Two Tribes Strange Days: Cold War Britain

# You go to my head

# And you linger like a haunted refrain

# And I find you spinning round in my brain...

Just over 20 years ago,

Britain came to the end of one of our longest wars in our history.

# You go to my head...

It was a war that made our Britain.

This is Cold War Britain.

In the last years of the Cold War,

the world seemed a dark and dangerous place.

The West rediscovered its crusading spirit.

The East collapsed into crisis

and British culture was inspired by terror and freedom.

But there was more to the Cold War than shadows and secrets.

It was a war in which we all played a part.

A war between two very different visions of the future.

A war of material dreams and atomic nightmares.

This was once the front line of the war against Communism.

It was here that the battle of ideas raged.

And it was here that the West made its last decisive stand

against the Soviet Empire.

Welcome to Brent Cross.

# Good morning world, it's a brand new day

"Brent Cross, this temple of consumerism,

may well determine the future style of British shopping habits in years to come."

When this opened in north London in 1976,

it was the biggest, the most modern

and the most exciting shopping centre in the country.

But it also represented a new front in the Cold War

because at its heart the struggle between East and West was an ideological competition,

a contest to see who could give their people

the economic security and the creature comforts they wanted.

I think it's one of the best precincts or shopping centres I've been in.

-MAN:

-But it cost a lot of money.

Certainly must have cost a lot of money but it's well worth it.

With a £25 million price tag,

Brent Cross was Britain's first American-style shopping mall

and we loved it.

Very good. I've just been in Marks, it's very, very nice

and it will save us all the journey up the West End.

You know you can judge the state of a country

by what you can or can't buy on its shelves

and in 1976, Britain's shelves were overflowing.

# All right

# Different labels and the different brands

# Reaching across the land

# Different colours in the different states

From cassette recorders and calculators to hot pants and high heels,

the Western economy was now delivering the kind of things

that most ordinary Russians could barely dream about.

By the late 1970s, the underlying pattern was clear.

Capitalism simply gave you more.

# Well, I walked to the mall and I walked up and down

# I got tired so I got sat down

Across the iron curtain, things were very different.

By the late 1970s, Communist utopianism had given way to the grim reality

of food shortages, empty shelves and stagnant living standards.

In the Soviet Union, queuing not consumerism

had become the national pastime.

There's an old Soviet joke.

A man goes off to buy a car,

he hands over his money and he fills in a form

and he fills in another form and he fills in another form

and at last the dealer says to him,

"It's yours, come back in ten years to pick it up,"

and the man says, "OK, morning or afternoon?"

"It's ten years away," says the dealer, "what do you care?"

And the man says, "Well, I've got the plumber coming in the morning."

Jokes like this captured a bleak reality.

The Soviet economy could no longer compete with Western capitalism.

For 30 years after the Second World War,

Soviet planners had dreamed of overtaking the West

but by 1976 they were falling steadily behind

and they couldn't cover it up any longer.

One of the chief causes was on parade every May, here in Red Square.

The Kremlin's enormous military spending

was bankrupting their country.

Proportionately, they spent three times as much as the Americans

and four times as much as Britain.

It was simply unsustainable

and in the dying days of the 1970s,

our different priorities were thrown into stark relief.

# God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

"Entertainment for all the family, this Christmas on BBC One."

"Snow Time Special features our host of stars against a spectacular Alpine setting."

On Christmas Day 1979,

while millions of Britons were opening their presents,

the Red Army was on the move.

"The number of Soviet troops in Afghanistan

has risen over the past few days

to about six and a half thousand."

While we slept off our turkey,

the Soviet Union went to war,

sending tanks and troops thundering into their southern neighbour, Afghanistan.

The Kremlin claimed they were supporting a government under attack from tribal insurgents

but the West was horrified.

Afghanistan came to symbolise a dramatic decline in East-West relations.

The 1970s had been the era of detente,

when the nuclear super powers talked of peaceful co-existence.

But now on the cusp of a new decade, the Cold War was back.

Could Afghanistan even be the trigger for a Third World War?

To the leaders of the West, it seemed an unpardonable act of Communist aggression.

It was time, they thought, to stand up to the Kremlin

and the front line, in this new confrontation, was down there.

The 1980 Olympics would be the battleground.

And in Moscow's Olympic stadium, before the eyes of the world,

sport and politics would collide as never before.

For millions of British families,

the most compelling clash on the world stage wasn't East versus West,

it was a purely domestic affair,

the biggest rivalry in world sport.

They were both British, they were both middle distance runners

and in 1980, this was their battlefield.

They were, of course, Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett.

They were from different backgrounds and had different styles.

They were compared to the Beatles and the Stones.

This was a golden era for British athletics.

Coe was the man you'd want your daughter to marry,

Ovett the man you'd want on your side in a fight.

At middle distance running, they were unequalled.

They broke world records for fun.

They held four between them and took it in turns to break each other's

but before the Moscow Olympics, they'd only gone head to head once

in international competition.

This was the race everyone wanted to see.

Steve is a very talented athlete.

No, there isn't a great deal more to say, is there?

And here in Moscow's Olympic stadium,

in front of 100,000 spectators,

they were planning to go head to head, not once but twice.

For most British viewers,

these weren't the Moscow Olympics,

they were the Coe-Ovett Olympics.

It was a duel that divided the nation,

and when they went head to head in this stadium,

almost 20 million people were watching back home.

This was one of history's greatest sporting showdowns

and yet it very nearly never happened.

I have notified the Olympic Committee

that with Soviet invading forces in Afghanistan

neither the American people nor I

will support sending an Olympic team to Moscow.

When the Americans pulled out,

Margaret Thatcher was adamant our athletes must do the same.

One way to bring home to the Russian people

the enormity of what has happened by their government invading Afghanistan

is to boycott the Olympic Games

and that could in fact bring it home to the Russian people

more forcefully than anything else.

Just seven months into her job as prime minister,

she saw this as her first opportunity

to flex her muscles against the Soviet menace.

But she had a fight on her hands.

My attitude is very simple, that sport should not be the first line in foreign policy.

I think it's dangerous if it does become that.

There's almost been a vendetta where the athletes have been singled out.

It seems very strange that if things are that serious

that the government is not trying to put pressure on other parts of society.

Do you personally find the invasion of Afghanistan morally repugnant?

I don't answer that question.

Not even as a citizen?

I'm speaking as chairman of the British Olympic Association, not as a citizen.

I'm sure everyone would love to know.

-I'm sure they would.

-Your opinion as a citizen.

-I'm sure they would.

-Why won't you reveal it?

Because I'm speaking as chairman.

You're not speaking to me as Denis Follows.

You're speaking to me as chairman of the British Olympic Association or you wouldn't be here.

The Olympic boycott issue aroused fierce passions

up and down the country.

This is a letter from a member of the public to Sir Denis Follows.

"Why don't you belt up, you old pompous fool," it begins.

"You and the others must be seniley demented if you think that politics

must not be allowed to interfere with sports."

Satisfyingly robust.

But Britain's athletes were no less robust.

"Britain's Olympic hopefuls defy Mrs Thatcher.

Most say they will accept an invitation to go to the Moscow Games."

Mrs Thatcher has again intervened to stop British athletes going to Moscow.

GUNFIRE

Mrs Thatcher wasn't finished yet.

She hated to think of the Kremlin

using our sporting superstars as a propaganda coup,

so she gave one of her ministers a new responsibility.

To frustrate the Olympic Games.

We're trying in lots of ways to get the Russians out of Afghanistan

where they have no right to be.

And one of his efforts took place in a minister's office, behind closed doors.

So who was it that Douglas Hurd was meeting in secret here at the Foreign Office?

Was it perhaps a top Olympic official,

the secretary general of the United Nations, maybe?

Perhaps even the Soviet ambassador himself?

Well, actually, it was Seb Coe's dad,

the thinking being that Peter Coe might be able to put pressure on his son,

the golden boy of British athletics,

to pull out of the Moscow Games.

Unfortunately, though, the meeting didn't quite go according to plan.

This is Douglas Hurd's memo of that momentous meeting.

Peter Coe, he reported, "was strongly opposed to a boycott of Moscow.

He spoke with some bitterness and at length on largely familiar lines.

He was naturally concerned about the degree of sacrifice

that we're asking of athletes like his son,

and I do not think that I had any success in altering his views."

Douglas Hurd said later that his mission

to frustrate the Moscow Olympics was the most foolish task

in which I was ever entrusted as a minister.

Foolish, perhaps it was,

but it was certainly a failure.

Almost all the British team flew out to Moscow,

but they promised to take no part in the opening and closing ceremonies.

For British medallists, there'd be no Union Jack and no National Anthem.

And as for that great showdown,

it became part of Olympic legend.

The first battle was the 800 metres.

Coe was the favourite but Ovett won it.

"Steve Ovett coming to take the gold medal for Great Britain.

To beat Sebastian Coe there."

Then came the 1500 where Ovett was the favourite but Coe settled the score.

CHEERING

Despite the public enthusiasm, there were no official celebrations.

The battle with the government had left a bitter taste.

Not even sport was immune from the rising tensions of the Cold War.

For Mrs Thatcher, her stand over Afghanistan

was a powerful statement of intent in her fight against Communism.

It signalled a stark new approach to the Cold War.

Now Britain's gloves were off.

Afghanistan shattered the illusion of detente.

Here at number 10, Margaret Thatcher saw the Soviet invasion as a historic turning point.

She wasn't surprised though because as she later put it,

she'd always known the nature of the beast.

But, you know, she needed the beast.

Indeed in many ways, it was the beast that made her name.

Margaret Thatcher had risen from provincial obscurity

to become the first female leader of the Conservative Party.

There's a little bit sticking up there. You can see it.

But at first, she'd had a bumpy ride.

Many, even on her own side, thought she was a fluke,

an aberration who'd soon go away.

But one evening in 1976,

she gave a speech that changed her image forever.

At 8.30 on the day of the speech,

Margaret Thatcher came to her favourite salon to have her hair done,

and then she cleared her diary for the rest of the morning

to work on this, the text of her speech.

This was something that meant a lot to her

and that evening in a voice that her critics have compared to a cat sliding down a blackboard,

she told her audience, "The Russians are bent on world dominance.

They put guns before butter

while we put just about everything before guns.

They know that they're a super power

in only one sense, the military sense.

They are a failure in human and economic terms.

In Britain the speech made little impact,

but 2000 miles away, in Moscow,

one man read the speech with horrified fascination.

A young soldier called Yuri Gavrilov

was working as a journalist for the Red Army newspaper, Red Star,

and after reading Margaret Thatcher's uncompromising words,

he gave her a nickname that has never gone away.

And here it is, Gavrilov's article,

and the ominous title, "Iron Lady frightens."

"The Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher," he says,

"recently gave a spiteful anti-Soviet speech

at Kensington Town Hall, pretentiously entitled 'Wake up England'.

In her hysterical speech,

the Russians are trying to take over the world,

and according to Mrs Thatcher,

the English people are asleep and oblivious to the danger,

which only she can see."

You know, the funny thing about Gavrilov's article

is that he meant those words Iron Lady as an insult,

but of course from that day on

Margaret Thatcher wore them with defiant pride.

I stand before you tonight,

in my red star chiffon evening gown...

LAUGHTER

..my face softly made up

and my fair hair gently waved,

the Iron Lady of the Western world.

APPLAUSE

A Cold War warrior,

an Amazon philistine,

even a Peking plotter.

LAUGHTER

Well, am I any of these things?

-ALL:

-No!

Well, yes, if that's how they...

LAUGHTER

Yes, I am an Iron Lady.

Margaret Thatcher had found her mission.

A few days after her Iron Lady speech,

she visited the British Army of the Rhine and drove a tank.

This was Thatcherism at full strength,

leading the crusade against world Communism.

But she couldn't win this fight on her own.

She needed a partner, someone to stand beside her on the front line.

And in June 1982, riding over the crest,

came a hero of Hollywood's old west.

You wanted law and order in this town, you've got it.

I'll shoot the first man who starts for those steps.

Come on!

This was Ronald Reagan's first visit to Britain as president of the United States.

He stayed at Windsor Castle,

and it was, he wrote in his diary, "a fairytale experience".

Early the next morning in the calm before the storm,

Reagan saddled up his horse and went for a ride here at Windsor Great Park.

With him was his trusty sidekick,

on this occasion, the Queen.

But he wasn't here just to show us how to ride a horse, Western style.

Reagan had come to make a speech in which he would present his vision

of the Soviet Union's inevitable demise.

The president spoke in Parliament's Royal Gallery,

dwarfed by paintings of Waterloo and Trafalgar,

great British victories over another evil empire.

And one phrase in particular captured Reagan's confidence

that Communism was doomed.

The march of freedom and democracy which will lead Marxism,

Leninism on the ash heap of history,

as it has left other tyrannies,

which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of people.

This speech was Ronald Reagan's manifesto for winning the Cold War.

At its heart was a sense of moral certainty

that the Communists were wrong and we in the West were right.

In many ways, Reagan was echoing another speech

made by a great international statesman on foreign soil,

Winston Churchill's speech of Fulton, Missouri in 1946.

Now that was the speech in which Churchill coined the phrase

"the iron curtain",

and it's often seen as the moment that the Cold War began.

And now, here in the Palace of Westminster,

Reagan took the great man's career as an inspiration for victory.

During the dark days of the Second World War,

when this island was incandescent with courage,

Winston Churchill exclaimed about Britain's adversaries,

"What kind of a people do they think we are?"

It was classic Reagan

and all the more impressive because he seemed to be speaking without a single note.

Afterwards, Mrs Thatcher congratulated him on his actor's memory.

Reagan admitted that he had been using a British invention called an autocue.

Or as his aides used to call it, the sincerity machine.

Afterwards, at a Number 10 lunch in the president's honour,

Mrs Thatcher told Reagan that she thought his speech magnificent.

He had, she said, written a new chapter in our history.

It was time, they thought, to say what we really believed,

time to take on the Soviet Union and beat it.

For Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher,

a status quo was no longer an option.

Their mission wasn't to contain Communism,

it was to roll it back,

to exploit its weaknesses and to assert our strengths.

Free markets, free speech and above all military strength.

So to Reagan's critics, his image of the ash heap of history

is disturbingly appropriate.

He didn't need to be a card-carrying CND supporter

to appreciate this fantastic poster.

"She promised to follow him to the end of the earth.

He promised to organise it."

To the satirists, Reagan was a gift.

A royal defence strategist has announced that he has analysed

the reason for the current behaviour of the USA.

He says the Americans are trying to make up for the fact that they were late for the last two world wars

by being really punctual this time.

You know, Ed, I know a city, once proud, reduced to ruins.

I have information that the Russians are there in huge numbers,

building, controlling, arming.

That is why today I'm sending the marines into Leningrad.

What? Oh no, not that, no, Mr President,

please, we have to have an excuse first.

Ed, it's too late.

To many people, Reagan's rhetoric was unsettlingly aggressive

and there was an anxious edge to the satirists' mockery.

Cheese and crackers, the president's brain is missing!

And there was now a fearsome new addition to the Americans' nuclear arsenal.

"It was just before nine o'clock that the plane bringing the first cruise missiles to Britain

came into land at the end of its overnight flight across..."

George Orwell's 1984 had imagined Britain as Airstrip One,

the forward strike base for a great military empire

and to critics of the new cruise missiles,

Britain had become Ronald Reagan's nuclear launch pad.

Protests stretched from Greenham Common feminists to earnest fashionistas.

I was wondering when we were getting someone walking in here, now one moment.

Oh, I see, it's not... That's meant to be...

We don't have any Pershing here, dear. They're cruise here.

Cruise breathed new life into CND.

Not since the Cuban missile crisis of the early 60s

had the clouds of nuclear catastrophe seemed darker or more threatening.

But protest was now infused with a very 80s paranoia.

Britain's popular culture often seemed gripped with a deep suspicion of American power.

Two bars of weapons-grade plutonium.

I know how close we came to a nuclear disaster.

But amid all the gloom and doom

a group of Scousers with attitude

would have us dancing into doomsday.

MUSIC: "Two Tribes" by Frankie Goes To Hollywood

When you hear the air attack warning

You and your family must take cover

# Ow, ow, ow

# Ow, ow

# Let's go

# Oh

When two tribes go to war

# A point is all that you can score

Written by the band's lead singer, Holly Johnson,

the song was inspired by Ronald Reagan,

the post-apocalyptic film Mad Max 2,

and an unholy amount of marijuana.

This is where Frankie Goes To Hollywood's producer, Trevor Horn,

turned Two Tribes into the most successful anti-war record ever made.

We'll give it a try, right?

Now if it goes wrong, if you miss a cue, we'll just stop it and do it again.

But the song's unique sound also owed a great deal to of all people, CND.

# Oh

# When two tribes go to war

# A point is all that you can score

# Let's go to war

# When two tribes go to war

# A point is all that you can score

It was this, the 12-inch version of the song,

the Annihilation Mix,

that really captured the paranoia of the time.

On a sleeve you've got this image of the Lenin mural in Moscow

and on the back of it,

very fetching photograph of Ronald Reagan and Mrs Thatcher.

There's also lots of facts and figures about the Cold War

and they'd been given to the band's management by CND.

So for example a table of where the new US missiles would be stationed.

But CND also gave the band something else.

They gave them a leaked copy of the secret government film

that was meant to be broadcast to the nation

if the worst happened and Britain was facing a nuclear attack.

SIREN

"When you hear the attack warning,

you and your family must take cover at once.

Do not stay out of doors.

If you are caught in the open, lie down."

The last voice we'd ever hear belonged to Patrick Allen.

His reputation as TV's grandfather of the voiceover had made him a minor celebrity.

If you cannot reach home in ten minutes, take cover in the nearest building.

If there is no building nearby, try to find some solid cover.

Struck by the power of the apocalyptic narration,

Trevor Horn wanted to re-use it

but he was worried about the Official Secrets Act

so he asked Allen to do it again.

While Patrick Allen was with Trevor Horn in the studio,

lines kept coming back to him

that he had originally recorded for the government film

but were thought a bit too bleak for broadcast.

Lines like "If your grandmother or any other member of the family

should die while in the shelter..."

..from contamination, put them outside

but remember to tag them first for identification purposes.

..or any other member of the family should die whilst in the shelter,

put them outside but remember to tag them first for identification.

Accompanying the song was a controversial video,

which featured a Reagan lookalike fighting the Soviet premier,

also a lookalike, while the UN looked on.

The BBC banned it.

Two Tribes reflected one of the great ironies of the Cold War,

that in the Western democracies people often used their free speech

to rail against their own side

rather than the Communist East.

I was only ten at the time, a schoolboy here at Birchfield near Wolverhampton,

but even as children in this leafy corner of the West Midlands,

we couldn't escape the shadow of the Cold War.

For children like me growing up in the 1980s,

war was something that you read about in the history books.

I was part of a generation who had never felt

the thump of a bomb dropping,

who'd never heard the wail of an air raid siren,

who'd never seen a war plane streaking overhead.

Yet somehow a fear of war remained very real.

It even invaded the sanctity of my childhood classroom.

And nothing captured that fear better

than a short children's book about a nuclear war.

"East is East and West is West

and maybe it was a difference of opinion or just a computer malfunction.

Either way, it set off a chain of events

that nobody but a mad man could have wanted

and which nobody, not even the mad men, could stop."

This is Brother In The Land by Robert Swindells.

It was published in 1984.

It must be the bleakest children's book ever written.

It's the story of a boy called Danny.

A young lad from the north of England

who's caught up in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse.

Now things don't go entirely swimmingly for poor old Danny.

His mother was killed in the blast

and they have to wrap her in polythene,

his dad is blown up on the back of a truck,

his brother Ben, at the end of the book, Ben's seven, dies of radiation sickness.

All in all, it's not exactly Enid Blyton.

Now I was ten when I read this

and I vividly remember the day that our teacher brought it into class.

I remember too our growing sense of desolation

as we worked our way towards the end,

and I also remember something else.

A dread that one day fiction might become fact.

Indeed a poll in April 1980 found that four out of ten people

thought nuclear war was coming in the next ten years.

-MAN:

-What would you do if you heard a warning?

I don't know, run for it.

Honestly I don't know. I'd be totally unprepared.

Waste of time, isn't it, going anywhere.

You've had it, ain't you?

Had it, ain't you?

-MAN:

-Would you take any preparations at all?

What preparations? You've had it, ain't you?

You've had it, ain't you? No good messing about, is it?

You've had it, ain't you?

No point crying over spilt milk, is there?

-Hello, Alison.

-GIRL:

-Hello.

In the event of a nuclear war, where will you be?

LAUGHTER

Oh my goodness me, I shall be in London.

In your own bunker or something?

Everybody knew there were secret underground nuclear bunkers

for Britain's political masters,

but what about the rest of us, what sort of future could we expect,

if the worst happened and the bombs started falling?

Well, the government had prepared a booklet to be sent out

when nuclear attacks seemed imminent.

However, there was a problem with the timing.

"The government intends to print and distribute this booklet to every home in the country.

But while the planners are banking on three weeks' warning of nuclear attack,

Her Majesty's stationery office say it will take at least four weeks just to print the booklet."

Under growing pressure from people who wanted to see this nuclear survival guide,

the Home Office finally agreed to publish it.

It cost 50p and it was called Protect and Survive

and ironically it convinced many people

that preparing for survival was a waste of time.

This booklet was supposed to reassure people.

Unfortunately it had quite the opposite effect.

"First priority is to provide shelter within your home

against radioactive fallout.

Your best protection is to make a fallout room

and build an inner refuge within it."

Do you have to dig a hole like the old Anderson shelters in the war?

No dear, that's all old-fashioned. With modern scientific methods,

you just use doors with cushions and books on top.

Seriously, we ought to do something about this bomb.

I'm going upstairs to get the incredibly helpful and informative Protect and Survive manual.

Nobody better touch this while I'm gone.

LAUGHTER

Here, Oppenheimer, listen, if the bomb was to drop round here,

how long would we have to stay inside this thing here?

Well, it depends upon the degree of contamination in the air outside,

cos we're in a very vulnerable position here being so close to the docks,

but I would say roughly,

give or take a week or two, about two years.

-BOTH:

-Two years?!

Yeah, give or take a week or two.

If you think I'm staying in a lead-lined Nissen hut with you and Grandad

and a chemical bloody kazi, you got another think coming.

But in 1984, the BBC made a feature-length drama

about the outbreak and aftermath of a nuclear war

and no one was laughing.

Threads depicted a nuclear attack on this city in South Yorkshire.

Now there had been plenty of post-apocalyptic TV dramas

but there's never been one quite as hard-hitting as Threads.

It was filmed here, in Sheffield,

and they used mainly local people as the actors.

The director told them, come as badly looking as you dare, or worse.

Threads was exceptionally realistic,

it was unrelentingly bleak and it was very, very disturbing.

I was too young to watch it at the time

but I vividly remember the front cover of the Radio Times.

Even this gave me nightmares.

In a statement issued by the Pentagon in Washington,

the United States has accused the Soviet Union...

Threads is a reminder of the Cold War's psychological impact

on a generation living in the shadow of the bomb.

SCREAMING

This was the ultimate nuclear nightmare,

free from censorship and playing at peak time.

Even today, I defy anybody to watch Threads all the way through

and then sleep comfortably the following evening

and at the time it provoked a passionate reaction.

These are just some of the flood of letters sent to the BBC back in 1984.

"Dear Sir," says this woman from Swansea,

"it's three o'clock in the morning after the screening of Threads.

I cannot sleep for the feelings of terror and utter hopelessness."

If you think that's a bit bleak, you should try this one.

This is from an old lady in Suffolk.

"I made up my mind there and then

I'm too old to cope with a nuclear winter

and I wrote to our dear Mrs Thatcher

to ask her for suicide pills for us old 'uns,

a small suicide pill we can swallow

that will go down with a nice cup of tea

when we heard the four-minute nuclear warning."

Many of the cast of Threads were the townspeople of Sheffield

and they were invited to a private viewing of the film before transmission.

All I can say is, I didn't think I would have reacted like this,

you know, but I just couldn't help it.

There's going to be nothing after it, nothing.

Threads reflected the dark irony of the Cold War years.

By the 1980s, most people were better off and more comfortable than ever,

and yet they lived with the constant anxiety

that it could all be taken away at the push of a button.

As one of those with a finger on the button knew only too well.

We are the parents and the children of the nuclear age.

We may not welcome it, we may fear it,

we may even be haunted by it,

but pretending it doesn't exist is not a solution.

Come what may, it can't be wished away.

But we weren't just the nuclear generation,

we were also becoming the post-industrial generation.

Britain was changing,

our old heavy industries were dying

and this too became part of the Cold War story.

In November 1984,

a man dedicated to overthrowing Mrs Thatcher's government

and Western capitalism itself,

took a cab to the Soviet Embassy in London.

The man in the taxi was looking for money

because the British government had frozen his assets.

At the time he was probably the most controversial man in the land,

and his name was Arthur Scargill.

The only point of interference in this dispute

is the abdication of Mrs Thatcher.

Arthur Scargill was a committed Marxist.

He was also the head of one of Britain's strongest trade unions,

the National Union of Mineworkers.

# Self doubt and selfism

In 1984, Scargill led his men

into a brutal showdown with the Thatcher government.

It was the most divisive strike in our modern history.

Now Scargill needed Soviet money

to sustain the strike through the long winter.

For Mrs Thatcher, the striking miners represented exactly

the kind of backward-looking socialism

that she'd come into politics to destroy.

As she saw it, they were the enemy within

and this was merely one battle in her wider war against Communism.

But the miners' strike represented a mortal threat to her administration.

At stake was not just her credibility but her political survival.

The very idea of the Russians bankrolling a strike

that could bring down her government was political dynamite.

Downing Street was so worried by all these stories about the Russians funding the NUM,

that they told one of Mrs Thatcher's ministers, Norman Lamont,

to look into it and to have a word with the Soviet ambassador.

But the ambassador was having none of it.

"There was no reason," he said,

"why Soviet miners as individuals

should not raise money for British miners if they wish to do so.

This had nothing to do with the Soviet government."

So now the Foreign Office got involved.

They called in the Russian ambassador

and told him that if they discovered

that the Kremlin was giving money to the miners,

"we would take a very serious view and we would regard it

as an unfriendly, unwarrantable interference in British domestic affairs."

To make matters worse, flying into town in the middle of all this,

was the Kremlin's latest rising star.

We realise that you lead the most important delegation

from Soviet Union to Britain for many a year.

Hotly tipped as their next leader,

Mikhail Gorbachev was the most senior Soviet official

to visit Britain for 17 years.

At Chequers, Mrs Thatcher came out fighting.

The Kremlin, she insisted,

must know that Soviet money was backing the British miners.

Gorbachev denied it.

Behind the public smiles, it was a desperately awkward moment

and yet for all her Iron Lady image,

Margaret Thatcher was the consummate pragmatist,

and as the talks continued,

she began to charm the Kremlin's coming man.

Despite the tension, something quite unexpected was beginning to happen,

because Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev

were beginning to develop a personal chemistry.

I rather think that each of them recognised in the other

a kindred spirit, a fellow radical,

fighting to overhaul the creaking machinery of the state

and this meeting was to prove a landmark in Anglo-Soviet relations.

Mrs Thatcher found Gorbachev very different

from the usual Soviet apparatchik, more relaxed, more open,

more Western,

yet there was no doubt who was wearing the trousers.

I like Mr Gorbachev, we can do business together.

What drove the Maggie and Gorbi show

was not just a personal rapport

but something altogether more fundamental.

In the West, the free market was at full throttle,

as in the East, a Soviet alternative to capitalism had ground to a halt.

For 40 years, the Cold War had effectively kept capitalism responsible

because the West needed to win the battle for hearts and minds,

but as the Soviet model began to implode so the brakes came off.

Here in Britain, we no longer needed to apologise for getting filthy rich,

and even mother Russia was about to make her peace with a free market.

When I become premier, mother Russia will lead the world in psychedelic cosmicness.

For a start we'll do away with the three-year waiting list for a kipper tie.

We could have platform shoes for the KGB.

And I'll legalise hoola hoops.

Gorbachev's first task as leader

was to tackle his country's economic collapse.

He began to unleash the power of private enterprise.

The Russians called it Perestroika

and it released a long dormant entrepreneurial spirit,

but this small success was born of a deeper failure.

Gorbachev's reforms were a sign of surrender.

In effect, they said to the West, "OK, you win."

So when Margaret Thatcher hit Moscow in 1987

she came as a conqueror.

Into the heart of Communism,

she brought the message of Western power and free market capitalism.

This was Thatcherism's high noon.

Her hosts had scheduled a series of telegenic locations,

and top of the list was the Kremlin,

where Gorbachev welcomed her in the glittering Saint George's Hall.

It was a supremely symbolic moment,

the Iron Lady, the Cold War warrior,

welcomed into the inner sanctum of the Communist empire.

Here in the heart of the Kremlin,

would the Iron Lady denounce the Soviet bear or embrace it?

Mrs Thatcher told the press that of all her foreign visits,

this was the one that she was most prepared for.

She was ready, she said, for a long dialogue, plenty of disagreements

and a hostile press.

But she needn't have worried,

for this would be a trip like no other.

No Western leader had ever come to Moscow and made such an impact.

Mrs Thatcher had dressed to impress.

With her glamorous array of hats, coats and tailored suits,

her look symbolised the Western luxury

to which the Soviet people aspired.

Everywhere she went she was mobbed.

Not since Catherine the Great had the Russian people

seen such a captivating, opulent and powerful woman.

The Russians admired strength, and here on primetime TV

was the warrior queen in full force.

Can I... Can I just answer this one first?

Look, isn't your response that to anyone,

look, if you attack us, you'll have such a terrible time

that you cannot win and isn't that the best defence

to anyone who threatens you?

Doesn't... One moment. Doesn't the bully go for the weak person,

not for the strong?

You have more... If you take this view,

I wonder why you have so many nuclear weapons.

To the Russians, Britain's prime minister

had once been a capitalist enemy

but now they treated her like a film star.

Here in the Kremlin, they didn't call Margaret Thatcher the Iron Lady any more,

they called her the lady with the blue eyes.

But old blue eyes wasn't the only British export

chipping away at communism's rotten foundations.

The 1980s was also the high watermark

for another enormously influential force behind the iron curtain.

Britain's rock music.

And in June 1987,

thousands of East Berliners gathered

to hear some of Britain's biggest bands play live.

They were headlining the Concert for Berlin,

a three-day extravaganza to celebrate the city's 750th anniversary.

The trouble was that it was on the other side of the wall

so many fans scurried up trees,

they clambered up chimneys, they packed on to balconies,

they climbed up to roofs just to get a glimpse of the gig.

CHEERING

Some brave souls gathered in front of the Soviet embassy

and some of them even danced in full view of the Russian officials.

It was after all the best place to hear the music from across the wall.

What a line-up for these German fans: David Bowie, Eurythmics,

and best of all, Genesis.

Tonight, tonight, tonight, Berlin partied as one city.

CHEERING

MUSIC: "Tonight, Tonight, Tonight" by Genesis

For those on the Eastern side of the wall,

Western music represented what we had and what they wanted.

More choice and more freedom.

One of West Berlin's biggest radio stations

broadcast the concert live across the wall,

and to listeners in the Communist East

it sent a powerful message: We are one city.

# Cos tonight, tonight, tonight

# Oh oh

SPEAKS GERMAN

The highlight of the evening,

well, apart from Phil Collins speaking German obviously,

came during David Bowie's set.

Bowie said later that this was one of the most emotional performances he had ever given.

He'd never done anything like it.

When he was on stage, he could hear the East German fans cheering

and singing along across the wall.

When he performed Heroes, a song that he had written here

and set in this city,

he said that it felt anthemic, almost like a prayer.

MUSIC: "Heroes" by David Bowie

For three nights, East German youths fought running battles with the Communist police.

# You'll be my queen

Across Berlin, the chants went up, "The wall must go!"

# Will drive them away

# We can beat them

# Just for one day

# We could be heroes

# Just for one day

This best of British gig

was a very loud example of something that diplomats call soft power,

the way that one country can influence another,

not through bullets and guns

but by the force of its moral and cultural example.

For more than 20 years, ever since the days of the Beatles,

British pop and rock had been infiltrating the Soviet bloc,

and to those people starved of liberty behind their own curtain

it represented not just modernity and self-expression but freedom and fun.

"East Germany has tonight opened its borders to the West.

28 years after the Berlin wall was built,

its people are once more free to travel anywhere."

MUSIC: "With Or Without You" by U2

# See the stone set in your eyes

# See the thorn twist in your side

# I will wait for you

Two years later, the wall came down.

That night in November 1989 changed the world forever.

It united Europe,

it shattered the Soviet empire

and it brought an end to the Cold War.

It also freed us from the terrors of nuclear Armageddon

and it set free millions of individuals who simply wanted what we had.

"People jumped aboard buses and headed to bright lights of West Berlin city centre."

And what was one of the first things East Berliners did in the West?

They went shopping.

"They described the difference between the shops here and at home

as like the difference between night and day."

To Margaret Thatcher, the collapse of Communism was the ultimate vindication.

But her fate had a cruel twist.

Just a year later, her colleagues drew up her political death warrant

at the very moment she was in Paris,

signing the arms reduction treaty that marked the end of the Cold War.

"These forces introduced by Stalin to threaten the West

and withdrawn by Gorbachev to earn its goodwill

are now to be pulled back and destroyed under international agreement."

The Iron Lady had been Britain's ultimate Cold War weapon

but now, like these withdrawing Soviet tanks,

she was unceremoniously decommissioned.

Still, she had left an indelible imprint on British life,

rather like the Cold War itself.

Victory had been won,

not with bombs and bullets but with credit and consumerism.

And history now records that dictatorship and Marxism

just couldn't compete with democracy and markets.

So we won. What did we do with our victory?

We unleashed the power of turbo capitalism,

now free from all restraint because it was the only game in town.

This was the system that had won the Cold War,

the system that was going to give us everlasting prosperity,

and then it didn't.

I bet very few of us now would look back and wish that the Communists had won

but I doubt I'm alone

in wishing that we had used our victory a little more wisely.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd