The Sound of the Crowd The 80s with Dominic Sandbrook

This programme contains some strong language

-30 seconds.

-Standby studio.

MUSIC: Are Friends Electric? by Gary Numan

# It's cold outside

# And the paint's peeling off of my walls. #

By 1979, one woman had become a regular fixture

on our television screens...

Titles!

..as she lectured the nation in her distinctive, clipped tones.

Cool, capable and always impeccably groomed,

this was a woman on a mission,

determined to drag Britain kicking and screaming into the new decade.

And what she inspired was little short of a revolution.

Welcome to the cookery course.

I hope those of you who haven't had any experience of cooking

at all are going to find a good basic groundwork here.

It was, of course, Delia Smith.

Not the woman you were thinking of?

Well, stay with me.

Take a whisk... I think a balloon whisk is the best sort to use for this.

You see, I think Delia is the key to understanding what really

happened to Britain in the 1980s.

I've got my egg whites all ready to be beaten up.

We usually remember the 1980s as "The Thatcher Years".

A decade of extraordinary political conflict and cultural confrontation,

shaped above all by the iron will of the Iron Lady.

I do not intend to be the first woman Prime Minister of

a mediocre and declining Britain.

You know, I don't think that's quite right.

Of course Margaret Thatcher mattered,

but maybe she mattered less than we think.

Maybe she wasn't driving the change.

Maybe she was responding to it.

# I really get a dirty mind... #

I wonder if the great changes of the 1980s really were down

to Britain's politicians.

I think the real authors of change were us,

millions of ordinary people.

The real revolution of the 1980s didn't happen out there.

It happened in here. And in here.

The '80s transformed our hopes and our dreams,

our anxieties and our aspirations.

And what we ate...

and where we shopped...

to where we lived...

and what we watched.

This was a revolution embodied not by Margaret Thatcher,

but by Delia Smith and by millions like her.

And in this series, as Delia herself would say,

I'm going to show you how.

# You just got to let me lay ya

# Gotta let me lay ya, lay ya

# You just gotta let me lay ya

# Gotta let me lay you down. #

-ANNOUNCER:

-In 55 minutes, we partake of The Old Grey Whistle Test.

First on Two...

Delia Smith's Cookery Course was one of THE television hits

of the early '80s.

Hello, and welcome again.

This week's programme is all about how to cook pasta

and how to make pancakes.

# Something's cooking in the kitchen... #

Here was a show designed to teach the great British public how to cook...

Another little tip I'll give you, to stop spaghetti or any pasta

clinging together in the water is to add a few drops of olive oil.

..and even how to eat.

The best thing to do is to take a few strands, not too many,

and then take them to the edge of the plate, twist the fork round

and then lift it up so that you've got a bite-sized piece.

# Baby, there's one lesson... #

And it introduced us to some dangerously exotic ingredients.

That's called lasagne.

And that makes a really delicious dish, one of my very favourites,

baked lasagne.

# But something's cooking in the kitchen... #

What we're now going to do is make a souffle.

# Something's burning in your microwave... #

Whisk up four egg whites to the soft peak stage.

# Something's cooking in the kitchen

# Something's steaming up the room... #

For millions of viewers, Delia's simple recipes and her breezy

informality around the kitchen were nothing short of an inspiration.

You know, my mum had all Delia's books.

And for us, every night was Delia night.

Now, it's true that Delia had never been formally trained.

But of course, that was something of an asset,

because to the viewing public,

she seemed the idealised suburban housewife.

The perfect neighbour.

The nice lady next door with a rare gift for whipping up a meringue.

Who better to teach the nation to cook from her neat little kitchen

somewhere in the heart of deepest middle England?

Britain was in crisis.

Unemployment was heading towards well over three million.

And yet, sales of domestic appliances were booming.

People were turning inwards,

focusing their attentions and their spending on the home.

But while millions of people were sitting down to watch Delia on TV,

millions more were rushing out to buy

a new gadget that told a revealing story about life in '80s Britain.

And that was the microwave oven.

MUSIC: Electricity by OMD

In the first years of the 1980s,

microwave sales went through the roof.

The future had arrived.

A miracle science oven that could cook anything in minutes.

-Baked potatoes in a flash.

-One minute per rasher.

-The golden date tart.

-No fishy smells.

Pavlova in one-and-a-half minutes.

1979 saw Margaret Thatcher sweep to power,

but it also saw the launch of the M&S Chicken Kiev ready meal for one.

Britain was becoming more fragmented, with more people

choosing to live alone and an increase in single-parent families.

And more women were embracing the opportunity to work.

I think things have GOT to change, because the majority of women

do work full-time and have GOT to work full-time!

In a lot of marriages, the woman basically is the breadwinner.

Delia Smith knew exactly what this changing Britain needed.

Delia's recipes were quick, simple and functional.

They were perfectly designed for aspirational,

working people who were far too busy to spend a lot of time cooking.

In 1985, Delia even published this.

One Is Fun!

aimed squarely at readers who lived on their own.

Then, no fewer than one in four British households.

"She was..." said one critic, "..spearheading the changes

"brought by the fast food revolution, freezer technology

"and working wives, without ever being so far ahead as to be freaky."

Freaky or not,

Delia Smith was offering exactly what Britain wanted.

Aspiration and inspiration.

Perfectly designed to suit the everyday rhythms of modern life.

And in Delia's world, it's little wonder that the voters turned

to a new kind of political leader.

'On weekday mornings, like most other mothers,

'Mrs Thatcher begins her day cooking breakfast at home for the family.'

A working mother who'd grown up in a grocer's shop and spoke openly

about good housekeeping, home economics and family budgets.

I too know what it's like running a house and running a career.

I know what it's like having to live within a budget.

I know what it's like having to cope.

She was a housewife. She knows what it's like on a limited budget.

Everything like that. It appealed to me. You know?

-And I thought, "Well, a woman..."

-SHE CHUCKLES

BIG BEN CHIMES

# Happy New Year, happy New Year... #

As 1980 dawned, the new decade seemed charged with possibility.

And Britain's first woman Prime Minister published her call-to-arms.

"You're probably reading this sitting at home,

"maybe with your family around you.

"In the living room, there's almost certainly a television set,

"probably a colour model.

"In the kitchen, there is more than likely to be

"a washing machine and almost definitely a fridge."

Now, this is very clearly aimed at the kind of people who are

watching Delia Smith.

But here's the killer question.

How many of these items were made in Britain?

"Once we were the best. We built well and sold well.

"We delivered on time, people bought British because British was best."

Not any more, of course.

Now people were buying German or American or Japanese.

And this is what Mrs Thatcher had come to power promising to change.

"So as you raise a glass to the '80s tomorrow night,

"drink with me to the awakening of Britain."

What all this did was to tap into two very powerful forces.

One of them was something new,

our growing obsession with gadgets and appliances,

home and household.

But the other was very old indeed.

Our deep sense of national identity, our patriotism, our pride,

our bulldog spirit.

Some of you may have noticed that for the past few years,

Britain has been invaded by the Italians, the Germans,

the Japanese and the French.

Now we have the means to fight back.

# Oh, yeah

# Oh, yeah. #

This attempt to turn the domestic aspirations of Delia's Britain

into a patriotic crusade would soon produce one of

the great icons of the early '80s.

# Bow, bow (chick chicka-chickaa). #

Now, today, this might not look like a car

to set Jeremy Clarkson's pulse racing.

But at the dawn of the 1980s,

the Austin Metro was something of a public obsession.

Indeed, I think that never before had the appearance of

a new British car been anticipated with such patriotic expectation.

"Not just a motor car..." said one headline,

"..more a symbol of national survival."

The new Austin Metro.

The new Metro is so aerodynamic, that at a steady 50mph,

the Metro HLE gets 62 miles per gallon.

Amid the industrial turmoil of the 1970s, strikes had brought our

biggest car manufacturer, British Leyland, to the verge of bankruptcy.

But by the dawn of the 1980s, new management had tackled

the problem head-on and seemed to be winning.

Leyland believe that by involving the workers in decision making,

they will not only reduce the number of disputes, they will,

as a bonus, improve the quality of their vehicles.

We want to prove to everybody that we can make these cars and

make the demand that they want, you know?

We can make a good job as well.

We know we can do it.

The Austin Metro was their secret weapon.

You know, for me, this is a bit of a nostalgic treat,

because my dad had one of the very first models.

Of course, he was far from alone.

Because here was a car that was reliable, affordable and economical.

The ideal car for a country coming to terms with industrial decline.

MUSIC: Pull Up To The Bumper by Grace Jones

But the key selling point and the one that chimed perfectly

with Mrs Thatcher's bullish rhetoric, was that it was British.

The new Austin Metro.

A British car

to beat the world.

The Metro was an undeniable British manufacturing success story.

But it was fighting against the tide.

For across much of industrial Britain,

the outlook could hardly have been grimmer.

Honey Tree Close, with its neat gardens and carefully

maintained modern houses, is a reflection of the prosperity

in the West Midlands that was once taken for granted.

But in the last two years, a dream has been shattered.

Where there was hope, there's now fear and uncertainty.

A few years earlier, when Honey Tree Close had been built, this area,

the West Midlands, had been Britain's manufacturing heartland.

But now, it found itself in deep trouble.

Years of cheap foreign competition, terrible labour relations,

appalling productivity and falling demand had eaten away

at Britain's industrial base.

And by the early '80s,

many of the families on this Dudley estate were becoming increasingly

worried about the future of the local Round Oak steelworks.

Round Oak had been producing iron and steel since Victorian times.

But by 1980, the future of the British steel industry looked bleak.

Two days before Christmas 1982, Round Oak closed its doors.

Some 1,300 jobs were lost.

It was an all-too-familiar story.

Steel-built Corby and its passing means the town must make massive psychological...

Dunlop's tyre factory at Speke is to close down entirely,

with the loss of 3,000 jobs...

Soon, the now-cold blast furnaces will be broken up for scrap.

This whole skyline will change.

# A cloud hangs over me

# Marks every move... #

Previous governments had been terrified of unemployment.

So when times were tough, they had pumped money into the economy

to prop up consumer demand and to bail out our struggling businesses.

But Mrs Thatcher was different.

Printing more money will lead to more inflation...

HECKLING

..not to more jobs.

This government has no intention of printing more money

to finance big pay settlements.

This wasn't just bitter medicine, this was shock therapy.

Within months, British manufacturing had plunged into the deepest

recession since the war.

# I am the one in ten

# (A number on a list)

# I am the one in ten... #

By the end of 1980, unemployment had hit two million.

In some parts of Merseyside, unemployment has reached 40%.

The odds against the unskilled getting a job are 424-to-1.

At the time this was seen, understandably enough,

as Margaret Thatcher's recession and Margaret Thatcher's unemployment.

Now, she certainly made a very convenient scapegoat,

but I think the truth is a bit more complicated.

You know, there's a persistent caricature that the Thatcher

government just pulled the plug on British industry,

and yet in the early 1980s, they were actually giving hundreds

of millions of pounds to the steel industry alone.

And I think the underlying reality is that with or without

Margaret Thatcher, industrial working-class Britain,

this Britain, was always heading for the scrapheap.

# Get your nose out the paper

# Take a good look at what's going down... #

Over the course of the next decade,

the collapse of these industries would drastically reshape our lives.

# Have you seen the writing on the wall? #

Entire communities, once defined by their local industry,

the mill, the mine, the factory,

faced unemployment and disintegration.

But out of the ashes of these old industries,

something new was rising.

Even before the Round Oak works had closed,

the government had declared the area an "enterprise zone".

Very '80s phrase, that, "enterprise zone".

And in 1985, work began on this. Merry Hill Shopping Centre.

And in a way, this building tells the whole story of what

happened to Britain in the 1980s.

The transition from manufacturing to services.

From making things to buying things.

From the roar of the blast furnace to the ring of the cash register.

A brave new world built on credit and consumerism.

In a society ruled by the values of the marketplace,

identity itself was now becoming a product.

Even a brand.

A question less of class, than of taste.

In the spring of 1980,

a brand-new publication appeared on the shelves of Britain's newsagents.

Its founding father was a man called Nick Logan.

Now, Logan had previously been the editor of the NME,

as well as the man who'd set up the magazine, Smash Hits,

so he certainly knew his way around the business.

And what he wanted to produce was something glossy and aspirational,

squarely aimed at people in their late teens and early 20s,

but with the production values of Tatler or Vogue.

And what he came up with was less a music magazine,

than a style Bible.

MUSIC: Fade To Grey by Visage

The Face became one of the most influential magazines of the decade.

It even had its own advert on TV.

DISTORTED: The Face!

"What The Face does..." Nick Logan once said,

"..is combine racy copy with a lot of photography.

"People do underestimate the power of a good picture."

And for me, what The Face absolutely captured was one

of the defining characteristics of the advertising-crazed 1980s.

The idea that consumerism isn't really about the stuff,

it's about you, the consumer.

It's about who you are,

who you want to be and what you want to look like.

It's all ultimately about the image.

The Face was keen to champion the New Romantic and New Wave stars

of the early '80s.

The Human League, Grace Jones,

Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran,

Ultravox, Heaven 17.

New music for a new decade.

# Here comes the daylight, here comes my job... #

An age of materialism, glitz and glamour.

# Here comes the night-time

# Here comes my role

# Goodbye to the pavement

# Hello to my soul. #

You know, I don't think it's an accident that so many of these bands

emerged from the old industrial cities of the North and the Midlands.

Places like Liverpool and Sheffield and Manchester.

Cities that had been rooted in the old certainties of class and

industry and now, of course, were blighted by unemployment.

What's also striking is just how radically these bands broke

with the music of the 1970s.

Not just in the way they sounded,

but perhaps even more so in the way they looked.

# Sitting on a park bench

# Years away from fighting

# Oh, to cut a long story short... #

Far from attacking the new materialism of the 1980s,

many of these bands eagerly embraced the spirit of individual aspiration.

My dad was a Ted, you know?

He dressed up because, you know... Most kids, when you're in your

teens and early 20s, you do it because you want attention.

When you open the door of your council flat,

when you go to a comprehensive school with 2,000 kids there,

you don't want to merge into the background.

You want to stand out from that background and you want to

look good just individually, yourself.

And that's what it's about.

Now, bands like Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet have always

carried a certain amount of political baggage.

And even today, there are plenty of people who will just write

them off as money-grabbing Thatcherites.

Which is, I think, a bit unfair, because of course,

most of them were Labour voters.

Even so, it is, I think, true that in their values, in their language

and even in their clothes, they were reflecting a changing mood.

More individualistic, more aspirational and, dare I say it,

more entrepreneurial. Less free love, then, more free market.

I think everybody's basically a capitalist.

You know, you see all these people...

Whether you vote Labour or Conservative,

you're still a capitalist.

Even if you're just a housewife who simply want a new cooker,

that's capitalistic, you know?

Having come from nothing, you know, having come from

a quite poor background, I know what it's like not to have money.

MUSIC: Rio by Duran Duran

For the New Romantics, class belonged to history.

The future was all about style, swagger and the gospel of success.

# And when she shines she really shows you all she can... #

In its relentless emphasis on image and identity,

style and aspiration, The Face was very much of its time.

These values would play an enormous role in the wider popular culture

of the 1980s and they're associated with one industry above all -

advertising.

Remember, this was Delia's Britain -

a country obsessed with consumerism and aspirations.

So, brand identity mattered more than ever.

MUSIC: All Of My Heart by ABC

And for Britain's ad men, brand identities

no longer just applied to products, they now applied to people.

Your after-dinner mints weren't just mints.

They were a statement of elegance and sophistication.

Your stock cubes, a reflection of wholesome family life...

with a saucy twist.

Remember, Preston...

Entire social groups were now defined not by class or income,

but by what they bought, what they ate and where they shopped.

And to one group of youngsters,

wearing the right shirt was a symbol of something more.

# All of my heart... #

Tribal, innit?

I mean, it's like football, it's just tribal.

One tribe onto another tribe.

Who can go and do the next tribe?

It boils down to human nature, don't it?

MUSIC: A Forest by The Cure

By the early '80s, Saturday afternoons had become

associated with one thing -

football hooliganism.

On Saturday, you get the regular football guys

and you get troublemakers.

It definitely affects the trade.

People are frightened.

Football hooliganism was, of course, nothing new.

In the 1970s, the back page headlines had been dominated

by one punch-up after another.

But by the early '80s, it was beginning to feel different.

The look had changed. Less flares and bovver boots,

more drainpipe jeans and Adidas trainers.

And the violence itself had changed too. It was now sharper, nastier

and better organised.

Football in the 1980s seemed a national disease.

But even as the mob mentality of the football terraces was destroying

the image of the beautiful game,

a very different game was taking Britain by storm.

The 1980s was snooker's decade.

Here, in stark contrast to the turbulence on the terraces,

was a game of gallantry and precision.

A gentlemanly contest of skill and stamina,

a game made for television with cameras to pick up every break,

every miss, every blink and every twitch.

It had a rich cast of charismatic characters,

individual heroes for an individualistic age.

MUSIC: Hit Me With Your Best Shot by Pat Benatar

APPLAUSE

There was Alex "Hurricane" Higgins, Dennis Taylor, Jimmy White,

Ray Reardon, Willie Thorne, and, of course...

..Steve Davis.

He's breathing heavily as he comes down to this final pink.

-CHEERING

-And that's it.

The World Snooker Champion, Steve Davis.

In 1981, a young Steve Davis beat Doug Mountjoy to win the

World Snooker Championship at the Crucible in Sheffield.

Congratulations there from his manager, Barry Hearn.

It kick-started a national love affair with baize and balls.

Steve Davis was much more interesting than he pretended to be.

Well, a bit more interesting.

A working-class south London boy made good,

he brought to the table some of Mrs Thatcher's favourite

virtues - talent, ambition and sheer hard work.

But the man who really turned snooker into a global

money-spinner was his manager, the accountant and promoter Barry Hearn.

-PHONE RINGS

-The good manager.

Hello, Barry Hearn.

Also known in the business as Barry 'Earn.

Yes, well, if you're talking about...

No, if you're talking about an afternoon and evening,

I'd do... If we were in your area, we'd do 1,250 the night-time

but an afternoon session will be an extra 500.

So that's 1,750 plus VAT,

plus any expenses that Steve incurs.

Thanks to Barry Hearn, Steve Davis became one of the highest earning

sports stars of the decade.

Not just a sporting hero but a brand.

An '80s advertiser's dream...

in any language...

..and a magnet for corporate sponsorship.

Listen, I'm a little bit worried about the gloves.

I don't really think they're going to suit this image.

Yes, it could be a bit over the top.

Toni, do you want to take off the gloves?

The gloves get the big heave.

All pictures must reflect the clean-cut image of Barry Hearn's boy

who gets £25,000 a year to appear in The Star newspaper.

That's lovely.

Crucially, while football appealed overwhelmingly to

young, working-class men, snooker's audience went right across

the spectrum - young and old, rich and poor, men and women.

Here was a sport that the whole family could enjoy,

gathered around the television on a wet bank holiday weekend.

And enjoy it we did.

The defending world champion, Steve Davis.

The 1985 World Championship final.

Dennis Taylor battled Steve Davis down to the final frame

in an unbearably tense match.

Victory rested on the very last ball.

CHEERING

He's done it!

CHEERING

Dennis Taylor, for the first time, becomes

Embassy World Snooker champion.

The match was watched by almost 19,000,000 people.

A record figure for BBC Two to this day.

MUSIC: Passing Strangers by Ultravox

In a world where snooker was taking over from football,

New Romantics from punk rockers and service industries from

heavy industry, the old assumptions seemed in headlong retreat.

But what of the political opposition?

On 29 September 1980, a bruised and battered Labour Party

convened here, the Winter Gardens in Blackpool, to try and make

sense of their election defeat a year earlier.

The atmosphere could be described as, well, poisonous.

Many young activists were seething with righteous anger,

not so much at the Tories,

but what they saw as the betrayals of the last Labour government and,

in particular, at their veteran leader, Jim Callaghan.

MUSIC: Upside Down by Diana Ross

Many of us in this conference are also angry about much of what

the last Labour government did and a great deal of what the last

Labour government failed to do.

And we have the right, comrades,

to be angry and to do something about our anger.

Between Labour's left and right, the gulf had been deepening for years,

but never before had the divisions been so blatant or so bitter.

# Inside out and round and round... #

Andrew Faulds,

MP for Warley East.

And I represent the true Labour Party in Smethwick.

Not the Workers Revolutionary Party,

nor the militant Trots...

APPLAUSE AND BOOING

..who have, who have...

..who have infiltrated so many constituency parties, as you know!

CHEERING

Madam Chairman,

the baying of the beast betrays its presence.

You can hear them.

# Upside down

# Boy, you turn me

# Inside out

# And round and round... #

What the TV pictures from Blackpool showed was a party engulfed

in a bitter civil war.

This was political theatre at its most luridly melodramatic,

a clash not just of big personalities,

but of two very different visions of Britain's future.

But what all this reflected was a much deeper story that went

well beyond Westminster politics,

because here was an old-fashioned institution

struggling to come to terms with social and economic change,

with the decline of the old industrial working classes,

the eclipse of the trade unions

and the rising power of social aspiration.

And it was under these pressures

that the Labour Party was tearing itself apart.

MUSIC

To heal the divisions, Labour's MPs chose a new leader,

the left-wing veteran, Michael Foot.

The party's not going to be...divided.

The party's not going to... tear itself to pieces.

But sentiment alone couldn't hold the party together.

A rousing speaker and first-rate writer,

Foot was nonetheless a media disaster.

Oi!

In January 1981, the former Labour grandee Roy Jenkins

issued a very public challenge.

Jenkins joined forces with the Labour moderates,

David Owen, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers.

And the so-called Gang Of Four

launched the Social Democratic Party, or SDP.

And the trouble didn't stop there.

Tony Benn's infinite capacity to surprise and sometimes to dismay

has never been better demonstrated than in the early hours

of the morning, his decision made public at 3:40am

to challenge Denis Healey for the deputy leadership of the party...

VOICE FADES OUT

In April 1981, the charismatic left-winger Tony Benn

casually tossed a grenade into the chaos.

By challenging Labour's Deputy Leader Denis Healey,

Benn was inviting the party to lurch even further to the left.

# For making your mind up! #

"Tony Benn for deputy" badge. 20p.

The result could hardly have been closer.

The final decision, and I'll say this now,

the votes have been counted three times.

Tony Benn, 49.574.

Denis Healey, 50.426.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

If Tony Benn had won, well,

then the future of the Labour Party would've looked very different.

Funnily enough though,

both the Benn crusade and the short-lived emergence of the SDP

were basically responses to the same thing,

the tumultuous upheaval in our social and economic life.

And so, Labour found itself caught

between the lights of left-wing purity

and the demands of appealing to the centre ground.

And of course, for the Labour Party,

that particular problem has never gone away.

MUSIC: Reasons To Be Cheerful by Ian Dury and The Blockheads

# Reasons to be cheerful, part three

# One, two, three

# Summer, Buddy Holly, The working folly

# Good golly Miss Molly and boats... #

Labour activists weren't alone in struggling to come to terms

with a change in mood.

# 18-wheeler Scammells, Dominecker camels

# All other mammals Plus equal votes...

CHEERING

In the summer of 1981,

Britain basked in the warm glow of the Royal Wedding.

# Reasons to be cheerful

# One, two, three... #

But for all the pageantry and patriotic optimism,

some sections of society had fewer reasons to be cheerful.

# Reasons to be cheerful

# Part three. #

The beginning of the 1980s, Brixton was not a happy place.

Transformed in the previous 30 years by waves of West Indian

immigration, this was one of the poorest areas in London,

blighted by very high crime and very high unemployment.

In these run-down streets, Mrs Thatcher's talk of aspiration

and self-improvement sounded like something from a different planet.

And for much of Brixton's black community, this was an age,

not of opportunity and entrepreneurship,

but one of prejudice, alienation and everyday racism.

In January 1981, 13 black teenagers were killed

in a house fire in New Cross, south London.

# 13 dead

# And nothing said... #

Many local activists blamed a racially-motivated arson attack.

When no arrests followed,

they accused the police of treating black lives as cheap.

A capital smouldered with indignation.

In Brixton, where relations with the police had long been strained,

the mood was especially volatile.

Are they really harassing people every day?

People have been beaten, kicked,

I saw it with my own eyes, the people...

-Racism.

-Racist, man.

# Mothers and fathers... #

On the afternoon of Saturday, the 11th of April,

here on Railton Road,

two young plainclothes policemen stopped and searched

a minicab driver whom they suspected of dealing drugs.

A crowd gathered and scuffles broke out. A man was arrested.

By now there were more than 100 people here and the mood was ugly.

The police called for reinforcements and then all hell broke loose.

MUSIC: Sound Of The Crowd by Human League

# Put your hand In a party wave... #

As the fighting intensified,

Railton Road became the front line of a running battle.

Bricks and petrol bombs were thrown at the police...

..who called for thousands of reinforcements.

# Add your voice to the sound of the crowd. #

The rioting went on well into the night.

It was only when fire hoses were turned on the crowds

that the police began to regain control.

The Brixton riots caused £6.5 million worth of damage.

450 people were injured,

hundreds of buildings burned and vehicles destroyed.

Was Brixton preventable?

And can it be prevented from happening again?

Amid a fierce debate about the causes and consequences,

Britain was forced to look hard

at its attitude to race and multiculturalism.

Quite clearly, we've got to limit

any further mass immigration into this country,

and if any people wish to return to their country of ethnic origin,

they should be encouraged to do so.

The police should recognise that in fact,

it's not on to treat people in what seems to many blacks

in Brixton as an oppressive and injust manner.

Over the next few months,

more riots broke out across the country,

Toxteth in Liverpool,

Moss Side in Manchester,

Chapeltown in Leeds.

A few months later,

Mrs Thatcher's Employment Secretary, Norman Tebbit,

witheringly dismissed attempts to blame the rioting on unemployment.

I grew up in the '30s with an unemployed father. He didn't riot.

He got on his bike and looked for work,

and he kept looking till he found it.

APPLAUSE

But Britain in the '80s was a very different place

from Britain in the '30s.

A much more fragmented, individualistic society,

in which people no longer felt a strong sense of loyalty

to their local community.

And yet, you know, the surprising thing, it was precisely that

sense of community spirit that the Brixton riots did much to revive.

In the aftermath of the riots,

local politicians made a concerted effort to regenerate the area.

And Lambeth Council commissioned a series of murals designed

to foster pride in the local neighbourhood.

# I'm never going to cry again

# I'm never going to die again

# I shed some tears for you

# I shed more tears for you Than the ocean

# The ocean... #

In a decade when people all over the country were carving out

new identities for themselves,

these murals represented a very different vision of Britishness,

tolerant and inclusive, a country of all creeds and all colours.

In that sense, I think it's these murals,

far more than the televised images of fighting and looting,

that really held the key to Brixton's and Britain's future.

Although not the zombie on the end.

I think that's actually a bit creepy.

Even as the dust settled in Brixton,

high streets up and down the country

were facing an upheaval of a rather different kind.

MUSIC: New Life by Depeche Mode

On Friday the 12th of February, 1982,

a quiet revolution came to the British high street.

Because in seven towns and cities across the nation,

a new kind of shop opened its doors for the first time.

This was a place that would transform not just how we dressed,

but how we shopped.

Its target audience was an entirely new kind of customer -

the young, affluent, professional woman.

# Moderating, generating new life

# New life... #

-REPORTER:

-Next sells stylish clothes, from stylish shops,

to a stylish sector of the market,

the upwardly mobile 20-40 year-old,

and they're outstandingly successful.

With so many young women now going out to work,

Next were tapping an increasingly lucrative and influential market.

# Alive and kicking In the culture club! #

Within just six years, Next's annual profits

had soared from barely £3 million to more than 90 million.

# Alive and kicking in the culture club... #

You know, Next could really only have been born in the early '80s,

and its ethos absolutely caught the mood of the day.

The shop's publicity hammered home a simple mantra - affordable,

collectable, aspirational.

And at its heart was that classic '80s obsession with choice,

although cleverly, the shop rather took the heavy lifting out of it

for the ordinary customer.

So, what they offered was a total concept look,

and within the confines of the style

you could choose whatever skirt you wanted,

a top to go with it and accessories to match.

Power dressing straight off the rail.

MUSIC: The Message by Grandmaster Flash

The average Next customer came in to buy just one item

and walked out with five.

The clothes are with-it and really,

the quality is good, but the prices are low and that's really,

I think, why it will be a success. You know, it's something different.

It's a total look, it's really...

taking the risk out of buying clothes.

In a decade when millions of women

were keen to rebrand themselves as stylish,

modern, individual consumers,

Next could hardly have been better timed.

And it wasn't long before it applied its formula

to that other great '80s symbol of social aspiration...

the home.

1985, Next launched its own home collection,

effectively off-the-peg interior design.

Stylish, affordable, this was basically an upmarket IKEA.

Now, if only you shopped properly,

you could become exactly the kind of people

you always dreamed of being.

A Next family, literally living the Next life.

The perfect expression of the Next lifestyle, a house decorated

and furnished with the company's products with just a few non-Next

items to complete the picture.

This might be described as a bit over the top for some of us,

-you're aware of that?

-No, no, no!

This is for the average person.

And as the average person settled into his new sitting room,

he might well be watching a brand-new TV channel.

Good afternoon.

It's a pleasure to be able to say to you, welcome to Channel 4.

Tuesday, 2 November 1982,

Britain became a four-channel nation.

The birth of Channel 4 was one of the emblematic cultural events

of the early 1980s.

In many ways, you know, it feels like a very Thatcherite moment,

a public service broadcaster funded by advertising.

Its programmes made by dozens of entrepreneurial independent

companies, so, of course,

the government should have loved it, but really, they didn't.

You'll hear some of this is a moment.

It's interspersed farts and it's available at £2.

FARTING NOISES

-And what do you think you're playing at?

-Playing?

Have you ever heard of spin the bottle?

Well, this is pour the bottle.

I mean Channel 4 is the channel for child porn and homosexuals.

And I had both in my show.

Irreverent, aggressive and often deliberately shocking,

Channel 4 held up an unforgiving mirror to life in '80s Britain.

And that was precisely the idea.

Part of its mission was to reflect the experiences

of young people in minority groups.

Here was a perfect example of the cultural mood outpacing the

intentions of the political elite.

On 16 January 1981, some 22 months before Channel 4's launch,

its chief executive, Jeremy Isaacs, came here

to the Royal Institution in London.

The hall was packed with independent TV producers keen to tap in to

a new and potentially very lucrative market and up at the front,

Jeremy Isaacs wasted no time. He cut straight to the chase.

"What we're after," he said,

"is programmes that show this country as it really is."

Now Isaacs was on his way out when he was accosted

by a 32-year-old screenwriter.

"Hi, Jeremy," he said.

"I'm Phil Redmond, and if what you say is true, would you let

"me have characters who could say 'fuck' at eight o'clock at night?"

There was a pause, a hard stare and then Isaacs grinned.

"Come and see me," he said. "We'll talk."

MUSIC: Brookside Theme

It's just as well they did.

The jewel in the crown of Channel 4's opening night was

a brand-new soap opera.

From the catchy theme tune to the now slightly dodgy-looking

haircuts, Brookside was unmistakably a product of the early '80s

and at the centre of the very first episode is

a very '80s couple, Bobby and Sheila Grant, who've left their

council estate for a brand-new house in suburban Liverpool.

Bloody hell, are you sure you've got enough here, Sheila?

You don't want to feed the starving hordes of India, do you,

while you're at it this afternoon?

It's not like having the shop at the end of the road any more, you know.

No, the shop is in the boot of the bloody car.

Like so many other couples moving into brand-new estates and

moving up in the world, the Grants find themselves living

alongside people from very different backgrounds, from older couples

downsizing after losing their jobs, to aspirational young professionals.

Liverpool's very first yuppies.

Roger, as much as I detest shopping,

this is the only day that it can be done.

I did not plan to stay in bed until mid-morning.

GRANGE HILL THEME TUNE

Phil Redmond had already made a name for himself with Grange Hill,

a stark portrayal of a London comprehensive school.

And Brookside shone a similarly uncompromising light on life

in '80s Liverpool.

Damon, what's up, love?

Oh, God, it's your job, isn't it?

They've sacked me.

They gave me that. They sacked me.

Sheila Grant, you know, the Grants, they are realistic because

half the things they do in their house, half the things that go on

in their house it's like half the things that go on in our house.

Back in November 1982,

Brookside's main competition was ITV's Coronation Street, which

had been running since 1960 and the contrast between the two

tells us a lot, I think,

about what had happened to Britain in the meantime.

You see, Coronation Street is really basically a '60s show.

It presents us with a warm,

romantic vision of the working-class North.

Nostalgic terraced street in which everybody looks out for

everybody else.

-Morning, Mrs Fairclough.

-Morning.

Brookside feels, to me, very different.

It has no such idealised sense of community, for one thing.

In fact the only thing that unites all its residents is that

they've all come from somewhere else.

Some of them are moving up, some of them are coming down but they

don't live in the houses in which they were born.

They just live in houses that they can afford.

MUSIC: Only You by Yazoo

I wish me mam could've seen all this, you know, eh?

New house, fun on holidays with the kids.

She'd have been really made up.

# Looking from a window above

# It's like a story of love... #

The storylines reflected some strikingly raw social issues

from debt, divorce and drug abuse to homosexuality and families at war.

It's easy for you to stick to your principles.

-Bob, you said you'd listen!

-I'll listen when you start talking sense.

I am trying to!

# Only you... #

Perhaps no show of the decade better captures the domestic

repercussions of the '80s revolution, the way that

unemployment and opportunity, disappointment and aspiration were

forcing their way into the heart of the ordinary suburban household.

The issues could happen anywhere.

Death, divorce, marriage, thieving, it could be any city, anywhere.

As Margaret Thatcher approached the end of her first term,

things looked bleak.

Tory scum! Tory scum!

Unemployment had gone through the roof.

By 1983, one in seven of Britain's working population was out of work.

Mrs Thatcher's popularity plummeted.

How did Mrs Thatcher do?

What do they think of her now? The answers are very forthright.

-Diabolical.

-Unbendable.

-Dreadful.

-I think she's lousy.

But then, quite suddenly, the mood changed, putting Mrs Thatcher

on course for a landslide at the 1983 election.

I have no regrets.

We had to send that task force,

we had to regain those islands for our people.

You know, one of the great myths about the early

'80s is that Mrs Thatcher only won re-election in 1983 because the

Argentines did her a favour.

By invading the Falklands, they supposedly allowed her to

banish the images of riots and dole queues and to unite the nation

behind her patriotic war effort.

But, actually, I don't really believe that at all.

You see, the polls show very clearly that when most people went

out to vote in 1983, they weren't even thinking about the Falklands.

They were thinking about jobs and the cost of living and the

economy, the classic bread and butter issues.

So she didn't win that election in the South Atlantic,

she won it in here or rather on there.

MUSIC: Breakfast Time Theme

In early 1983, Britain woke up to the brave new world of

breakfast television.

It's 6.30, Monday, January 17 1983.

# Breakfast time

# Breakfast time... #

And for the Thatcher campaign team,

the ethos of breakfast TV held the key to re-election victory.

BBC's Breakfast Time was fronted by Frank Bough, Selina Scott

and Nick Ross.

And its daily recipe was far removed from the high-minded

seriousness of your typical news programme.

You see, what people wanted wasn't

worthy analysis and furrowed brows.

What they wanted was woolly knitwear and cheerful chitchat.

They want family entertainment, and who better to provide it than

Frank Bough?

And this is where the BBC's breakfast show had absolutely

captured the spirit of Delia's decade.

Every morning it offered home cooking,

high-street fashion and keep-fit classes.

Sure, it was fun and it was frothy, but it always came back to the

same two quintessential '80s values of domesticity and aspiration.

We now have a gentleman whose Christian name is Glynn and

whose surname is Christian.

He's here with more advice about cooking with microwave ovens.

-Good morning.

-Good morning to you.

And before long,

TV-am was presenting an almost identical formula on ITV...

Do you like it?

..complete with mildly annoying rat.

Hello, good morning and welcome.

Mrs Thatcher absolutely grasped the potential of the breakfast

sofa and so, more importantly, did her spin doctors.

"Breakfast TV offers a new and potentially important

opportunity to the government to explain its policies and measures."

Now this comes from a secret memo circulated in December 1982 by

the government's press office.

"Breakfast TV," it says, "is an unknown quantity but it is predicted

"to have a lasting impact on the British way of life.

"The timing of its launch is particularly opportune since

"we are now in the run-up to a general election."

The Labour movement are going to be defenders of our country.

The Labour leader, Michael Foot,

stuck with the traditional formula of mass political rallies.

# I'll be wrapped around your finger... #

But Margaret Thatcher fully embraced the power,

directness and intimacy of television.

This is what it's like being on the campaign trail with

the Prime Minister in 1983.

It's as far removed from traditional campaigning as it's possible

to imagine. There aren't many voters inside.

What there are, are hundreds of members of the media

who swarm around the Prime Minister, follow her every move

and the idea from the Conservatives' point of view

is to get the best possible exposure on the TV news that evening.

# I'll be wrapped around your finger... #

Thanking you for being here this morning...

Breakfast TV helped to transform the way politicians engaged with

the public...

I'm very happy to be here. Sorry I haven't been before.

..giving rise to a phenomenon that might best be described as

sofa politics.

What suits you, Prime Minister?

The kind of way I am now with a classic suit and many,

many varied different blouses.

And in June 1983, the voters rewarded her with

a landslide victory.

# Don't you know, I'm still standing better than I ever did... #

I think Mrs Thatcher won in 1983 because better than any of her

political rivals, she had grasped the new priorities of '80s Britain.

Her obsessions with image and identity,

individualism and aspiration.

Now who was it who set all that in motion? Well, it wasn't her.

It was us.

Millions of ordinary people through millions of decisions taken

every day in our offices and our shopping centres,

our high streets and our living rooms.

You know the grocer's daughter may have come to embody

the new spirit of '80s Britain, but she didn't create it.

We did, with a little help from Delia Smith.

# Watch out, you might get what you're after... #

Next time -

battle lines are drawn as Margaret Thatcher goes to war,

video nasties invade suburbia and Daley Thompson conquers the world.

# Hold tight

# Wait till the party's over

# Hold tight

# We're in for a nasty weather

# There has got to be a way

# Burning down the house... #