The New British Empire Dominic Sandbrook: Let Us Entertain You

London 2012.

The Olympic Games had come to Britain

and the eyes of the world were eagerly

trained on the capital's new Olympic Park.

The Opening Ceremony was billed as a showcase

for the very best of British.

There was only one small problem, though -

nobody really knew what that meant.

A century and a half earlier, at the height of our power

and prestige, we had put on the Great Exhibition of 1851 -

a celebration of our manufacturing might.

In Hyde Park, the Victorians built a vast glass

and steel structure, the Crystal Palace,

and filled it with the glories of British industry.

But by 2012, much of our industrial base was gone.

So what did we have left to boast about?

The Opening Ceremony threatened to be a fiasco

played out on a global stage.

But it wasn't.

Instead, it was a celebration of Britain like never before.

And the reason?

We may have lost our colonial empire

and our industrial supremacy but there is one thing, I think,

that we do better than anyone else on the planet -

popular culture.

And that is precisely what the Opening Ceremony celebrated.

# People try to put us d-down

# Talkin' 'bout my generation... #

It's extraordinary to think that one British writer, JK Rowling,

has sold more than 400 million books...

..that Doctor Who is watched in almost every country

in the Western world,

that James Bond has been the central character

in the longest-running film series in history,

that the Beatles are still the bestselling musical

group of all time

and that only Shakespeare

and the Bible have sold more books than Agatha Christie.

To put it simply, no other country on Earth, relative to its size,

has contributed more to the modern imagination.

This is the story of how we went from being a country that

made things to a country that makes culture

and from an empire that spanned a quarter of the globe

to an empire of the imagination.

# Talkin' 'bout my generation

# This is my generation

# Talkin' 'bout my generation

# This is my generation. #

So, British culture. Where do you start?

What about with a group of lads from Birmingham who decided

that their lives should be different?

The future laid out for them was one of hard labour and industrial grit,

a life in the steelworks.

Since Victorian times,

Birmingham had been the beating heart of British industry...

..its products bought and sold all over the world.

-Let's go.

-Come on, then!

But by the late 1960s,

life for these lads was looking a lot bleaker.

-ARCHIVE:

-The iron trade is a dying industry. It's dying out.

The lads leaving school now, they won't entertain it.

They won't have it.

Nowhere suffered more from the brutal collapse of British manufacturing

than the West Midlands.

But out of the ashes of our industrial heritage

there emerged something entirely new

because in the late 1960s,

Birmingham began to forge a very different kind of metal.

In 1965, the 17-year-old Tony Iommi was working his last day

at the local steelworks.

A keen amateur guitarist,

he had decided to give up manual labour for a life in music.

But as he was loading a sheet of metal into the steel press,

he momentarily lost concentration,

and in that instant, he brought the full weight of the industrial

machinery down on the middle two fingers of his right hand.

For Iommi, it was a disaster.

He was left-handed and he'd just severed two of his fretting fingers.

Undeterred, he made his own leather thimbles and played on.

It was a moment that changed the future of popular music...

# What is this

# That stands before me? #

..because Iommi became the lead guitarist of Black Sabbath.

Like the other members of Black Sabbath and, I suspect,

most youngsters in the West Midlands, Tony Iommi felt little affinity

with the hippyish, peace and love, flower-power side of the 1960s.

He'd grown up in a world of blast furnaces and steam hammers.

Heavy metal was, quite literally, in the air.

MUSIC: NIB by Black Sabbath

# Oh, yeah!

# Follow me now and you will not regret

# Leaving the life you led before we met... #

And what he wanted was to make music that reflected his daily reality -

the din and the sweat and the grit of life in industrial Birmingham -

the workshop of the world.

With its roots in the forges and foundries of our industrial past,

Black Sabbath pioneered a louder, deeper, heavier sound...

# Oh, yeah! #

..and they would prove irresistibly influential...

# If you like to gamble, I tell you I'm your man

# You win some, lose some, it's all the same to me... #

..from Motorhead...

..to Metallica.

Heavy metal has become a global musical phenomenon,

thrilling audiences around the world from Solihull to Shanghai.

I really enjoy it

and you forget about the rest of your troubles and that.

Just gets you going, really. I mean, you start head-banging

and you're feeling OK.

In the 2011 Census,

more than 6,000 people even listed it as their religion.

Black Sabbath's blend of industrial clamour and Satanic fantasy

has seen the band sell some 70 million records worldwide.

MUSIC: Paranoid by Black Sabbath

# People think I'm insane

# Because I am frowning all the time... #

Their most recent album went to number one in 14 countries.

Heavy metal could only have been born in Britain.

It came screaming and shrieking out of a place that, for more than

a century, had rung to the din of iron and steel.

The great irony, though, is that Black Sabbath came banging

and crashing onto the scene at the very moment

when the great forges and foundries were beginning to close their doors.

And perhaps that is no coincidence.

It was only as Britain's industrial, political

and military power started to wane that we began to see

ourselves as entertainers to the world.

Yet much of our popular culture represents a reckoning with

the industrial and imperial greatness that we had and we lost.

The story of our culture, like the Industrial Revolution,

is one of different parts of our country

specialising in different kinds of products.

And at its heart is exactly the same spirit of invention

and entrepreneurship.

It's that same spirit that drove men like Matthew Boulton

and James Watt - the pioneers whose steam engine transformed their age.

These industrial revolutionaries, as well as their Victorian

successors, lived in a world of innovation, marketing and money.

I don't think we've ever really lost that ethos, that creative,

entrepreneurial instinct.

And in that sense, perhaps, we all still live in Victorian Britain.

Please, sir. I want some more.

-What?

-What?

-What?

Ask for more?

If you look and listen hard enough, you begin to hear

the ghosts of our Victorian past echoing through our popular culture.

And often, that's been down to the outlook of the individuals

who shaped it or, perhaps more accurately, manufactured it.

Today, most of us associate the name J Arthur Rank

with black and white films on wet Sunday afternoons.

But, you know, Rank wasn't actually a film-maker.

He was, in fact, a miller.

But in the 1930s and 1940s, it was this unassuming Yorkshire

miller who became the saviour of Britain's film industry.

For Rank, the very embodiment of the Victorian industrialist,

the film industry was just that - an industry.

Rank saw culture as a commodity like any other, something that was

manufactured, packaged and sold.

His mills may have fed the nation

but he dreamed of giving people cultural sustenance,

something to lift up their hearts and elevate their minds.

But there was an obstacle in the way of Rank's dream,

and that obstacle was America.

Before the Second World War, American films

accounted for 80% of British screen time,

earning 50 million a year from British cinema-goers.

But this wasn't just about the money.

In the summer of 1945, the head of Britain's new Arts Council,

the economist John Maynard Keynes, made a radio address to the nation

and in it he made no bones about his underlying ambitions.

'Let every part of merry England be merry in its own way.

'And death to Hollywood!'

Death to Hollywood! For people

like Keynes, Britain's youngsters weren't just talking American...

If you think you're going to make a plough-jockey out of me,

you've got another think coming!

..they were dressing American, walking American,

even thinking American.

And all this raised the ghastly prospect that, very soon, we would

merely be a remote colonial outpost of a great American cultural empire.

Rank fervently believed that Britain had everything it needed

to take on Hollywood and reassert good old British values.

And at the end of the war, he proved it.

In 1944, Rank brought Laurence Olivier's Henry V to the screen

in glorious Technicolor.

Once more unto the breach,

dear friends, once more, or close the wall up with our English dead.

The story goes that Henry V was

commissioned by Winston Churchill as a way of rallying

the nation's morale for the long struggle against the Nazis.

But the film also chimed perfectly with Rank's dream of packaging

and selling patriotic high culture for a mass audience.

And what better way to take on Hollywood than with the help

of England's greatest playwright and Britain's finest actor?

And teach them how to war.

And you, good yeoman, whose limbs were made in England,

show us here the mettle of your pasture.

Henry V took the American box office by storm.

'For there is none of you so mean and base,

'that hath not noble lustre...'

Time magazine called it

"one of the great experiences in the history of motion pictures".

The game's afoot.

Follow your spirit, and upon this charge cry,

"God for Harry, England, and Saint George!"

-ALL:

-God for Harry, England, and Saint George!

This could have been Rank's own rallying cry

and it inspired some remarkably bull-headed rhetoric.

-ARCHIVE:

-Another warmly-appreciated speech came from that champion

of British films, Mr Rank.

As an exhibitor, I know today that you can make more money

out of British pictures than any other pictures.

Strong words, indeed, but Rank was convinced that the formula

for success was to establish a quintessentially British brand,

one which relied on British talent, British heritage

and British history.

And in the late 1940s, he bankrolled some of the greatest films ever made

from The Red Shoes

and Great Expectations to A Matter Of Life And Death.

-ARCHIVE:

-But it is in connection with the film organisation

employing over 32,000 men and women

that the name of J Arthur Rank has achieved worldwide recognition,

carrying the name of Britain to the farthest corners of the earth

through the medium of British film.

But despite his successes,

Rank himself never seemed entirely comfortable in the film world.

Even when Rank went to Hollywood,

he remained very much the stoical Victorian industrialist.

At one press conference in 1947, an American reporter was

so frustrated by Rank's silence that he asked him,

"Is it true, Mr Rank, that you are dumb?"

And there was a long pause and then Rank said, "No, just dull."

Sadly, for all his efforts, this God-fearing Yorkshireman

just couldn't compete with the vast Hollywood machine.

But what he created was a formula

that became one of the great mainstays of our post-war culture.

Above all, Rank had discovered that, on the cultural front,

Britishness and British history were our greatest assets.

This would become our brand

and, in the long run, it would fundamentally change not just

how other people thought about us, but how we thought about ourselves.

'This is BBC television. It's one o'clock.'

In 1964, the BBC's flagship sports programme,

Grandstand, featured a rather unusual item.

Well, now, in just a few minutes, a Boeing 707 is due to arrive

from New York and carrying it, er... carrying in it

four remarkable young men from Liverpool.

FANS SCREAM

And this is the moment they've been waiting for -

Paul McCartney leading them off, George Harrison on the left,

John Lennon, at the back, Ringo Starr.

FANS SCREAM

The Beatles were back from America, an international sensation.

FANS SCREAM

We were told you've come back from America millionaires.

-That was kidding! Next time.

-I'll buy you a drink.

But perhaps the way to understand the Beatles is not

just as a band whose music has become the soundtrack

to our lives, but as a business proposition.

For all the vigour and freshness of the songwriting,

the Beatles were an immaculately packaged product.

And for that, they had one man in particular to thank.

-ARCHIVE:

-Brian Epstein - the Beatles' manager.

Artists credit him with a unique judgment of what will be a hit

and who will make it.

Nearly all of them earn more than the Prime Minister.

Brian Epstein has become a near-legendary figure -

a Liverpool businessman who discovered the Beatles

at the Cavern Club in 1961

and managed them until his early death in 1967.

I hadn't had anything to do with

management of pop artists before

that day that I went down to the Cavern Club

and heard the Beatles playing.

Having grown up working for his parents' furniture business,

Epstein knew a thing or two about selling

and he knew exactly how he wanted to package the band.

The Beatles were then just four lads on that rather dimly-lit stage,

er, somewhat ill-clad, and their presentation was...

well, left little to be desired, as far as I was concerned.

One of the first things that Brian Epstein did was to bring

the Beatles to Liverpool's finest tailor.

And there, he replaced their black leather jackets with smart,

dark suits.

In essence, Epstein had turned them into the kind of band

that your mother would approve of. But he was also making them

a band, or a brand, that was quintessentially British.

No longer did the Beatles look like 1950s American rockers.

Now they projected a kind of sanitised, exaggerated Britishness.

MUSIC: A Hard Day's Night by The Beatles

# It's been a hard day's night

# And I've been working like a dog

# It's been a hard day's night

# I should be sleeping like a log

# But when I get home to you

# I find the things that you do

# Will make me feel all right. #

And it wasn't just the suits.

The Beatles were cheeky and irreverent,

loveable Liverpool jesters, not just serious musicians.

-Thank you very much.

-All the best.

-Cheers.

-Goodbye.

-Goodbye. Goodbye.

Well, you don't interview the Beatles, you just play straight men.

For an American audience, they'd seen something entirely new.

Very quickly,

Epstein's boys were generating enormous international sales.

It made a rather refreshing change.

By the early 1960s, the world was turning its back on British exports,

but the Beatles were bucking the trend.

By 1967, they were making £20m worth of export business

from the United States alone.

George, how do you like being described

as the Prime Minister's secret weapon?

Er, it's been great, yeah.

The thing is I didn't get the bit where they said,

"Earning all these dollars for Britain."

Like, are we sharing it out or something?

The truth was, they were the Prime Minister's secret weapon

and in 1965, Downing Street showed its appreciation

in a very public fashion.

-ARCHIVE:

-So came the summons to the palace.

The news got round to the faithful that the world's number one group

were to be invested by Her Majesty

with the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

But their MBEs weren't for music.

The press claimed they were for money, for "services to exports".

MUSIC: I Feel Fine by The Beatles

# Baby's good to me, you know

# She's happy as can be, you know

# She said so

# I'm in love with her

# And I feel fine... #

This was an extraordinary moment.

Today we take it for granted that pop stars

and celebrities will be awarded MBEs almost every year.

But in 1965, the Beatles' award felt genuinely shocking.

For the first time, Britain's political establishment had

recognised and rewarded pop cultural capital.

-Why is the MBE awarded, though?

-I don't know.

-No idea.

In fact, I know nothing about it. It's just that we've got it

and it's nice to have and it doesn't make you more respectable or

anything I don't think.

Maybe other people think it does.

Doesn't make me any more respectable. I'm still a scruff.

The Beatles had been clutched to the bosom of the British establishment.

And not everyone was happy about it.

The pages of The Times simmered with outrage. "For the next war,"

wrote one man, "do not count on me, use the Beatles or the beatniks."

But amid all the invective,

some correspondents grasped the deeper issues.

"Sir, may I list a few of the reasons why many people think

"national recognition of the Beatles quite appropriate?

"1. They are significant earners of foreign exchange.

"2. They have, to quote Mr Heath

"when he was President of the Board of Trade,

"'saved the British corduroy industry.'

"3. They have helped to correct the foreign vision

"of Britain as a country

"entirely populated by middle class conservatives of all sorts,

"eg stockbrokers, wildcat strikers, Beefeaters

"and Pembrokeshire coracle fisherman."

MUSIC: Ticket To Ride by The Beatles

By now Britain's sense of its own identity seemed in flux.

With our empire gone, and our industry dying,

here was a new role - entertainers to the world.

# I think I'm gonna be sad

# I think it's today, yeah... #

Every cultural revolution needs its founding texts.

Preserved here in the Bodleian Library in Oxford is

a document that arguably shaped modern Britain

every bit as much as, well, the Magna Carta.

This is the very first Sunday Times colour section

from 4th February 1962.

Now today, every Sunday paper has a colour supplement,

but at the time, this represented something thrillingly new -

a glossy colour magazine carefully targeted at young,

affluent, and often female readers.

So this very first cover

features the model of the moment, Jean Shrimpton.

It's just your eyes I'm interested in now. Good.

MUSIC: She's Not There by The Zombies

..wearing clothes by Mary Quant...

photographed by David Bailey.

Make that... Let me... Who told you to move?

And there's even the promise of a new James Bond story by Ian Fleming.

Something for everyone.

And everyone, it seemed, rather liked it.

Within nine months, The Sunday Times had 200,000 extra readers.

And by 1964 The Sunday Telegraph

and The Observer had launched colour supplements of their own.

And in these glossy pages

you could read about the latest British fashions...

..the latest British film stars...

MUSIC OVER SPEECH

..the latest British pop groups.

Aspirational, materialistic, and heavily funded by advertising,

these glossy magazines played a central role in creating the

idea of the Swinging '60s and more specifically, of Swinging London.

MUSIC: Dedicated Follower Of Fashion by The Kinks

# They seek him here

# They seek him there

# His clothes are loud

# But never square... #

If you read enough of these magazines,

you might imagine that London was a buzzing, technicolour metropolis...

# Cos he's a dedicated follower of fashion... #

..a city inhabited solely by artists, pop stars and models.

# Round the boutiques... #

But in truth it wasn't quite like that.

# Keep pursuing all the latest fashion trends

# Cos he's a dedicated follower of fashion... #

In 1968, almost a quarter of London's households were

living in poverty.

This was still, above all, a working industrial city.

In reality, you know, the '60s only swung for a tiny minority.

Of course, life was getting better,

but even here in London that was more a question of cars,

fridges and washing machines than of free love and flower power.

Less Magical Mystery Tour, more Coronation Street. But in a sense,

that didn't really matter.

Swinging London was about the triumph of image

and this was the key moment when Britain's image changed

from grey, industrial powerhouse to technicolour, global entertainers.

# Save me Somebody save me... #

Swinging London may have been little more than a branding exercise

to disguise our post-war decline but it worked.

# Promised myself after my first romance... #

What it created was a new image of Britain, both at home and abroad.

An image of London as the capital of culture,

and of Britain once again as a place of consequence.

# Save me Oh, yeah, yeah

# Save me... #

The Swinging London phenomenon reached its peak with this -

the April 1966 edition of the American magazine Time.

Inside, in admittedly fairly excruciating prose,

the magazine painted a picture of a city devoted to high fashion,

pop culture and the pursuit of pleasure.

Here's an extract. "This spring as never before in modern times,

"London is switched on.

"The city is alive with birds, girls, and Beatles, buzzing with Mini cars

"and telly stars, pulsing with half a dozen separate veins of excitement."

The tourists came in their droves.

In 1960, some one-and-a-half million people had visited London.

But by the mid '60s, that figure was more like six million.

And London was now exporting the idea of its swinging scene

all over the world.

-ARCHIVE:

-Caracas, the swinging city of Venezuela.

The centro comercial chacaito building is the place for mod gear.

The influence is definitely Carnaby Street.

Boutiques abound crammed with pace-setting clobber

hot from the fashion centre in London W1.

Only a few years earlier, Britain had still been

one of the world's great exporters of steel and ships.

Now we were selling fashion and music.

And like our old industrial exports, these things were often made in our

manufacturing heartlands and brought to London before being sold abroad.

Victorian London had been the world capital of money,

but '60s London saw itself as the capital of culture.

But for one young entrepreneur, it was precisely our Victorian legacy

that offered the greatest cultural possibilities.

After all, Britain still had a rich network of global connections -

the threads of empire.

And while his predecessors had been trading slaves and sugar,

his chosen commodity was culture.

# Keep on running Keep on hiding

# One fine day I'm gonna be the one to make you understand... #

In the early 1960s,

this corner of West London, then neglected and shabby,

was home to many of the city's growing West Indian community.

The spectacle of a 25-year-old former public schoolboy

driving round these streets in a Mini Cooper

might have seemed a bit incongruous.

But the man in the Mini

was one of the most remarkable cultural entrepreneurs

in our modern history.

His name was Chris Blackwell, and he'd grown up in Jamaica

and fallen in love with the local music.

And he was here in London

to sell ska music to the Jamaican immigrant community.

And he kept the records... in the boot.

MUSIC: Train to Skaville by The Ethiopians

Like all great entrepreneurs,

Blackwell had identified a market.

Any moment now there's going to be a fierce outbreak of ska.

And ska is the new beat

from the West Indies - from Jamaica.

Where the Victorians had imported Jamaican sugar,

Chris Blackwell was going to import Jamaican music.

And he did so with remarkable success.

Daylight come and I wanna go home,

but all THEY want to do...is ska.

# My boy lollipop

# You make my heart go giddy-up

# You set the world on fire

# You are my one desire... #

His first hit came from the 17-year-old Millie Small,

with the single My Boy Lollipop.

Blackwell's label, Island Records,

quickly became one of the most exciting around,

with a remarkable roster of talent.

But Blackwell always dreamed

of propelling Jamaican music into the mainstream.

And in the early 1970s, he got his chance.

By 1970, Blackwell had set up a recording studio

here at Basing Street, West London.

This room, believe it or not, was his office.

And it was through that door that in 1972,

Bob Marley and the Wailers

came strolling in for their first meeting

with the man who would make them famous.

MUSIC: Concrete Jungle by Bob Marley and the Wailers

They made such an impression

that Blackwell gave them £4,000 then and there

to go away and make a record.

Now, some of his friends were worried

that he'd never see the money or indeed the band ever again.

But Blackwell's hunch would pay handsome dividends.

-# Darkness has covered my light

-And has changed

# And has changed my day into night

# Yeah

# Where is the love to be found?

# Won't someone tell me... #

A couple of months later,

Blackwell was invited to the studio

to hear what would become Marley's first album for Island,

Catch A Fire.

Up until this point, reggae was still very much a minority interest,

but Blackwell was convinced

that Bob Marley could take it into the musical mainstream.

To do that, though,

Blackwell felt they needed to make the music

more accessible for a British audience.

So he deliberately toned down the frenetic reggae style,

he introduced more guitars and more synthesisers.

He even expanded the solos.

And the result

was one of the most influential records

in rock music history.

MUSIC: Stir It Up by Bob Marley and the Wailers

# Stir it up

# Little darlin', stir it up

# Come on, baby

# Stir it up

# Little darlin'... #

Catch A Fire was released to enormous acclaim.

It kick-started Marley's career.

-# It's been a long, long time, yeah

-Stir it, stir it, stir it together

# Since I've got you on my mind

# Ooh-ooh-ooh... #

But Blackwell had one more trick up his sleeve.

Chris Blackwell always had a real flair for marketing,

and in particular he was a great believer in packaging.

If people thought something looked good on the outside, he once said,

then they would naturally assume

there must be something good on the inside.

And that's certainly true of Catch A Fire.

So, the album is designed like a Zippo lighter.

You flick it open, you get the fire,

and, ultimately, the vinyl.

To be completely honest, it is actually a bit of a hassle

getting the record in and out,

but that, I suppose, is beside the point,

because in the early 1970s, this seemed like a thing of beauty.

And, let's be honest,

it is a lot better looking than an iTunes download.

# Exodus

# All right... #

The combination of Bob Marley's talent and charisma

and Chris Blackwell's entrepreneurial nous

turned the reggae artist into a global superstar.

-ARCHIVE:

-Island Records have invested several hundred thousand dollars

in Bob Marley and the Wailers,

and the dividend just keeps on increasing.

# We're the generation... #

Legend: The Best Of Bob Marley went on to sell 25 million copies,

becoming one of the bestselling albums of all time.

-ARCHIVE:

-Reggae's now firmly established

as a highly marketable commodity, heard throughout the world -

perhaps the only really new sound of the '70s.

# Woe yoe...

-CROWD:

-# Woe yoe

# Woe yoe yoe yoe yoe... #

All this could, I think, only have happened in Britain.

You see, in essence what Blackwell was doing

was capitalising on the long established relationship

between the imperial metropolis, London,

and its former colony, Jamaica.

Only this time, the key commodity wasn't sugar - it was music.

And whatever you might think of the empire,

the fact is that it left Britain at the centre of a dense web

of cultural and economic connections,

and it was this network that Blackwell used

to bring reggae to a global audience.

# Called you so many times today

# And I guess it's all true what your girlfriends say

# That you don't ever wanna see me again

# And your brother's gonna kill me and he's six feet ten... #

The influence of reggae can still be heard to this day.

And the deeper tones of Jamaican dub and dancehall

have inspired British music movements

from drum and bass to dubstep and grime.

# Look at me, I been a cheeky ... man and

# Look at all the drama we started, now I'm

# In here layin' on my back

# Sayin' DJ, won't ya gimmie one more track?

# Let it rain... #

But, of course, not everybody's musical tastes

are quite so cool and urban.

When we think about the music of the '60s and '70s,

we often think about the big names -

people like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones,

David Bowie and the Sex Pistols.

But the reality was a bit more surprising.

The bestselling act of the 1960s, for example,

wasn't the Beatles -

it was Soundtrack, featuring Original Cast.

-LESLEY GARRETT:

-# Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens

# Bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens

# Brown paper packages tied up with strings

# These are a few of my favourite things... #

Pop bands might have thrilled the kids,

but they barely touched the unassailable popularity

of the musical.

By 1975, The Sound Of Music soundtrack

had outsold the Beatles' bestselling album, Abbey Road,

by a ratio of almost two to one.

In the '50s and '60s,

musical theatre was dominated by Broadway.

But by the 1970s, there was a new kid on the block. And he was British.

MUSIC: The Phantom Of The Opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber

On 9th October 1986,

Her Majesty's Theatre here in London's Haymarket

was the venue for the gala opening

of the most anticipated new show in the West End.

This was the first night

of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom Of The Opera -

the hottest ticket in town.

# The phantom of the opera is here... #

The story goes that the composer himself was a bag of nerves,

and at the interval, he and the show's producer,

Cameron Mackintosh, headed off to a local bar for a few stiff drinks.

They didn't even make it back in time for the curtain call.

But they needn't have worried.

Because as the last note died away,

there was a ten-minute standing ovation.

And The Phantom Of The Opera has been playing at this theatre,

continuously, ever since.

Andrew Lloyd-Webber had made his name in the 1970s

with a string of hits

from Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

to Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita.

In 1981, Cats opened in the West End...

..where it ran for 21 years.

But The Phantom Of The Opera

took Lloyd Webber's star to unprecedented heights,

becoming the most financially successful

entertainment event in history.

For me, Andrew Lloyd Webber's great skill lies in his ability

to take an apparently forbidding subject

and apply a liberal sprinkling of stardust.

Over the years, he has taken

the book of Genesis, the story of Jesus, the life of Eva Peron,

the poetry of TS Eliot and, in the case of Phantom,

a half-forgotten Victorian horror story

by the French writer Gaston Leroux, and he has turned each of them

into a foot-stomping, hand-clapping, crowd-pleasing spectacle.

And what could be more Victorian

than broadening the minds of the great British public

with a heady mixture of high culture and pure populism?

Like all good populists,

Lloyd Webber had a very canny approach to marketing.

Keen to test the waters for his latest venture,

he released the title track as a single

nine months before the show opened.

Sung by Sarah Brightman and Steve Harley, the former Cockney Rebel,

it went straight into the top ten.

# You'll give your love to me

# For love is blind

# The phantom of the opera

# Is now my mastermind. #

Somehow it feels supremely fitting that Andrew Lloyd Webber's

most successful musical is set in a 19th-century opera house,

because, to me, he feels like a very Victorian figure.

He combines so many familiar roles - the theatrical impresario,

the canny entrepreneur, the ambitious businessman,

the civic philanthropist, the capitalist empire builder...

all of them underpinned

by the same combination of cultural uplift and commercial self-interest.

Thanks to Lloyd Webber,

musical theatre became the hottest ticket on Broadway

and one of Britain's biggest cultural exports

of the entire 1980s.

And London's West End became a tourist honeypot,

up there with Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London.

As one cultural grandee put it -

"The arts are to British tourism what the sun is to Spain".

By the end of the decade,

Lloyd Webber himself had become a multi-million-pound global brand.

Only today we read that you insured yourself for £10m.

I know you hate to talk about money but why did you have to do that?

Well, I'm surprised and a bit saddened really

because the last time I picked up a paper,

I thought I was worth £300m.

I seem to have come down in price.

1986 didn't just mark the launch of Phantom -

it was also the year that Lloyd Webber's company,

the Really Useful Group, floated on the London Stock Exchange.

His music was now a commodity bought and sold all over the world.

As Lloyd Webber well knew,

in a society where the market rules,

if you get the sales pitch right, then everything has its price.

The shark tank at the aquarium in London's County Hall -

probably their biggest attraction.

But the most famous shark to take up residence in this building

was rather less animated.

It was, in fact, pickled.

This tiger shark is officially known as

The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living

by the artist, Damien Hirst.

In 2003, it went on display in a new gallery

on the ground floor of County Hall.

And it became perhaps the best-known work of British art

in the last 40 years.

It was commissioned by the advertising executive

turned modern-art Svengali, Charles Saatchi.

By the early 1990s, Saatchi had become the single most important

patron of a group known as the YBAs - the Young British Artists.

For the YBAs, the really important thing was the idea.

They were interested less in technical skill

than in provocative, even inflammatory imagery

The YBAs gloried in arresting images, designed to shock.

Dismembered livestock...

..phallic foodstuffs...

portraits of serial killers made with children's handprints...

grotesque dolls -

the triumph of the startling, shocking image.

As Saatchi himself put it, they made art that was

"head-buttingly impossible to ignore".

It was little wonder they appealed to a former ad man.

Indeed, Saatchi's forays into modern art were only possible

because of his phenomenal success in the world of advertising.

ARIA PLAYS

In the '70s and '80s, he'd been involved

with some of the most memorable TV ads ever made.

With the fortune that he'd built selling brands,

Saatchi came to dominate the contemporary art market.

The art may have been modern, but his motives were very familiar.

Charles Saatchi was not, of course, the first self-made man

to spend his winnings on contemporary art.

Exactly a century earlier, in the 1890s,

the Victorian sugar magnate Sir Henry Tate had given his own

substantial contemporary art collection to the nation.

He even paid for a special gallery in which to house it - the Tate.

For Tate and, I suspect for Saatchi, art meant status.

So it was that Saatchi took to visiting degree shows like this one.

Indeed, on occasion he would actually buy up entire degree shows.

By the mid '90s, Saatchi's patronage had

turned his iconoclastic proteges into household names.

Suddenly British art seemed the most controversial

and exciting in the world.

Young artists all over Britain are producing work

that is challenging, articulate and relevant.

Now sometimes that work appears tasteless,

and cynical and uncouth.

I think it's because sometimes we all are.

But Charles Saatchi did more than just buy art

and show it off or store it away.

He sold it on, creating a churn of speculation that increased

the value of his holdings and created a boom in the market.

YBAs emerged out of a very distinctive historical moment.

Margaret Thatcher's election hat-trick had seemed to mark

the definitive triumph of market forces.

It is wonderful to be entrusted

with the government of this country, this great country,

once again.

MUSIC: Fool's Gold by the Stone Roses

Saatchi himself had played a pivotal role in Mrs Thatcher's success.

His advertising agency had been behind some

of the Conservatives' most eye-catching campaign publicity.

And he strode into the world of art

at the high watermark of Thatcherism.

What Saatchi understood was that the YBAs' provocative, attention-seeking

images were the perfect products

for an age of conspicuous consumption.

Charles Saatchi and the YBAs took the idea of "cultural capital"

to extraordinary new heights. This was art for the age of money,

made by a new generation who were all too conscious

of their new earning power.

MUSIC: Loose Fit by the Happy Mondays

Even the artists themselves sometimes recognised

the absurdity of their inflated price tags.

How did the Damien Hirst ashtray come about?

Me and Sarah started smoking quite violently.

No, I always smoke quite violently. You started.

I started smoking violently

and we had this fantastic ashtray

full of dog ends, and Sarah said look - it's a Damien Hirst.

And I said it is Damien Hirst.

So we just got a photocopy done,

stuck it on the bottom and sold it for tons of money.

And what of the man on the bottom of the ashtray?

Damien Hirst, whose pickled shark

Charles Saatchi had commissioned,

became the poster boy of the YBAs.

-How do you feel?

-Good. Beautiful. Sexy.

How do you feel?

Hirst's art was an exercise in rampant commercialism,

from a bull with horns and hooves cast in 18-carat gold

to a human skull covered with £15m worth of diamonds.

And to a canny businessman,

intellectual property was everything.

When the skull went on sale,

the only images available were those provided by Hirst himself.

In 2011, Hirst even gave classes in spin painting for the bankers

and business giants at the global economic forum at Davos.

But by then, this didn't seem odd.

It seemed, in fact, like a typical British success story.

VIDEO GAME BLEEPS

Most people could never afford to buy a Damien Hirst.

But they could afford

the other great British success story of the day.

And this was something based on the same spirit of technological

innovation that had defined Britain's Victorian heyday.

After all, the children of the '80s

didn't just grow up with Thatcherism.

They had something entirely new - the home computer.

This was, I suppose, a new Industrial Revolution -

almost mind-boggling, not just in the pace of technological change,

but in its impact on our day-to-day lives.

Now at the time, there was an awful lot of talk about the potential

for education and business,

but for a generation of self-taught teenage programmers,

the machines' real potential lay in something altogether more fun -

games.

For a brief moment in the 1980s,

home computers seemed an open market, a free-for-all, which saw

a new breed of cultural entrepreneur emerge blinking into the daylight,

well, or the glare of the television studio.

Are they difficult to do, difficult to play?

No, not really. Playing, it's just to get people used to the computer.

To write them, it's difficult at first

but when you get the hang of it, it's fine.

Now what's happening here?

Er, well, you're controlling a car. It's a racetrack.

-Ah, then you've crashed.

-Yes.

I'll tell you something - you can't play with that

-and talk at the same time, can you?

-No, it's difficult.

MUSIC: (Keep Feeling) Fascination by the Human League

But there was one game, produced by two Cambridge undergraduates,

David Braben and Ian Bell, which changed everything.

We were writing for ourselves,

in that we did what we wanted to do

and not what we thought would sell, to a certain extent.

But we always had the idea of writing a good-selling game.

And that, they did.

Will you become one of the Elite -

the space combatiers,

set apart by their total mastery of the space ways?

Only players who have successfully piloted their armed Cobra

spacecraft around a universe of 2,000 planets in eight galaxies,

profitably trading commodities

and fighting off space pirates as they go, qualify to join the Elite.

# Keep feeling fascination

# Passion burning, love so strong... #

I was ten years old when Elite came out, and it took over my life.

I spent months playing this game.

Many of them, admittedly, waiting for it to load.

Of course, by today's standards, it all looks pretty basic.

But at the time, these simple wireframe graphics

represented a revolution.

MUSIC: Einstein A Go-go by Landscape

Elite was something entirely new.

This wasn't a three-minute arcade game, it was an epic -

presenting players with a seemingly endless universe

to explore on their own terms.

You could run guns, traffic drugs, vaporise whomever you liked.

Your decisions had consequences. But they were your decisions.

Braben and Bell had turned computer games into mainstream culture.

This was an immersive open-ended world

which drew heavily on science fiction.

David Braben and Ian Bell were barely into their 20s

when Elite came out.

They represented a new kind of cultural hero - the geeky genius.

I mean, it started off as a hobby,

Well, it still is really a hobby,

but obviously it has changed slightly.

-On the other hand, it is quite profitable in the long run.

-Mm. Yes.

Elite was also very much a product of the Thatcherite '80s -

a fact reinforced by its mercenary ethos -

trade, fight and pillage your way to the top in order to become "Elite".

But I think it also represented a much older sensibility -

the kind of individual drive

and technological ambition that had led Richard Arkwright to develop

his spinning frame, or Boulton and Watt to pioneer the steam engine.

And this entrepreneurial strategy would pay handsome dividends.

In the last 30 years, video games have been the fastest-growing

cultural commodity in the world,

elevated from children's entertainment

to multi-million-pound blockbusters.

From Elite's rather basic beginnings have grown this -

the fastest-selling entertainment product in history.

Grand Theft Auto looks American. It sounds American.

It has a distinctly American attitude to firearms.

But it's actually British...

..made in Scotland

and based on the very same free-roaming concept as Elite.

The latest version earned a billion dollars in its first three days.

When we think of the Victorians,

we remember an extraordinary generation who built our world

in bricks and mortar, glass and steel.

And I think their spirit still endures.

You know, we love to run ourselves down,

but our popular culture, fuelled by exactly the same ambition

and inventiveness that drove the Victorians,

is simply second to none.

We may no longer be the workshop of the world, turning out ships

and steel, but we do still make one thing better than anybody else -

we make stories.

Next time - some of our culture's favourite subjects -

very rich people, very posh people

and very large houses.