Nastasja One day. I’ll tell you the story of my life. I’ll write it for a play and they’ll make it into a worldwide film.
– David Greig, The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman
He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union, 1999
At the start of Jonathan Coe’s novel The Rotters’ Club, two young people, Sophie and Patrick, meet in a restaurant, and she asks him to imagine how different the past is. For her, Britain in the 1970s was:
Completely different. Just think of it! A world without mobiles or videos or Playstations or even faxes. A world that had never heard of Princess Diana or Tony Blair, never thought for a moment of going to war in Kosovo or Afghanistan. There were only three television channels in those days Patrick. Three! And the unions were so powerful that, if they wanted to, they could close one of them down for a whole night. Sometimes people even had to do without electricity. Imagine!1
Although it is easier to imagine the 1990s than the 1970s, today’s Sophies and Patricks might also find it strange to imagine a world without the iPhone, iPod, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Wikipedia, Kindle, Nintendo DS, audio downloads or MacBook Air laptop. At the very start of the decade, the digital revolution was nowhere to be seen, the driving forces behind Britpop (Noel Gallagher or Damon Albarn) were unknown teenagers and British theatre was seen as in crisis. In global terms, the terrible genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia hadn’t yet happened, China was not yet a major economic player and Saddam Hussein seemed containable; very few people had heard of Osama bin Laden. In British politics, John Major was prime minister, Tony Blair was a minor politician and New Labour hadn’t been invented yet. David Cameron was still working as a junior researcher in the Conservative Research Department after leaving Oxford University. Other, less privileged, students didn’t have to pay tuition fees. So the 1990s are already something of a foreign country, whose inhabitants did things differently.
The traditional family is dead, killed off by cohabitation and divorce.
Housing: governments promote private home ownership, but few new homes are built. Repossessions of homes, due to failure to keep up mortgage payments in the economic recession, reach peaks of 75,500 and 68,500 in 1991–2.
More than 80 per cent of homes have central heating, fridges, freezers, washing machines and telephones.
Car ownership reaches 70 per cent.
Most common cause of death: cancer and heart disease.
The average weekly wage is £400 (1999).
The most striking trend is the decline of the traditional family model of male breadwinner and dependent wife, with the rise of the two-earner family. Part-time work is more common, with about two-fifths of mothers in part-time jobs.
In 1992, unemployment reaches 2.6 million.
In 1994, 53 per cent of women are economically active.
Work is a curse, but the alternative is purgatorial. In the 1990s, there is a polarisation between work-rich and work-poor households, between those with two earners and others with none. There’s a rapid rise in inequality and poverty: in the early 1990s, about one Briton in six lives in poverty. Child poverty grows, with 4.4 million children – one-third – living in poor households in the late 1990s. The number of low-income workers peaks at 20 per cent of the workforce in 1992. For about one in ten couples with children, neither parent is employed, and these families are a sharp contrast to two-earner couples. Only half of single mothers are employed. Many rely on social security benefits.
North–South divide: Londoners earn 50 per cent more than equivalent workers in the North East. The South East has the highest proportion of people earning £50,000 or more.
In 1995, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report on income and wealth shows that inequality in Britain is worse than it has been for fifty years, and the gap between rich and poor is growing faster than in any other Western country.
By 1999, just over half the population describe themselves as middle class, and about 40 per cent as working class.
Women average 75 per cent of men’s earnings.
We need employment, which requires more capital stock and higher investment, which will be the most effective instrument for the social objective of bringing the marginalised back into the fold. And that in turn will involve the redistribution of income.
– Will Hutton, The State We’re In
(London: Vintage, 1996, rev. edn), p. 24
Braun alarm clock, Dyson hoover, IKEA furniture, Bondi Blue iMac personal computer, red AIDS ribbon, Sony Playstation, bottle of Evian water, thong, combat trousers, Cazal sunglasses, paperback of Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, Aeron office chair, Ecstasy pills, Jimmy Choo shoes, Wonder bra, Nokia mobile phone, poppers, Nintendo Gameboy, Big Issue magazine, cyclist anti-smog mask, Poundland bargain, Agent Provocateur lingerie, ethical knitted hat, Reebok pumps, plastic cartoon lunchbox, rollerblades.
As if, bad hair day, bitch, chill out, don’t go there, eat my shorts, get over it, mother of all, not!, OMG, so, talk to the hand, wassup?, whatever, wicked, wig out, yo.
Afro-Saxons, bling, booze-cruise, chick-flick, crib, cyber, diss, dotcom, email, fairtrade, feminazis, Futon Man, gastro-pub, himbo, homeboy, hottie, job seeker, metrosexual, minger, mockney, morph, on-message, phat, pimping, regime change, slacker, Y2K.
Cappuccino in Costa coffee shop (London, 1998) |
£1 |
First-class postage stamp (1999) |
26p |
The Times newspaper (1999) |
35p |
Pint of beer (1999) |
£1.73 |
26p |
|
Dozen eggs (London, 1999) |
£1.57 |
Average West End theatre ticket (1995) |
£28 |
Average price of a new house (1992) |
about £70,000 |
Average price of a new house (1999) |
about £112,000 |
Dysfunctional family: although Princess Diana, wife of Prince Charles (heir to the throne), is an international superstar celebrity, all is not well with the Royal Family. At the end of 1992, Queen Elizabeth II laments that she has had an annus horribilis. You can see Her Maj’s point. Look at the marriage problems of her kids: in March, her son Prince Andrew separates from his wife Sarah, known as ‘Fergie’. In April, the Queen’s daughter Princess Anne divorces her husband Mark Phillips. In June, Andrew Morton’s startlingly frank Diana: Her True Story is published. In November, Windsor Castle, a royal residence, is damaged by fire. In December, Charles and Diana separate. In 1996, they divorce, as do Andrew and Fergie. When Princess Diana dies in a car crash on 31 August 1997, the Queen’s perceived indifference causes a crisis in public support for the monarchy.
Bad cops: on 22 April 1993, black teenager Stephen Lawrence is stabbed to death by a gang of white racists. The police fail to secure evidence for a conviction despite the arrest of five suspects. A public inquiry in 1999, headed by Sir William Macpherson, concludes that the Metropolitan Police Force is ‘institutionally racist’. The phrase haunts race relations.
Child murder: on 12 February 1993, two ten-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, abduct and murder the toddler Jamie Bulger in Liverpool. The grainy CCTV footage of the boys taking their victim from a shopping centre becomes a symbol of social anomie, and the allegation that the two boys had watched a horror movie video, Child’s Play 3 (1991), sparks a debate about violence in film. The most notorious murder of the decade.
Devilish problem: on 27 February 1991, nine children suspected of being sexually abused by their families are removed by social services on the remote island of South Ronaldsay in Orkney. The suspicion is that a satanic abuse paedophile ring is involved, but no evidence is ever discovered, and the children eventually return to their families. But fear of abuse pervades society.
Because I got high: on 16 November 1995, Leah Betts, a schoolgirl from Essex, dies after taking an Ecstasy pill. Although her death is due to drinking too much water, it kick starts a moral panic about drugs. A poster campaign uses her photograph, with the headline ‘Sorted: Just One Ecstasy Tablet Took Leah Betts’. In 1998, a European Commission report says that a higher proportion of teenagers and adults take drugs in the UK than in other EU countries. Drug references permeate culture.
Crime and punishment: under the Conservative government, in 1993, Home Secretary Michael Howard announces that ‘prison works’ and favours a tough approach: the prison population rises to 50,000. Tony Blair, opposition Home Secretary in 1992, prefers a more nuanced approach encapsulated in the soundbite: ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’. But the prison population continues to rise under New Labour. Because of an improving economy, crime falls by 10 per cent in 1995–9. Despite this, popular culture remains fascinated by criminals.
Terror old and new: in 1991, the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven and the Birmingham Six – convicted as IRA terrorists in the 1970s – all have their sentences quashed by the High Court after it emerges that police tampered with evidence in the original trials. Although most people in the UK are preoccupied with acts of violence by the IRA, a new terrorist enemy arrives: in 1993, the World Trade Center in New York is hit by an Islamic terrorist, Ramzi Yousef, with a truck bomb that kills six people; in 1998, the bombing of US embassies in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Nairobi (Kenya) by Al-Qaeda results in 300 deaths.
Money never sleeps: in 1994, Lloyd’s – the world’s largest insurance broker – faces heavy loses following court rulings in the USA which makes it liable for payouts for asbestosis sufferers whose claims go back for decades. The Lloyd’s Names – private individuals who agreed to take on insurance risk liabilities in return for profits from premiums – go bankrupt. Lloyd’s itself is almost destroyed by the payouts.
Gay life: in 1991, actor Sir Ian McKellen visits Downing Street to discuss laws about gays. In 1994, the age of consent for gay men is reduced from twenty-one to eighteen (the age for heterosexuals remains sixteen). During the decade, there is an increasing acceptance of people living a gay lifestyle. Certainly, there is a much greater visibility for gays (including lesbians), with ‘gay villages’ in areas such as Soho, London, and many more representations of gays in the media, especially on television.
Race and religion: Britain is mainly white and mainly secular. In 1994, ethnic-minority groups make up 5.5 per cent of the UK population and 20 per cent of London’s population. Half of the ethnic-minority population is UK born. In 1992, 6.4 million people attend a Christian church (Anglican, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, etc.), 15 per cent of the total population, the lowest attendance in Europe; there are 500,000 Muslims, 270,000 Sikhs and 140,000 Hindus.
Domestication of porn: the growth of the internet makes pornography widely available. Likewise, television channels, such as Channel 4 and the new Channel 5, screen more programmes about porn. Channel 5 in particular becomes notorious for broadcasting programmes such as UK Raw, Compromising Situations and Sex and Shopping.
Careless community: in 1990, the Conservative government institutes a system of ‘Community Care’ for mental patients. The policy is meant to enable them to stay in their own homes. Without adequate supervision, however, many become increasingly vulnerable, a danger to themselves and to others. For example, in December 1992, Jonathan Zito is killed by Christopher Clunis, a paranoid schizophrenic, at Finsbury Park underground station.
Trauma and survival: bad news dominates the media. The Bosnian civil war introduces the horrific concept of ethnic cleansing (genocide), and the experience of post-traumatic stress disorder becomes more familiar. Although this condition usually refers to soldiers who have survived battle, it is also applied to domestic abuse victims.
Help yourself: self-help books, which offer suggestions for various ways of improving your life, become increasingly popular. They aim to boost self-esteem and make you feel better. Examples include Paul Wilson’s The Little Book of Calm (1999), Rachel Swift’s Women’s Pleasure: or How to Have an Orgasm as Often as You Want (1994) and John Gray’s Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (1992). Such bestsellers are part of a trend towards a more therapy-oriented society, and suggest an acceptance of New Age philosophy, a yearning for spiritual meaning. For those with a more immediate need to counter the blues, there is always Prozac.
Evidence shows the UK lagging behind other countries. To improve basic skills, such as literacy and numeracy, the standardised National Curriculum in secondary schools is further developed, and New Labour introduces literacy and numeracy hours in primary schools to help raise standards. Secondary schooling is compulsory until the age of sixteen, but compared to other European countries fewer pupils stay on after that age. For students, 1998 is the decisive date: New Labour introduces tuition fees payable by students as a way of raising money for expanding higher education. Scottish students at Scottish universities are exempt. In universities, postmodernism and poststructuralism remain the most important academic systems of thought and analysis.
Education, education, education.
– Tony Blair’s three top priorities, 1996
The decade’s new sitcoms follow the 1980s trend of more anarchic and eccentric ideas, notable examples being Absolutely Fabulous, Men Behaving Badly, The Royle Family, Drop the Dead Donkey, The Vicar of Dibley, Father Ted, Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge, One Foot in the Grave and The League of Gentlemen. From the USA come Friends, Frasier, Seinfeld, The Simpsons and South Park.
The most popular television dramas are nostalgic frock-flicks: for example, the BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1995) features Colin Firth as Mr Darcy in a famous wet-shirt moment. Epic series about society, such as Peter Flannery’s Our Friends in the North (BBC2, 1996), are also popular, as well as docudramas such as Hillsborough (ITV, 1996) and political thrillers like House of Cards (BBC1, 1990). The sex lives of law graduates are explored using innovative camera techniques in This Life (BBC2, 1996). There are two gripping police series: Cracker (ITV, 1993), about a police psychologist played by Robbie Coltrane; and Prime Suspect (ITV, 1991), about a female detective played by Helen Mirren. By contrast, Nick Park’s animated thirty-minute films, featuring Wallace and Gromit, bring smiles to the faces of adults as well as children. The most popular game show is Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? (ITV, 1998) and a notable comedy quiz show is Have I Got News for You (BBC2, 1990).
On 30 March 1997, Channel 5, the fifth terrestrial television channel, is launched. Soon it becomes a byword for substandard tabloid television.
A decade of Channel 4 (the most provocative channel):
The decade is dominated by Hollywood cinema, with an emphasis on violent shoot-’em-ups and special effects.
Brits in Hollywood: Oscar-winning best films include The Silence of the Lambs (Anthony Hopkins as serial killer Hannibal Lecter, 1991); The English Patient (Anthony Minghella’s version of Michael Ondaatje’s book, 1996); Shakespeare in Love (co-written by Tom Stoppard, 1998) and American Beauty (Sam Mendes’s suburban drama, 1999).
Memorable British films: British films love historical and literary themes, and contemporary social issues. Most notable Shakespeare adaptation: Much Ado About Nothing (Kenneth Branagh, 1993).
Adaptations of plays: Shadowlands (William Nicholson, 1993); Tom & Viv (Michael Hastings, 1994); The Browning Version (Terence Rattigan, 1994); The Madness of King George (Alan Bennett, 1995); Beautiful Thing (Jonathan Harvey, 1996), Little Voice (Jim Cartwright, 1998), The Winslow Boy (Rattigan, 1999) and East is East (Ayub Khan-Din, 1999).
Adaptations of novels: Howards End (1992); The Remains of the Day (1993); Sense and Sensibility (1995); Trainspotting (1996); Fever Pitch (1997); The End of the Affair (1999).
Brit rom-coms: the Richard Curtis-written Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and Notting Hill (1999).
Historical films: Land and Freedom (1995); Mrs Brown (1997); Elizabeth (1998), Topsy-Turvy (1999).
Contemporary films: Stephen Poliakoff’s Close My Eyes (1991); Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave (1994) and Trainspotting (1996); Mike Leigh’s Naked (1995) and Secrets & Lies (1996); Ken Loach’s Ladybird Ladybird (1994) and My Name is Joe (1998). Brassed Off (1996) and The Full Monty (1997) explored northern life.
Gangster films: The Krays (Philip Ridley, 1990) and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (Guy Ritchie, 1998).
Magazines: as well as celebrity gossip, the most popular magazines of the 1990s are lads’ mags, such as Maxim, Loaded and FHM. They help to create a culture of laddism – in 1993 journalist Sean O’Hagan coined the term ‘New Lad’ in Arena magazine, which involves middle-class men ironically posing as sexist, anti-intellectual beer-swilling brutes. Such magazines specialise in images of semi-naked women, plus articles on other traditional male interests such as sport and cars. This is all evidence for those who see masculinity in crisis as being one of the themes of this decade.
Designers create ‘softer’ fashions that are more relaxed than the 1980s look. Casual fashion sports T-shirts, combat trousers and chinos, while street fashion is influenced by hip-hop culture and characterised by baggy jeans, hooded sweatshirts, football jerseys and puffy jackets. Clothing fads include pre-ripped jeans, Ninja Turtles items, head-bands and Reebok trainers. Retro styles, influenced by the 1960s and 1970s, abound. High designer fashion becomes increasingly diverse: for example, a Paul Smith suit mixes flamboyant patchwork fabrics from Afghanistan with 1950s tailoring, while a Helen Storey ensemble mixes modern street and sportswear influences with ethnic-inspired embroidery. Doc Martens boots, 1980s symbol of the well-hard individual, make a comeback, often in stylish new colours. In advertising, ‘heroin chic’ – the use of thin, druggy-looking models – becomes a controversial issue. Body piercing and tattooing become increasingly popular.
The spirit of alternative comedy, which boomed in the 1980s, lives on – it is hyped as ‘the new rock’n’roll’. This entertainment includes irreverent jokes, dark humour, observational comedy and political satire – most of which now find their niche in the mainstream. Double acts dominate televised comedy: Reeves and Mortimer (Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer), Punt and Dennis (Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis), Newman and Baddiel (Robert Newman and David Baddiel) and Skinner and Baddiel (Frank Skinner). Newcomers include Graham Norton, Bill Bailey, Jack Dee, Angus Deayton, Sacha Baron Cohen and Harry Hill. Caroline Aherne introduces us to her Mrs Merton character in 1994 and then writes, with Craig Cash, The Royle Family, in which she also appears. Armando Iannucci’s On the Hour on radio and The Day Today on television introduce a new sense of the ludicrous. On the radio, Jeremy Hardy’s satire is fuelled by his radical beliefs. The Fast Show (TV) is an influential quickfire television show, while Goodness Gracious Me, with Meera Syal and Sanjeev Bhaskar, explores the Asian experience of British life.
Although glamour has always been part of society, in the 1990s the public obsession with celebrities plumbs new depths. Following the creation of Hello! magazine in 1988, soon followed by imitators such as OK! (1993), celebrity journalism booms as the rich and famous invite journalists into their homes. Saccharine articles inevitably follow. Royalty, film stars, television stars, pop stars and football stars are the main focus of attention: examples include Princess Diana, David Beckham and his wife, Victoria (formerly Posh Spice). Yet some celebrities are simply famous for being famous. But if much media coverage presents a sunny view of celebrity culture, this is equalled in popularity by a tabloid fascination with their divorces. Nor is the traditional media left out: in 1995, Princess Diana appears on the BBC’s Panorama and tells all about the break-up of her marriage. In celebrity culture, the figure of the paparazzo (usually acting in a pack of paparazzi) looms large as a hate figure, whose intrusive lens provides the material for mass ogling of the famous. The death of Princess Diana in a high-speed crash in Paris while her car was being chased by paparazzi sums up the symbiosis between media and celebrity tragedy.
The term ‘Cool Britannia’ is a media-inspired label which celebrates the creativity of British culture in the mid-1990s, acting as both tourist magnet and cultural boosterism. In 1996, Newsweek magazine calls London the ‘coolest city on the planet’, and the idea of ‘Cool Britannia’ brings together pop music, art, film, theatre, fashion and even eating out, hyping up national pride, exemplified by the use of the Union Jack to decorate the guitars of musicians or the clothes of celebrities. Examples of this phenomenon include Britpop, the YBAs, Brit films and new plays by young playwrights. Tony Blair – who once played in a band – cashes in on ‘Cool Britannia’ by hosting pop stars and other creatives at Downing Street. Because this phenomenon is London-based, other parts of the UK come up with their own brands of cultural revival, with Cool Caledonia for Scotland and Cool Cymru for Wales.
Pop is dominated by boy bands and girl bands, characterised by catchy songs, choreographed dancing and a carefully constructed image. Manager Nigel Martin-Smith creates Take That, while Louis Walsh creates East 17. Producer Simon Cowell manages Westlife, also created by Walsh. Take That features Gary Barlow, Howard Donal, Mark Owen, Jason Orange and Robbie Williams. Formed in Manchester in 1990, they sell more than 25 million records in 1991–6, especially their album Everything Changes (1993). Robbie Williams leaves in 1995 to pursue a solo career.
The most phenomenal of the girl bands is the Spice Girls, formed in 1994 by Heart Management. Band members Victoria Beckham, Melanie Brown, Emma Brunton, Melanie Chisholm and Geri Halliwell take on marketable identities as Posh, Scary (Mel B), Baby, Sporty (Mel C) and Ginger. In June 1996, they release their debut single ‘Wannabe’, and their first album Spice sells 25 million copies worldwide. In 1997, comes Spiceworld: The Movie. Their massive success make them iconic figures of 1990s pop culture. Geri Halliwell’s Union Flag dress becomes a symbol of ‘Cool Britannia’, and the concept of ‘Girl Power’ helps to define the decade. In 1998, Halliwell leaves the group.
As a reaction to the inauthenticity of boy bands and girl bands, Britpop develops in the indie (independent) music scene and changes pop culture. Guitar groups such as Blur, Oasis and Pulp are influenced by 1960s pop such as the Beatles and Kinks. Britpop bands also create their music as a reaction against American grunge music, which is popular at the start of the 1990s. Other Britpop bands include Suede, Supergrass, Sleeper, Menswear and Elastica. Liam Gallagher of Oasis becomes a tabloid celebrity for his bad-boy antics. In 1995, a chart battle between Blur’s ‘Country House’ and Oasis’s ‘Roll with It’ is labelled ‘The Battle of Britpop’ by music magazines such as NME (Blur won by selling 274,000 to Oasis’s 216,000). Britpop declines after Oasis’s Be Here Now (1997) album flops. Attention shifts to bands such as The Verve, Radiohead, Travis and Coldplay.
Following the Acid House parties of the late 1980s, clubbing and dance culture boom. Super clubs such as Ministry of Sound, the Laser Dome, the Fridge and Hippodrome in London (plus cool spots such as Helter Skelter in Manchester and Cream in Liverpool) are led by star DJs playing a variety of dance music. Alongside this, Rave culture, with its joyously illegal warehouse parties and Ecstasy-fuelled all-nighters/long-weekenders, is attacked by the media for its illicit drug use and unlicensed venues, and this results in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, which empowers police to stop such events. Abroad, Ibiza is a favourite holiday venue where clubbers of all countries unite. Many 1990s plays contain references to this clubbing culture and drug use.
Andrew Morton, Diana: Her True Story (candid royal biography).
Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary (humorous year in the life of a thirtysomething).
Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island (humorous travel book by American author).
Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch (autobiography of a football fan).
Joanna Trollope, The Rector’s Wife (witty account of Anna’s rebellion).
Andy McNab, Bravo Two Zero (behind-the-lines SAS patrol in Gulf War).
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (theoretical physicist’s view of cosmos).
Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (Second World War love story).
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (fantasy set in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry).
Sue Townsend, The Queen and I (Royal Family on a council estate).
One of the most influential kinds of literature is a new generation of young American writers called the ‘blank generation’. Their writing is characterised by its detached coolness and a tone that feels flat, affectless and atonal, with offhand narrative voices describing urban life, violence, sex, drugs and consumerism. In these novels, awful things happen, but they leave the writers apparently unfazed. A good example is Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), in which a serial killer recounts the details of his murders with the same sense of distance that he lists the designer clothes worn by himself and his friends. Other examples of this genre include the work of Douglas Coupland, Dennis Cooper, Jay McInerney, Chuck Palahniuk and Tama Janowitz.
Government can never do the work of creating. But it can and must support those who do.
– Chris Smith, Creative Britain
(London: Faber, 1998), pp. 141–2
Young British Artists: YBAs is the name given to a group of conceptual artists whose notoriety dominates the decade. They include Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Many of them are taught at Goldsmith’s College, University of London, and their work is exhibited and bought by cultural entrepreneur Charles Saatchi, who promotes the phenomenon of Britart. In 1997, the Royal Academy hosts the Sensation exhibition (items from Saatchi’s personal collection). It includes Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (shark in formaldehyde) and Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (tent embroidered with names). One work, Marcus Harvey’s Myra – a picture of Moors murderer Myra Hindley made out of the handprints of children – creates immediate controversy. Another, Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary, causes offence when the exhibits visit New York because it includes porn images and a lump of elephant dung. Other YBAs include Jake and Dinos Chapman, Rachel Whiteread, Sarah Lucas, Sam Taylor-Wood and Steve McQueen.
The Angel of the North: located on a hill overlooking the A1 road in Gateshead, north-east England, Antony Gormley’s The Angel of the North is an iconic piece of public art. Erected in 1998 and costing £1 million of National Lottery funding, the statue is about twenty metres tall and has a wingspan of fifty metres. Although its initial reception is not enthusiastic, the statue soon becomes an emblem of local pride – in 1998, local football fans pay tribute to Newcastle United footballer Alan Shearer by draping a huge football shirt on the Angel.
The Millennium Dome: the largest building of its type in the world, the Millennium Dome is a huge white marquee designed by architect Richard Rogers and located on the Greenwich Peninsula in London. It is originally the idea of John Major’s Conservative government, which wants a distinctive building to celebrate the arrival of the third millennium AD on 1 January 2000. After his election in 1997, Tony Blair hypes up expectations for the project, which opens to the public as The Millennium Experience, a one-year exhibition that lasts for the whole of 2000. It is widely derided. After this, the Dome becomes a white elephant, an empty monument to the hype generated by New Labour, until bought and rebranded as the O2 Arena in 2005.
Cheap flights take off. In 1992 the air industry is deregulated by the EU. The winners are low-cost airlines, such as Ryanair and easyJet, which make flying cheap and available to everyone. Air becomes by far the most popular way of travelling.
By 1998, Stansted Airport is handling seven million passengers a year. Europe is the most popular destination (80 per cent of visits abroad). Since 1994, Spain is the most popular country, followed by France. Package trips to the USA become cheaper than trips to British resorts. With falling prices, a second holiday becomes possible, and Thailand, Bali and Australia are now on the map.
Most working people have four weeks’ holiday a year and go away for two weeks in July and August. Seaside package holidays abroad are most popular, but more Britons also take a second holiday abroad in the winter (skiing for a week) or spring (short breaks to Europe).
At home, people enjoy various indoor and outdoor activities. The biggest cultural shift is towards home-based leisure. About 99 per cent of households have at least one television, which is the most popular leisure activity with an average viewing time of twenty-five hours per week – half an individual’s weekly free time.
By the end of 1993, three million subscribe to satellite television channels. Video watching booms. In 1992, some 70 per cent of households have a video recorder, but only 20 per cent have a home computer. Video games rise relentlessly. But so does reading: for example, sales of books rose by 5 per cent in 1993.
People spend a quarter of their time on socialising with friends, and a little less on sports and hobbies. DIY and gardening are national obsessions.
In the 1990s, beer loses out to wine as the most popular alcoholic drink, with chilled Chardonnay a beverage of choice.
Retail therapy grows in importance.
Test-tube babies: a significant moment in the development of in vitro fertilisation (IVF), enabling women to become pregnant by the implantation of fertilised eggs, is the invention of a process for injection of single sperms by André Van Steirteghem in Brussels in 1992. This enables men with minimal sperm production to help achieve pregnancies. Also, the development of IVF using donated eggs helps women with ovulation problems achieve pregnancy.
Pop science: the public is keen on science, and the appetite for science journalism and books aimed at the general reader grows. A good example is Stephen Hawking, a Nobel laureate whose book on cosmology, A Brief History of Time (1988), stays in the bestseller lists throughout the 1990s, although it is more often bought than read. Sometimes pop science is intensely political, as when Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray publish The Bell Curve (1994), which purports to prove that differences in intelligence between races are genetic in origin.
The digital revolution has a huge impact on everyday life. In 1991 the World Wide Web is made available via the internet and by the middle of the decade everyone knows about it. For many people, their first experience is through a slow dial-up connection to send and receive emails. In 1994, the first internet café opens, and, in the following year, eBay and Amazon are started. The ability to create individual websites fires the expansion of the internet in the late 1990s. By 2000, 40 per cent of British households own a personal computer and access the internet. In general, the use of personal computers increases and mobile phones become widely available for the first time. Internet and mobile phones immediately speed up personal communications and various forms of human interactivity: with mobile phones, parents are able to better monitor the movements of their children. The use of text-messaging quickly spreads. During the decade, the use of Microsoft software – especially Windows – and Pentium Intel computers makes these brands household words. Handheld video games such as Nintendo Game Boy and Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog are massively popular. Many businesses find digital transactions easier. However, along with such benefits come new problems: the ability of the state and corporations to accumulate large amounts of information in digital format raises questions about personal privacy. Increased availability of new digital technologies makes older technologies obsolete. So CDs replace audio tapes and gramophone records, and DVDs replace VHS tapes; increased use of mobiles goes with a steady decline in pay phones; digital cameras replace traditional models. Emails gradually replace letter writing and postal communication.
The dotcoms: dotcom companies, which do most of their business on the internet, boom in the late 1990s, mainly funded by venture capitalists but often with poor business plans and wildly inflated expectation of success. A stock-market crash in 2000 ends the dotcom bubble.
Toys: the Tamagotchi, a handheld digital pet made in Japan, is invented in 1996 and the Furby, an electronic furry robot, goes on sale in 1998.
Use of cheque books is down by a quarter and plastic card payments triple. By 1999, almost a million people work in IT-related jobs, a sharp increase.
Ravenscraig steelworks closes in 1992. Heavy industry, such as steel and coal production, declines. Michael Heseltine, Conservative President of the Board of Trade, closes thirty-one mines with the loss of 30,000 jobs. By 1994, British Coal has only seventeen mines, employing 8,500 miners.
British and French engineers celebrate in 1990 as they meet under the English Channel while building the first tunnel linking the two countries. In 1994, the Chunnel opens, linking London to Paris and Brussels by means of the high-speed Eurostar train.
Farm industry madness: an epidemic of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), commonly called Mad Cow Disease, begins in the late 1980s and spreads throughout Britain, with thousands of cases each week by 1993. Although the Conservative government at first plays down the problem, with Agriculture Minister John Selwyn Gummer feeding a hamburger to his four-year-old daughter Cordelia in May 1990, the outbreak soon affects thousands of cattle, and about four million are slaughtered. In 1996 it is confirmed that BSE also spreads to humans in the form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD).
Rail privatisation: in 1993, British Rail, a government-owned railway system, is privatised by the Conservative government. This involves a new complex system of ownership by more than 100 private companies of the railway lines, trains, stations and maintenance companies. Despite its initial opposition, New Labour does not reverse the process. A series of horrific rail crashes, beginning at Southall in 1997 and Ladbroke Grove in 1999, and continuing early in the 2000s, are blamed on the cost-cutting involved in the now privately owned railways.
Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers.
– John Major on Britishness
She was the People’s Princess.
– Tony Blair on Princess Diana
I’m going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.
– Bill Clinton
In the emerging world, the relations between states and groups from different civilizations will not be close and will often be antagonistic. Yet some intercivilizational relations are more conflict prone than others. At the micro level, the most violent fault lines are between Islam and its Orthodox, Hindu, African, and Western Christian neighbors. At the macro level, the dominant division is between the ‘West and the rest’.
– Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations
and the Remaking of the World Order, New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 183
Liberal principles in economics – the ‘free market’ – have spread, and have succeeded in producing unprecedented levels of material prosperity.
– Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the
Last Man (London: Penguin, 1992), p. xiii