course, interrelated; the hot metal process common to all newspapers was not only costly and cumbersome, but required a large number of men to operate it, and union leaders had no intention of allowing any changes that would reduce the workforce. Back in the 1950s, it was said, the Daily Telegraph had bought printing presses that, due to a failure to reach agreement with the unions, were still sitting at the paper, having never been used, when they were sold as scrap metal more than thirty years later. Similarly, when The Times returned to the newsstands in 1980, the unions had conceded the introduction of computers, but only if everything that journalists typed – still using manual typewriters – was then retyped by members of the National Graphical Association (NGA) in a practice known as ‘double key stroking’; no journalist was allowed to touch a computer keyboard. There was an old joke asking how many people worked in Fleet Street producing the national newspapers, to which the answer was, ‘About one in four’. In the face of this refusal to modernize, proprietors seemed powerless, largely because they were unwilling to cooperate with each other, as the sometime Daily Telegraph editor Bill Deedes admitted when discussing the Fleet Street unions: ‘Over and again, they made ridiculous demands of one newspaper or another, witnessed the failure of the industry to close ranks, and scored. They had never lost. They believed they could never lose.’

Eddie Shah was the man who showed they could be beaten. In 1983, he introduced new technology at his Warrington print works and announced that he was unilaterally ending the closed shop that had hitherto been run by the NGA. The subsequent dispute lasted for seven months and became increasingly bitter, with Shah invoking the new union legislation and with thousands of demonstrators descending on Warrington to support the union. Prefiguring the miners’ strike that was to come, a series of battles between pickets and police dominated the news agenda, reaching a climax in November with what was claimed to be an attack on a mass picket by equally large numbers of police, using riot-control equipment and tactics that had previously been seen as an instrument of last resort, but that were now seemingly used as the first option. Or, as seen from the other side of the fortified stockade, it was a life-threatening outbreak of mass violence. ‘The mob’s on the rampage,’ Shah told Andrew Neil, editor of the Sunday Times, in a panicked telephone call. ‘My men have their backs against the corrugated gates trying to keep the pickets from smashing them down. If they get in here we’re going to be killed.’

Neil Kinnock, who had only just been elected Labour leader, was keen to distance himself from such scenes – ‘I condemn without reservation the violence at Warrington whoever uses it,’ he told the Commons – but the battle-lines were clearly drawn: the TUC in support of the NGA, and the government standing four-square with Shah. At its peak the dispute caused a complete shut-down of all national papers for four days, but union muscle proved unequal to the task of fighting on two fronts, both against the police and in the courts (the NGA lost an estimated two million pounds in fines and legal fees), and Shah emerged with a complete victory.

With his new-found freedom, and his new-found national prominence, Shah went on to launch a radically different national newspaper in 1986. Today was a middle-market daily that used computer photo-setting, allowing journalists to type their copy directly in, and that sent its pages – complete with colour photographs (of an admittedly rudimentary nature) – by satellite to printing plants around the country. He also negotiated a single-union, no-strike agreement with the paper’s production staff, who were members not of any established print union but of the EETPU, the electricians’ union led by Eric Hammond. This was to be the model for the future, but by the time of the first issue, media and political attention had moved onwards from Warrington to Wapping in east London, where, inspired by Shah, Murdoch was staging his own showdown with the unions.

Wapping was the location of a site bought by News International in 1979, and in 1985 the company opened discussions with the unions about starting production there. There was no great urgency to the negotiations and no obvious prospect of success, for the gap between the employers’ proposals (no closed shops, new technology, no right to strike) and those of the unions (jobs for life on existing terms) never looked likely to be bridged. Nor was there any desire so to do; the News International management was intent on moving its four titles into the plant and had no wish to take the printers with them, while an official from the SOGAT union made clear their position on Wapping: ‘When will you get it through your thick heads, we will never let you use it? You may as well put a match to it – or we’ll do it for you.’

As with the recently ended miners’ strike, the groundwork and the strategic planning had been on one side only, for even while negotiations were dragging on in a desultory way, preparations were being made for the production and distribution of all the papers at Wapping. As the Financial Times put it, Murdoch had calculated his moves ‘coldly and cynically, secretly and deviously, anticipating successfully the other actors in the drama’. In conditions of great secrecy, the building was being fitted out (the story was put about that it was to produce a new 24-hour paper, the London Post, which was nominally the subject of the negotiations), a deal was being struck with the EEPTU for a new workforce, and a contract was being signed with the haulage company TNT to distribute the copies by road, thus avoiding the likelihood of rail unions refusing to transport them. All that was needed was an excuse to trigger the move, a single false step by the printers. ‘He wants them to go on strike at a moment which will suit him,’ noted Woodrow Wyatt in January 1986, after talking with his friend, Rupert Murdoch. ‘If they did he can sack everyone and print with five hundred and twelve people he has lined up, who have already learned to work the presses at Tower Hamlets. That would be instead of the four to five thousand currently employed.’ So bullish and aggressive did the News International attitude become during this protracted phoney war that even Andrew Neil, one of Murdoch’s most supportive employees, worried about the new era: ‘Sometimes I think we’re becoming far too callous in our desire to clean this place out,’ he noted.

Later that January the unions duly obliged by calling a strike over Murdoch’s intransigence in protest at the hypothetical London Post, and all members were promptly served with redundancy notices. At the same time The Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun and the News of the World were relocated to the new plant and the Wapping dispute (it was not technically a strike, since the union members were no longer employed) began. It was to last as long as had the miners’ strike two years earlier.

The move was made possible by the journalists on the four titles, the vast majority of whom had no forewarning of its happening, but accepted it nonetheless. The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) instructed its members not to go, insisting they remain in solidarity with the print-workers, but there was precious little solidarity to be found. As recently as 1984, journalists on the Sun had gone on strike but, in the absence of any support from the printers, had been unable to stop production of the paper; they had lost their case then and saw no reason now to extend a fraternal hand. Nor did the pay differentials engender any thoughts of standing shoulder-to-shoulder: the average salary for production workers in Fleet Street was at the time £18,000, while the basic journalist’s salary on The Times was £15,000. In such circumstances it was perhaps predictable that nearly 95 per cent of the 700 or so journalists employed by News International were ultimately prepared to move to Wapping. At a meeting of the NUJ chapel at the Sun, the vote was one hundred in favour of making the move, with just eight against.

And, as was only to be expected, the union movement as a whole offered no serious support either; if it had been unwilling and unable to fall in behind the NUM, then it was not going to mobilize secondary action on behalf of the printers. There was also the bald fact that the papers were being produced by union members (albeit from the EEPTU, regarded as pariahs by much of the union bureaucracy) and distributed by lorries driven by members of the Transport and General Workers Union. More surprising was the lack of solidarity from within the print unions themselves; the Sunday Times colour supplement was produced in Watford by SOGAT members, who didn’t stop work, while NGA members in Northampton continued to print the related titles, the Times Literary Supplement and the Times Education Supplement. And when, nearly a year into the dispute, the SOGAT executive proposed a fifty-eight pence a week levy on all its members to assist those who were still out of work and whose unemployment benefit was about to end, the membership voted against the measure.

Beyond the unions, the wider public too failed to respond to the printers’ cause, despite SOGAT spending an estimated £400,000 on publicity. From a reader’s point of view, Wapping was a step forward: the papers continued to appear and it soon became clear that there was a marked improvement – they were bigger, better printed, more reliable. And if they were being produced by a much smaller workforce, then that only seemed to confirm the widespread stories of absurd over-manning in Fleet Street. So while the printers did enjoy the support of some on the left, no network emerged equivalent to that which had sustained the miners; there simply wasn’t the same sympathy for those seen as privileged, well-paid workers in London. The TUC and the Labour Party officially boycotted all News International titles, so that their journalists were barred from Neil Kinnock’s press conferences, while various local authorities withdrew advertising support, and in some cases stopped buying the papers for their public libraries (a move that was subsequently ruled unlawful), but it is doubtful that Murdoch lost much sleep over such tactics.

Those who did support the sacked printers, however, were whole-hearted in their commitment and, for the year that the dispute lasted, the streets of Wapping became the venue for a mass rally every Saturday evening, as thousands of pickets attempted to prevent the lorries laden with copies of the News of the World and the Sunday Times from leaving the plant. They were unsuccessful on every occasion – not a single day’s production was lost – but the result was, more often than not, a series of violent running battles with the police, reminiscent of the miners’ strike. ‘It was horrific,’ wrote Tony Benn in his diary after seeing the police charge the lines of demonstrators one Saturday night in May 1986. ‘I couldn’t believe it – the absolute horror of standing in the middle of the night in the middle of London, seeing the police flailing about with their truncheons at people who a moment earlier had been standing talking and knowing that it was authorized, planned. Everyone was involved, from people in their sixties to young children.’ For those inside what became known as Fortress Wapping, those Saturday nights were no less traumatic. Shielded by lines of police and security guards, behind barbed-wire-clad walls and rolls of razor wire, the staff were always aware of the emergency tunnels that connected the buildings to provide an escape route if the demonstrators broke into the plant. Nor was the daily experience of going to work through ranks of pickets screaming abuse any more welcome than it had been for the working miners during the NUM strike.

The first anniversary of the dispute, in January 1987, saw the biggest demonstration of all, with 13,000 pickets involved in a confrontation that left 168 police officers injured and one picket, Michael Delaney, dead after being run over by a TNT lorry. (The inquest jury found that he had been unlawfully killed, though this verdict was overturned on appeal.) It was the last such protest. The unions called off the dispute in the face of dwindling funds – SOGAT had used up half its reserves during the dispute, and still had fines to come – and of the hopelessness of the cause, for it was surely inconceivable that Murdoch was going to back down.

The consequences of the Wapping dispute were far-reaching. This was the last great struggle of the old industrial unions; the miners, the Praetorian Guard of organized labour, had already been defeated, now so too were the printers, the most cosseted and strike-prone workforce in private industry. Thereafter the centre of balance of the union movement shifted away from industry and towards the state service sector. Again the government had sided solidly with the employers, providing vocal support and allowing a sympathetic attitude by the police and the legal system; Thatcher had given Murdoch a personal assurance, according to Andrew Neil, ‘that enough police would be available to allow us to go about our lawful business’.

Such a supportive stance was entirely appropriate for a government that had long deplored the mob rule of mass-pickets and insisted upon the rule of law, but there was also an element of reciprocation for the unswerving loyalty displayed by Fleet Street to the Conservative cause. The gratitude didn’t stop there, for a notable feature of the Thatcher years was the heaping of honours upon practising journalists of the right persuasion: knighthoods for editors Larry Lamb (of the Sun), John Junor (Sunday Express), David English (Daily Mail) and Nicholas Lloyd (Daily Express), as well as for favoured television interviewers Robin Day and Alastair Burnet, and a peerage for News of the World columnist Woodrow Wyatt. These honours were occasionally mocked by commentators, were sometimes even the subject of fierce criticism, but they were accepted with due reverence by their recipients. ‘I would remind you,’ Lloyd was reported to have snapped disdainfully at a colleague, ‘that I was knighted by Margaret Thatcher for my services to journalism.’ Notable exceptions to the ranks of those who felt the touch of the queen’s sword on their shoulders were Rupert Murdoch, an avowed republican, and Kelvin MacKenzie, relentless in his pursuit of royal stories, neither of whom were much concerned with receiving honours (though Murdoch was later to accept a knighthood from the Pope).

In the wake of Warrington and Wapping, rival newspaper proprietors, shocked into action at seeing the power of the print unions finally broken, hurriedly began their own process of modernization. An entire layer of the newspaper workforce disappeared as hot metal yielded to computers, and the good times began in earnest for the industry. This was the era of the Lawson boom, and greater affluence, combined with the increased capacity provided by the new technology, sent sales soaring upwards. There was a further boost when a European Commission ruling ended the duopoly of television listings that had previously been enjoyed by the Radio Times (which provided a week’s worth of BBC schedules) and the TV Times (which did the same for ITV and Channel 4); all other publications had been prevented from listing more than 24 hours of television programmes, or 48 hours at the weekend. Once that restriction had been swept aside at the end of the decade, the way was open for newspapers to produce weekly supplements covering all channels and for other magazines to enter the field, including What’s on TV and TV Quick.

The latter was a German-owned concern, an indication of another trend in the late 1980s: the arrival of foreign publishers in the magazine market, particularly with women’s magazines. Starting in 1986 with Prima (published by the Bertelsmann Group, the biggest media empire in the world), this saw the debuts over the next two years of Best, More, Hello!, Marie Claire, New Woman, Riva and Bella, though their appearance did not necessarily mean the end of the traditional titles, for Woman, Woman’s Own, Ideal Home and Good Housekeeping all put on sales in the same period. New newspapers were also forthcoming, though the most intriguing possibility never materialized; during the course of the Wapping dispute, Murdoch offered the unions, in exchange for a settlement, the printing plant that had formerly produced The Times and the Sunday Times, together with the building in which it was housed, suggesting that they set up their own newspaper, to employ the printers that had been sacked – the offer was rejected. Meanwhile the existing titles grew in size, particularly at weekends, when first Sunday and then Saturday papers sprouted new sections on an almost weekly basis.

Others too were affected by Wapping. The NUJ was hit almost as hard as were the print unions, losing recognition at many of the national titles; all newspaper distribution was moved from rail to road; and the convivial drinking culture of the old Fleet Street began to recede into mythology, as other publishers also withdrew from the area. The biggest beneficiary, though, was News International itself: the job cuts and the increased production at the new plant saved the company a reported £65 million a year, making possible an expansion into television in Britain and America.

This move into other media had long been an ambition of Rupert Murdoch. Some years earlier Bruce Matthews, one of the most senior figures in News International, had asked Jeremy Isaacs about satellite television. When Isaacs replied that he didn’t know anything about it, but ‘surely you have expert analysts who can forecast the viability of that sort of massive business venture,’ Matthews revealed the secret of Murdoch’s success: ‘It’s not like that here. When Rupert says “go”, we go.’ It was to be some time before that particular jump was made, but British television was already seeing a major transformation with the launch in 1982 of Channel 4, under the stewardship of Isaacs himself.

The idea of a fourth television channel had been around since the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting had reported in 1962, and been broadly accepted by both major parties during the 1970s, though its form was still in dispute right up to the Act that brought it into being in 1982. Intended as a public service broadcaster to supplement the work of the BBC, Channel 4 was placed in the novel position of commissioning but not making programmes, and was charged by the government with appealing ‘to tastes and interests not generally catered for’, while being ‘experimental and innovative’. Financially too it was in a strange place, given arms-length funding by the ITV companies, who then sold the advertising on the new channel as a way of recouping its investment. Unfortunately, a dispute with the actors’ union Equity over repeat fees meant that at the beginning there weren’t enough adverts to fill the breaks, since only those commercials with no actors in them could be broadcast. The result was a series of what looked like home movies, starring cheerful, awkward businessmen who were spectacularly ill-suited to the small screen: characters such as Joe Williams, boss of OTV in Hackney, who told us what wonderful value his ex-rental television sets were, somewhat in the tradition of Bernard Matthews, the Norfolk farmer who had begun his long-running claims to produce ‘bootiful’ turkey products the previous year. There was a certain pleasure to be derived from the lowest budget, least subtle adverts ever screened appearing on what was supposed to be the sophisticated, intelligent new medium of Channel 4, but even so these emergency plugs weren’t sufficient and it became common to see a minute or two of the station logo accompanied by the promise ‘Next programme follows shortly . . .’

The programmes that did appear soon revealed a conflict of cultures in the establishment. Isaacs, as an ex-BBC man and a member of the north London media elite, came with an awareness of a pluralist, multi-cultural Britain, self-evidently at odds with the values of the Conservative government that had brought the channel into being. ‘Should black Britons, should the young, should feminists, should homosexuals see themselves, canvass their ideas, on television?’ asked Isaacs rhetorically in 1983. ‘I see no reason why not. They are of this society, not outside it.’ But, as Norman Tebbit pointed out to him: ‘You’ve got it all wrong, you know, doing all those programmes for homosexuals and such. Parliament never meant that sort of thing. The different interests you are supposed to cater for are not like that at all. Golf and sailing and fishing. Hobbies. That’s what we intended.’ Even before the station was launched, The Times was reporting that ‘the channel is just the sort of thing to inflame that school of opinion, so strong in the upper echelons of the Conservative Party, which believes that the left is in control of the nation’s television’. In fact, much like the BBC, the new station was more liberal than it was hard left: there was no one from the labour movement on the board of Channel 4, though there were some Conservatives, while the SDP was over-represented in the senior management with founding chairman Edmund Dell, deputy chairman Richard Attenborough and board member Anne Sofer. (George Thomson, the chair of the IBA, was also an SDP member.)

The station also created, through Film on Four, some of the most memorable British movies of the decade (The Draughtsman’s Contract, Wish You Were Here, A Room with a View), made on shoestring budgets and therefore often able to explore avenues that would otherwise have been inaccessible: ‘You can’t go to a big film company and say, “I want to make a film about a gay Pakistani who runs a launderette”,’ commented Hanif Kureishi, writer of My Beautiful Laundrette. ‘They’d tell you to get lost.’ But despite these contributions, Channel 4 to a large extent made its reputation with repeats and imports, where its alchemical appeal to youth was capable of turning very base metal into viewing gold – a series like The Gong Show, an American parody of talent shows, would have struggled to get an airing, let alone a following, on any other British channel.

In all this, Channel 4 did bring a voice and a style that was quite distinct from the existing stations, which were increasingly reliant on game shows, one of the great successes of the decade, since they represented a cheap way of filling the ever-expanding schedules. Such programmes had been part of British television from the 1950s onwards, but it was the 1980s that turned out to be their moment in the sun. It was calculated that the budget of a game show worked out at just a third of the cost-per-minute of a sitcom, let alone a serious drama, and the prizes added little to the expense, thanks to IBA regulations: in 1988, for example, the IBA restricted the value of prizes on a series to £1,750 per show, averaged over four shows, so that if a small car (worth around £4,500) was given away in one episode, it was virtually certain that contestants on the next three weeks’ programmes stood little chance of winning anything very much at all.

The game show boom began in 1980 with Bruce Forsyth’s Play Your Cards Right and Bob Monkhouse’s Family Fortunes. Thereafter the floodgates opened to include, amongst many others, Blockbusters with Bob Holness, Bob’s Full House with Bob Monkhouse, Bullseye with Jim Bowen, Catchphrase with Roy Walker, Fifteen to One with William G. Stewart, The Price is Right with Leslie Crowther, Strike It Lucky with Michael Barrymore, Telly Addicts with Noel Edmonds, 3-2-1 with Ted Rogers, and Wheel of Fortune with Nicky Campbell. Then there were the hosts who specialized in the genre: Jimmy Tarbuck with Winner Takes All and Tarby’s Frame Game, Paul Daniels with Every Second Counts and Odd One Out, Derek Hobson with Jeopardy! and That’s My Dog, Tom O’Connor with Gambit and Name That Tune. Most of the hosts were established comedians, and so enthusiastic were schedulers about the concept that even Bernard Manning got a game show: Under Manning was based on the American hit You Bet Your Life, which had been hosted by Groucho Marx, and lasted for one series in the summer of 1981. Channel 4 also had game shows, of course, indeed its first ever programme (and its longest lived) was Countdown, but therein lay the difference; despite the inane puns of presenter Richard Whiteley, Countdown was at heart an intelligent word game. The channel’s other great contribution was Sticky Moments, a comedy vehicle for Julian Clary in which he relentlessly mocked every aspect of the genre.

All of these drew their competitors from the general public, establishing an interim stage before the advent of reality television in the 1990s. Similarly the game shows that relied upon celebrities tended to feature the lower-budget end of minor stardom, just as reality television was later to do; Blankety Blank and Punchlines were both influenced by the earlier Celebrity Squares, pitching members of the public against each other with the help of a panel of so-called personalities, many of whom were more famous for appearing on these shows than for anything else they’d ever done. The nature of their stardom was summed up by journalist Tom Hibbert, who had made a career from exposing the vacuity and vanity of minor media figures, as he looked back on the era from the vantage point of the 1990s: ‘In 1986 Britain was awash with celebrities like never before, under threat from the famous only famous for being famous, the famously awful, turning the soul of a once-brave country to mush.’ Despite the best endeavours of Channel 4, the future for British television was not noticeably bright.

To no one’s great surprise, when satellite television finally did arrive, with Rupert Murdoch’s Sky in 1989 and British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB) the following year, it relied heavily on such cut-price celebrities. BSB signed up actor Christopher Biggins, journalist Nina Myskow and the former host of Sale of the Century, Nicholas Parsons, while Sky had Keith Chegwin from Cheggers Plays Pop, ex-Daily Star editor Derek Jameson and Frank Bough, last seen hosting the BBC’s Breakfast Time (his colleague from that show, Selina Scott, was over on BSB). Little of this was very inspiring or even interesting, and the initial ratings demonstrated as much, though Andrew Neil, who had left the Sunday Times to become chairman of Sky, professed himself perfectly relaxed about the miniscule audiences, knowing how poor the programming was: ‘There were some nights when I was perfectly happy that no one was watching,’ he remarked.

Perhaps the only ones watching were the satirists. The BBC comedy series KYTV (1989) was based entirely on parodying a satellite broadcaster – ‘the television of the future’ – with promised programme highlights including I Love Lucy, The Simon Dee Show and episode one of Crossroads. KYTV also ridiculed satellite’s sports coverage, but although it got the hyperbolic tone absolutely right (a nondescript boxing match is promoted under the slogan: ‘Last time it was war, this time it’s the Apocalypse’), its suggestions that coverage would include dominoes, the sack race and caravanning was to prove wide of the mark. In a move that presaged the future of football, BSB had already secured rights to screen FA Cup ties on Saturday evenings, to the great disquiet of fans, who didn’t warm to the idea of matches being rescheduled to suit the convenience of broadcasters.

The start-up costs of these services were enormous, and well in excess of the revenue they were capable of generating in the early years. Sky was said to have cost £320 million to get up and running, and then proceeded to lose £2 million a week, but it was heavily subsidized by other parts of the Murdoch empire, particularly the Sun, which was making £1 million profit a week. BSB, on the other hand, had no such resources to fall back upon and could only hope to live long enough to reach its target of attracting three million subscribers by 1993, that being the level at which it would break even. In the event it didn’t get anything like that amount of time, lasting little more than a year. Within a few weeks of BSB’s launch, Q magazine was warning that the market was unlikely to sustain both it and Sky: ‘It seems increasingly likely that the high seas of satellite TV may not prove wide enough for the two of them.’ In November 1990 the two companies officially merged to become BSkyB, though no one was in any real doubt that it was effectively a takeover by Sky. ‘It’s smart to be square,’ the BSB adverts had proclaimed, in reference to its distinctively shaped satellite dishes known as squarials, but few had been convinced.

What Sky was ultimately targeting was an audience of men in their forties in social groups C and D, hence its move into sport and particularly into football in the next decade. Absent from its schedules, therefore, was the greatest success story of all on television in the late 1980s: the soap opera. Soaps had been dominated by ITV for years – its first ever programme was Round at the Redways, starring real-life married couple Harry Greene and Marjie Lawrence – and had in recent times centred on the triumvirate of Coronation Street, Crossroads and Emmerdale Farm. Their appeal spread across social and age groups and had different emphases in different shows: Emmerdale Farm, for example, was aimed at a middle-aged female audience and thus celebrated its fifteenth birthday in 1987 with a book that included ‘country recipes, knitting patterns, offers’, while in the annual NME readers’ poll the best TV show category was won in 1981 by Coronation Street, reflecting the younger cult appeal that helped boost that show’s ratings (the winners on either side were Not the Nine O’Clock News and The Young Ones). The youth market, however, was shortly to transfer allegiance to Channel 4’s Brookside, attracted by the younger cast and by its creator Phil Redmond, a familiar name to graduates of Grange Hill. For all its technical and storyline innovations, Brookside’s most radical departure in British soap history may well have been the failure to include a pub as a central focus, a development that might have been welcomed by those in the ranks of the nagocracy, had they not been so concerned by the amount of swearing going on. In the absence of a pub, there seemed to be a great many letters that required posting, in order to facilitate interaction between characters at the postbox.

Despite their undoubted popularity, however, soaps were considered somewhat tawdry affairs, beneath the notice of critics and a poor substitute for proper drama. That was until 1983. In that year a Coronation Street storyline saw Deirdre Barlow (Anne Kirkbride) having an affair with businessman Mike Baldwin (Johnny Briggs) and finding herself torn between him and her worthy, if dull husband, Ken (William Roache). In the context of the programme, it was a shock development, for Ken and Deirdre had been married to everyone’s satisfaction just two years earlier – their wedding had conveniently coincided with that of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer – but even so, the level of media coverage was startling. For the first time a soap storyline became front-page news in its own right, and it wasn’t only the tabloids who followed the twists and turns with eager enthusiasm; even The Times saw fit to announce in its news pages that Deirdre had chosen to ‘stay with Ken, her dependable husband, after all’. A line between fiction and reality had been crossed, setting the tone for the remainder of the century and beyond.

Because Ken and Deirdre were but the warm-up act. In 1985 the BBC launched EastEnders, its first serious attempt to challenge the pre-eminence of Coronation Street and the soap wars began in earnest. The debut episode was accompanied by sufficient hype to attract seventeen million curious viewers, but the early figures were not sustained and the audience fell as low as five million, before it started to climb back. Two factors contributed to its recovery: first, its transmission time was changed, to duck out of a head-to-head battle with Emmerdale Farm that it was regularly losing, and second, it developed sensationalist storylines that were a gift for the tabloids. Press interest had already been sparked with the revelation that Leslie Grantham, who played pub landlord ‘Dirty’ Den Watts, had earlier served a jail sentence for murder, but soon it was not only the actors but also the melodramatic plots that were turning up in the news pages.

Boosted by a Sunday afternoon omnibus programme (an idea taken from Brookside), EastEnders became the biggest show in the country: in a 39-month period from October 1985 it spent 167 weeks at No. 1 in the charts, interrupted on only two occasions, once by Coronation Street and once by Bread. This remarkable dominance of the nation’s viewing culminated in the Christmas Day episodes of 1986, when Den served his wife Angie (Anita Dobson) with divorce papers, reaching a record audience of 30 million. It also created a new world in which soaps ruled the schedules and the ratings as never before: the last four years of the 1980s saw just two weeks when a soap didn’t come out on top of the viewing charts (apart from Bread the other exception was a Christmas screening of Paul Hogan’s film Crocodile Dundee); the comparable period a decade earlier had seen more than fifty non-soaps reach No. 1, including sitcoms, variety shows, football finals, movies, even News at Ten. The public appetite for soaps was such that Coronation Street added a third weekly episode in 1989, an example followed the next year by Brookside, while EastEnders was so big that even non-events were breathlessly reported by the media – EXCLUSIVE: DIRTY DEN TO STAY IN EASTENDERS, revealed a Daily Mirror front-page story.

There were many who disapproved of EastEnders, some regretting the absence of the humour that had long been the human heart of Coronation Street, others taking the high moral tone of Mary Whitehouse: ‘Its verbal aggression and its atmosphere of physical violence, its homosexuality, its blackmailing pimp and its prostitute, its lies and deceit and its bad language, cannot go unchallenged,’ she thundered. And indeed it was a much more aggressive and violent serial than its predecessors, even finding room for Nick Cotton, a heroin-addicted murderer and the first long-running character in a British soap who could be considered overtly, irredeemably evil. (The first episode opened with the dead body of one of his victims.) Or, alternatively, his viciousness was a symptom of the times. ‘I feel sorry for him,’ commented John Altman, the actor who played Cotton; ‘he’s a victim of Britain in the eighties. He looked for work, couldn’t find it and turned to drugs and blackmail.’ But crucially, despite the moral reservations of some, the Sun embraced the show with gusto, seeing it as a powerful weapon in their circulation battles, as the paper’s chroniclers Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie pointed out: ‘The Street, with its ageing audience, had always been essentially the newspaper property of the Mirror. But EastEnders was young, southern and rough – just like the Sun.’

The supremacy of the soap opera as an art-form was such that it spread into advertising, which began to create its own mini-soaps for television. The first was a series of Renault adverts in 1984 starring Malcolm Stoddard as an executive named David, telling his wife Joanne (Rosalyn Landor) that he was going to start his own company. Others followed and in 1988 came the most successful of all, the Gold Blend series with Anthony Head and Sharon Maughan as next-door neighbours flirting through the metaphor of instant coffee. This saga was so long-running – and allegedly so popular – that a compilation video was released in 1993, along with a novelization, Love Over Gold, written by Susan Moody under the pseudonym Susannah James (‘The untold story of TV’s Greatest Romance,’ promised the cover). It wasn’t the first such book to come out of advertising. You Got an Ology? in 1990 was based on the British Telecom adverts starring Maureen Lipman as a Jewish mother named Beattie, fussing over her grown-up son Melvyn (Linal Haft), while in 1991 a book titled Fly-Fishing was published under the pseudonym J.R. Hartley, the name of the character portrayed by Norman Lumsden in a Yellow Pages advert dating back to 1983.

Meanwhile records by stars of soap operas, including Anita Dobson and Nick Berry of EastEnders, were becoming commonplace in the singles charts, while the appearance of the model Nick Kamen stripping down to his boxer shorts in a 1985 Levi’s 501 advert was sufficient to launch him on a pop career. The same advert pushed Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’ back into the top ten, just one example of a trend for retro-soundtracks on television commercials that also produced reissued hits for Nina Simone, Sam Cooke and Ben E. King amongst many others. In 1991 the Clash, having never previously reached the top ten singles chart in Britain (largely because of their refusal to appear on Top of the Pops) found themselves with a posthumous No. 1 in ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?’ after it too featured on a Levi’s advert.

By the end of the decade, the boundaries between the different branches of the media had blurred so much that it was hard to tell what was fact or fantasy. The word ‘advertorial’ was coined to denote newspaper pieces that were adverts semi-disguised as normal reporting, but the real confusion came in the news pages, where the story of the Gold Blend couple jostled for space with PR froth about the alleged antics of actors in EastEnders and with entirely speculative stories about the royal family, these normally requiring the publication of yet another photograph of Princess Diana, a soap fan who was herself fast coming to resemble a character in a soap opera. By contrast, the decline of the unions meant that industrial reporting dwindled while, in the absence of serious parliamentary opposition to the government, politics itself seemed at times to take on the nature of a soap. Amongst the recurring Westminster plotlines was the question of who was Margaret Thatcher’s chosen favourite as her younger leading man, the chosen successor should she ever leave Downing Street; the fluctuations in fortunes of Cecil Parkinson, Norman Tebbit, John Moore, Kenneth Baker and others were followed in much the same manner as the ups and downs of ‘Dirty’ Den’s fictional love-life. The tabloids led the way, but the middle-market papers tended to veer in the same direction, and even the broadsheets were not far behind, though the Independent did constitute an honourable exception – on its launch in 1986 it announced that it would not be making space available for ‘news’ of the royal family and admirably stuck with its decision.

To some degree, any confusions that did arise were a reflection of the multi-media ambitions of newspaper proprietors, as seen in News International’s case with the number of plugs for Sky Television that appeared in its newspapers, though it was far from alone. The consortium behind BSB had similarly had issues of cross-ownership, including not only the Granada and Anglia television companies, but also Virgin, Amstrad and Pearson, owner of the Financial Times. In the media, as elsewhere, the buzzword of the time was ‘synergy’, the belief that operating in several different fields made a company more productive. Or as an advert for Charterhouse Bank put it: 2 + 2 = 5.

The commercial advantages of having multiple divisions were seen when, for example, Virgin realized that the budget for its film of 1984 was soaring over budget and decided, against the wishes of the director Michael Radford, to remove the soundtrack that had been written by, as Richard Branson put it in his autobiography, ‘an unknown composer called Dominic Muldownie [sic]’, in an attempt ‘to recoup some of the disastrous overspend’. In fact, Muldowny was a respected and highly regarded young composer in his field, but his name carried little weight in the marketplace compared to that of the Eurythmics, the band whose music appeared in his place and whose soundtrack album was modestly successful, with the single ‘Sexcrime’ reaching the top five; the movie might not have benefited from the change but it was a financially sound decision. Similarly there was a logic when Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s Really Useful Group branched out in 1983 from producing his musicals to buying West End theatres, in which those shows could be staged, though a subsequent venture into publishing – it bought, and later sold, Aurum, the publishers of this book – was less obvious.

Even some of the longest established names in retail saw a need to expand the range of goods they stocked in the name of diversification, so that Boots the Chemist and W.H. Smith’s departed from their core market to become almost general stores; ‘one no longer knows what sort of a shop they are,’ despaired commentator Christopher Booker. Smith’s drew attention to this development with the slogan ‘Smith’s for books and a whole lot more’, while the Victoria and Albert Museum advertised itself as ‘an ace caff with quite a nice museum attached’, a campaign that attracted charges of crass commercialism, though it had echoes of the original appeal of the institution: in the nineteenth century the front part of the museum had been a café, intended to attract those coming after work.

There were examples too within the broadcast media of branching into new areas, as when Radio 1 decided to venture into comedy with the employment of Victor Lewis-Smith and with The Mary Whitehouse Experience. The intention was evidently to reclaim a youthful audience for a station that was looking cosily middle-aged – as mocked by Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse’s superannuated DJs Smashie and Nicey – though it was not until the following decade, with the arrival of Matthew Bannister as controller of Radio 1, that this ambition was fully pursued, with rigorous across-the-board reforms. In the late 1980s, however, Bannister was busily engaged in reinventing Radio London, the local BBC station for the capital, to become GLR (Greater London Radio), ‘a hip new station for sophisticated Londoners in the 25-45 demographic’, in the words of its lunchtime presenter, Johnnie Walker. Launched in 1988, GLR only lasted for twelve years, but it proved highly influential, giving a career boost to a range of talent including Danny Baker, Chris Morris and Chris Evans, and setting out an alternative to the pop stations then in existence. Its targeting of very specific audiences was also to become the model for radio at a time of expansion in the industry, a trend that became ever more apparent after the 1990 launch of the independent station Jazz FM. (It was, claimed John Prescott, the only company in which he ever held shares.)

While there were always some who deplored the expansions of business into unrelated areas, real concern was reserved for the concentration of media power in the hands of individual companies, particularly when they were based outside the country. In 1985 Rupert Murdoch took on American nationality, since only US citizens were legally able to buy television stations there, and the following year Neil Kinnock expressed a desire to introduce equivalent legislation in Britain: ‘I must say that it is time for us to think seriously about establishing similar citizenship conditions, not only because of the nationality-swapping history of Mr Murdoch, but also because of the new reality and the increasing probability of other non-British ownerships of important media of news and opinion.’ But no such controls were forthcoming, and News International continued to expand and to branch into new areas: in 1987 it bought the Today paper founded by Eddie Shah. It also acquired the publishing firms of William Collins & Sons in Britain and Harper & Row in America, bringing them together to form HarperCollins in 1990.

Such moves did little to assuage the fear that the apparent proliferation of media options concealed a diminishing number of companies, exercising control behind the scenes. Such apprehensions, however, made little headway against the repeated insistence that more outlets meant more choice. It was an argument caricatured in a 1990 sketch on the BBC series A Bit of Fry & Laurie, in which a government minister responsible for a recent Broadcasting Bill is served by a restaurant waiter played by Stephen Fry. The waiter professes great admiration for the politician, even quoting one of his speeches: ‘We must strive to offer the consumer a far greater range of choice. For too long broadcasting has been in the grip of a small elite. We must expand and offer more choice.’ He then notices, to his apparent horror, that the place-setting includes silver cutlery and snatches it away, taking it off into the kitchen and returning with a bag containing thousands of identical, white plastic coffee-stirrers, which he proceeds to heap upon the table. ‘At least you’ve got the choice now, haven’t you?’ he snarls. ‘They may be complete crap, but you’ve got the choice. And that’s so important.’

12

Media

‘When will I see my picture in the paper?’