World in Motion The 80s with Dominic Sandbrook

In the dying moments of 1984,

a young man quietly slipped away from his parents' Surrey home.

He was in a hurry.

He had an important call to make and only an hour to get to London.

As the chimes of Big Ben rang out to welcome in the New Year,

back at the party, the sound of popping champagne corks

almost drowned out the ringing of his parents' phone.

PHONE RINGS

Hello.

Hi, Dad. It's Mike. Happy New Year. I'm in Parliament Square

and guess what?

I'm ringing you on your mobile phone.

We've just made history!

The man making that surprise call was Mike Harrison,

the 24-year-old son of Sir Ernest Harrison,

and Sir Ernest had just been given the licence

for Britain's first mobile phone network.

This was a mobile phone call to remember.

The phone in question was this - the VT1,

weighing in at a whopping 11 lb,

and the call lasted barely a minute,

but what it represented was nothing short of a social and technological revolution.

-Hello.

-Hello.

-Hello.

I'm in the centre of London at the moment. Yes, I'm on my Vodafone.

By the end of 1985, Vodafone had sold more than 12,000 phones,

backed by a suitably catchy advertising campaign.

Larry & Barry Solicitors.

If you'd like to be in when you're out, ring Racal Vodafone.

In a decade obsessed with image and self-improvement, having a mobile,

along with the biggest Filofax you could lay your hands on,

showed that you were rich, successful and upwardly mobile.

It's easy now, and it was easy then,

to laugh at the yuppies of the 1980s.

But you know those '80s yuppies - they're you and me.

Making calls on the train, answering e-mails on your phone late at night.

Like it or not, that 24/7 work ethic

is something that we're all very familiar with today.

After all, what do you get if you combine this...

..with this?

Well, you get this.

From the cult of the mobile and the buzz of the stock market,

to the gospel of advertising and craze for all things continental...

..the second half of the Thatcher decade laid the foundations

for a hectic 21st-century lifestyle.

Five years of dizzying change that saw Britain plunge headlong

into a new era of digital technology,

financial globalisation and the unashamed pursuit

of individual self-interest.

No revolution ever comes without a cost.

But what Margaret Thatcher never imagined

was that at the end of the decade,

she too would be swept away by the shock of the new.

At the dawn of the 1980s,

Britain had been a very different kind of country.

Insular, conservative and remarkably old-fashioned.

A land of rusting, heavy industries, owned and run by the State.

But Margaret Thatcher had come into office with a blueprint for radical change.

She wanted to drag Britain out of the analogue age

and poised to help her

drive through the changes was the man who had taken

that very first mobile phone call, Sir Ernest Harrison.

Sir Ernest Harrison was exactly Mrs Thatcher's kind of person -

an ambitious, thrusting self-made man.

He'd first seen the potential of the mobile phone years earlier

and he was naturally keen to drum up publicity

for his new Vodafone network.

And so, the very day after his son's New Year's Eve call,

he organised a little publicity stunt of his own.

To make the first public call on his new gadget,

Sir Ernest hired the enormously popular comedian Ernie Wise.

And this time he made sure that the cameras were on hand

to capture the moment.

Dressed in 19th-century livery,

Wise alighted from an old Royal Mail coach at London's St Katharine Docks.

The location could hardly have been more appropriate.

Once the heart of Britain's colonial trading network,

London's docks were now being transformed into a temple to high finance and mass consumerism.

Sir Ernest's little stunt had been very cleverly designed

to play up the speed and modernity of his new mobile phone network,

in stark contrast to the backward and old-fashioned

State-run General Post Office,

which had controlled Britain's communications for centuries.

But his real target was British Telecom.

-PHONE RINGS

-It's ringing again for you.

# Hey, how you doing?

# I'm sorry you couldn't get through

# Cos this is a message that's been recorded

# Especially for you... #

Although British Telecom had been detached from the Post Office in 1981,

it was still a State-owned monopoly.

Sadly, its customer service was still far from ideal.

We were cut off today because the exchange in Oxshott

had a fault in it again.

That's the third time in the last four months.

Just to have a new phone installed,

you often had to wait as long as six months.

But as 1984 drew to a close, all that was about to change.

Now in her second term in office,

Mrs Thatcher had committed herself to a radical programme of privatisation.

-PHONE RINGS

-Hello.

The first State-owned utility to go under the hammer was British Telecom,

and the public reaction could hardly have been more enthusiastic,

with two million people snapping up shares.

But privatisation was more than just a political phenomenon.

Its free market ethos even made it into family board games.

Not long after BT had been sold off, this came on to the British market.

Its name was Poleconomy, the game of the United Kingdom.

Believe me, it made Monopoly look positively low rent.

Poleconomy is a role-playing game about money and power,

where each player is both tycoon and politician.

I was about 12 when my parents bought me this game, and I loved it.

I'd just seen the film Wall Street - well, I'd seen the poster -

and I rather fancied myself as Shropshire's answer to Gordon Gekko,

a thrusting young tycoon cutting a dash through the corridors of power.

And as the evenings wore on and my parents started sobbing with boredom,

so I built up my mighty empire.

British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, Barclaycard,

some life insurance, PG Tips.

Double six. Still got the old magic.

For me at least, this was all good fun.

But to Mrs Thatcher's critics, it seemed that nothing now was safe

from the government's thirst for revenue.

-Do you have an account with us?

-Account. No.

Oh, you're a shareholder, perhaps?

I'm a citizen, if that's what you mean.

Citizen... Oh, you mean client?

Look, I don't want to sound stupid but I get back to England,

-I find my car's been stolen...

-Peter, you've been away?

Did you perhaps miss the privatisation of the police force?

Next up for sale was British Gas.

And you didn't need to be a stock market player

to spot the appeal of the ad campaign.

If you see Sid, tell him.

What the Sid adverts represented

was privatisation as a kind of cultural mission,

spreading the gospel of popular capitalism, and it worked.

By the end of the 1980s, more than one in five people had bought shares.

There were now more British shareholders than there were trade union members.

We'd become a nation of Sids,

much to the delight of the Prime Minister herself.

Popular capitalism is nothing less than a crusade

to enfranchise the many in the economic life of the nation.

We Conservatives are returning power to the people.

# Pounds, dollar, millionaire P-p-p-pound, dollar...#

But when Margaret Thatcher fired up the engine of change,

she didn't quite get what she'd bargained for.

As the daughter of a shopkeeper,

she dreamed of a nation of citizen investors

holding companies to account and raising standards across the board.

But most people were rather more interested in making a quick profit

than investing in the long-term future

of British Telecom or British Gas.

Within just six months, one in four BT investors

had already sold their shares.

And as for the Sids, well,

within days, thousands of them had cashed in on their shares.

Even so, what all this represented was a massive swing of the pendulum

from public to private,

driven not just by Mrs Thatcher's political ideology,

but by the material ambitions of millions of ordinary people.

By embracing the free market,

Mrs Thatcher hoped to turn back the clock

to a lost golden age of thrift and responsibility.

In reality, though,

she'd handed a golden opportunity to a group of people

whose priorities could hardly have been more different.

Good evening. For the first time ever on Monday,

the buying and selling of stocks and shares will be anyone's game,

as a century of financial tradition in the City of London collapses

as the Square Mile throws open its doors to greet the world's financiers.

-2-3.

-2-3.

-Nine, the key point.

On 27th October 1986,

Big Bang sent shock waves through the cosy world of British finance.

Out went old family interests run by a narrow old boys' network...

..in came ruthless new American competitors.

INDISTINCT

Out went face-to-face transactions on the old Stock Exchange floor,

in came computer trading in vast new open-plan offices.

We often think of the City of London as a strange, closed world

of impenetrable mathematical jargon,

eye-watering bankers' bonuses and dodgy financial ethics

but, actually, what happened to the City in the late 1980s

was exactly what happened to factories and offices

all over the country.

The end of the closed shop and the old order,

the end of the company car and the job for life.

And if you want a very simple example

of how quickly Britain was changing,

then forget what people were doing at their desks.

All you need to know is what they had for lunch.

In the good old days, City bankers liked to sit down to long lunches

in wood-panelled dining rooms -

all silver service, Dover sole and spotted dick.

But the new American competitors preferred something that was simpler

and more convenient and, crucially, much faster.

-Hello.

-Morning, sir.

-Chicken, bacon and avocado, please.

-Brown bread or white, sir?

-Brown, please.

-Brown bread. To eat in or take away?

-Take away, please.

-Take away.

-Lovely. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

-Thank you. Bye-bye.

If you were one of the old guard, the prospect of lunch on the run

was enough to give you acute indigestion,

but if you were one of the young guns,

if you could stomach the long hours and competitive cut-throat ethos,

you were hungry for a quick promotion and whacking great bonus,

then the City was the place to be.

'Wheeling and dealing billions of pounds over the telephone every day.

'Hard to imagine a more stressful environment.'

At the heart of this new order were the Essex boys and Essex girls

who flooded into the Square Mile in the last years of the 1980s.

Oi, Gary! Gary! Break it down, five lots! Work in 20!

They were young, brash and intensely ambitious,

and their new bosses didn't care where they'd been to school,

or whether they said "toilet" instead of "lavatory".

All that mattered was how good they were at buying and selling,

and how much money they were making.

What is your aim in life?

Erm...

Just to earn lots of money, really.

# Could be wrong

# I could be right...#

But this wasn't just a question of high finance.

The effects of Big Bang rippled out into our popular culture...

..into the stories we told ourselves about the aspirational chancers

who became the new folk heroes of mid-'80s Britain.

# I could be white I could be black...#

If there's one place that became synonymous

with small-scale Thatcherite ambition, then it was here,

Peckham in south London,

then one of the poorest areas in the country,

because it was here that one local businessman set out

on the long march to Millionaires' Row.

This time next year we will be millionaires.

By the late 1980s, Derek Trotter's efforts to better himself

had become a national phenomenon.

Now, that is a bit of me!

Almost 20 million people, a third of the population,

were now regularly tuning in to Only Fools And Horses...

..and greatly enjoying Del Boy's hapless attempts to embrace the yuppie lifestyle.

It's good to unwind, eh?

Sorry?

After a hard day in the City, it's good to unwind.

-Can I get you anything?

-Yes, please, John.

-A bottle of Beaujolais nouveau.

-Yes, sir.

-HE CLEARS HIS THROAT

-A '79.

Now, the very same year that Del Boy came over all Gordon Gekko,

a rather different sitcom made its first appearance on Channel 4.

Now, once again, this was a show set in Peckham,

although this time the action revolved around a local barbershop

and, once again, audiences were presented with a hard-working, aspirational character

who dreams of getting on and making money,

only this time there was a difference.

Let's just get this straight.

Just because I'm black, it doesn't mean to say that I cannot appreciate the finer things in life.

And just because I'm black, it equally doesn't mean

that I can't have ambition or speak the Queen's English.

It wouldn't go down too well if someone came to ask for a loan

and I said, "Me can't give you a loan because I, man, feel he's an idiot."

What you don't realise is that times are changing

and you're not changing with them.

There had been plenty of black characters on TV before Desmond's,

Channel 4's longest-running sitcom,

but no show had ever focused so heavily

on Caribbean immigrants' lives at work.

This is a barbershop, not a public library.

And Desmond's broke new ground in introducing a character

we weren't used to seeing on TV - Michael Ambrose -

a black assistant bank manager who votes Conservative.

I've been thinking, well, I've got a bit of capital

and I think perhaps I was...

Perhaps we can make something out of the shop after all.

At the time, the very idea of a middle-class aspirational black man,

what Americans rather excruciatingly called a buppie,

struck some viewers as an outlandish novelty.

But the really interesting thing about Michael Ambrose wasn't his skin colour,

it was the fact that he so perfectly embodied the new mood of the

late 1980s, the new emphasis on ambition and self-improvement,

on getting ahead and make no apology for it.

But not everyone shared Michael Ambrose's faith in Mrs Thatcher's economic revolution.

On a bitterly cold night in April 1988,

a wizened old woman made her way along London's South Bank

towards Waterloo station,

and what she saw there appalled her.

She was used to seeing shantytown poverty in her own country,

but she didn't expect to find it in Britain.

# I don't know where else I can go, Mother

# Oh, Mother...#

That little old lady was the 77-year-old nun

Mother Teresa of Calcutta,

who had won the Nobel Peace Prize

for her work with India's urban poor.

Her destination that freezing April night was this place,

then the site of Waterloo's infamous Bullring roundabout,

a dingy, forbidding maze of concrete underpasses

that, by the late 1980s, had become home

to some of the capital's very poorest people.

"How," asked Mother Teresa,

"could somewhere in the very heart of First World London

"look so much like Third World Calcutta?"

The next day, Mother Teresa went to Downing Street

to share her views with the Prime Minister.

Did you get the impression when you saw Mrs Thatcher that she was as aware of the problem as you are?

I think she knows.

I think she knows, but her attitude is different.

My attitude is different. She's a...

..government person. She's at the top level.

I'm at the service of our people.

I'm one of them.

Mrs Thatcher handled her tricky meeting with Mother Teresa

with a politician's natural cunning.

She had, she said, the greatest respect and affection for Mother Teresa,

even if we might disagree with her on one or two things.

But it was one of her junior ministers,

Sir George Young, Baronet,

who seemed to confirm all the very worst suspicions

about the government's attitude towards the homeless.

"The homeless?" he said.

"Aren't they the sort of people that you step over

"as you're coming out of the opera?"

I live underneath the Royal Festival Hall...

..in this place that they call a bash.

So far, I've been here about four or five months.

I'm not really sure whose fault it is that I'm here.

But it's got to be somebody's fault.

Some politicians might suggest that it's your fault.

Some politicians have got a very nice job with very nice money.

Probably very nice houses as well.

But I think they need to look at homelessness in a more serious way.

Today, there's a common conception

of '80s Britain as a deeply uncaring society,

a land ruled by selfish individualism.

But I think that's one of those cliches that doesn't quite stand up.

You see, whatever you think of the government,

most ordinary people weren't selfish individualists at all.

In fact, the mid-'80s was something

of a golden age of popular philanthropy,

with millions of us dressing up and doing our bit.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to a night of Comic Relief.

-Yes, my name is Griff Rhys Jones.

-And my name is Mel Smith.

Comic Relief was just one of several charity telethons that dominated

British television in the late 1980s.

From Live Aid to Children In Need,

this was philanthropy as peak-time mass-market entertainment.

And the public response was simply extraordinary.

Our total so far is...

Now, there were of course plenty of sceptics,

people who argued that this was merely the privatisation

of compassion, and an opportunity for rich celebrities

to flaunt their principles.

But Comic Relief's organisers insisted they were only stepping in

because Mrs Thatcher's government

had so conspicuously failed to deal with poverty,

not just abroad, but right here in Britain.

Do you know exactly where you're sleeping tonight?

Well, over 80,000 children in Britain

have to ask themselves that question every night.

In 1990, the charity Crisis commissioned a cinema advert

to highlight the continuing plight of London's homeless.

People were used to seeing cinema adverts for cars, for cigarettes,

even for their local curry houses,

but never before had cinemas screened an advert for a charity,

let alone one made with such stark visual flair.

The fact that Crisis had chosen to spend so much money on an advert

was of course immensely revealing.

Britain in the '80s was a country defined by the sheer power of the adman's image,

all the way from your favourite chocolate to - why not? -

your favourite charity.

Advertising agencies now claimed that what really mattered

wasn't where you'd come from, it was what brands you bought.

Now, in my case, that meant in Insignia deodorant, Reebok trainers

and Mars...bars.

# A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play.#

But the most surprising convert to the gospel of advertising

was this man, Neil Kinnock.

After Labour's catastrophic defeat by Margaret Thatcher in 1983,

the party had turned to this affable Welshman

as the man to lead them out of the wilderness.

At the time, Kinnock was seen as a media friendly figure,

the perfect choice to win over a suspicious press.

-Do you want a real scoop?

-Go on, then.

I walked on the water over there.

Alas, his first PR stunt, only hours before his coronation,

was something of a disaster.

# If I should stumble

# Catch my fall

# Catch my fall...#

Not quite the statesman-like image he was looking for.

Poor old Neil. But once Neil Kinnock had dried himself off,

he had to face the fact that his party, too,

needed something of a makeover.

You see, for Labour, the early 1980s

had been nothing short of catastrophic.

Surveys found that the party was seen as irredeemably old-fashioned,

as stuck in the smoky, stagnant world of the 1970s,

and as horribly out of touch with ambitious young voters.

So in the build-up to the next general election in 1987,

Kinnock took on two young men who knew all about the power of image.

One was a former TV producer called Peter Mandelson.

The other was Oscar-winning director Hugh Hudson,

who'd made Chariots Of Fire.

And they designed a campaign to compete with Mrs Thatcher's

famously slick packaging at the hands of admen Saatchi & Saatchi.

Out went the red flag, in came the red rose.

Out went the cheap grey suits...

..in came smart dark tailoring,

the kind of thing you might wear to work in the City.

# You've got the look

# You've got the look...#

To sell Kinnock to the nation,

Hugh Hudson made a short film that would go down in history.

I think that the real privilege of being strong

is the power that it gives you to help people who are not strong.

The result was the single most celebrated party political broadcast ever made,

although perhaps that's not really saying very much.

It was nicknamed Kinnock - The Movie.

And Hugh Hudson shot the opening here

on the Great Orme in North Wales.

Now, Hugh Hudson was no fool.

He knew that Neil Kinnock and the sea had an unfortunate history.

So Kinnock was firmly installed on a rock,

under strict instructions not to move.

This time there could be no walking on water.

I'm married to

a woman of high intelligence and great independence.

And immense warmth.

And I wouldn't want to be married to anybody

who didn't have those qualities.

Under Hudson's direction, Kinnock gave an Oscar-worthy performance.

But not everyone was bowled over.

From Hugh Hudson, the maker of Chariots Of Fire and Revolution,

comes Progressive Social Change But Nothing Too Radical.

Neil Kinnock IS Kinnock.

A man with an impossible dream.

A man with a rather fruity wife.

A man with a new advertising agency.

Of course Spitting Image were bang on,

because what Kinnock - The Movie really represented

was the triumph of style over substance.

The funny thing about that film, you know,

is that for all Hugh Hudson's visual flair,

Neil Kinnock only won 31% of the vote in the 1987 election.

Even so, I think Kinnock - The Movie is enormously revealing, because it

shows just how much British politics,

even the Labour Party, once so scathing about commercialism

and consumerism, had been seduced by the adman's aesthetic.

But now that Labour had moved towards the centre ground,

whatever had happened to that old '60s dream

of standing up to authority and defying the Establishment?

Well, even in late '80s Britain,

the flame of youthful rebellion was still alight.

All you had to do was head to your local record shop.

If you had wandered into one of those record shops in August 1988,

then you might well have picked up one of these little flyers.

Funnily enough, even though they were freely available,

they purported to be exclusive party invitations.

"Apocalypse Now. Please note, no invite, no entry.

"Private function. Absolutely no alcohol on sale."

No booze? What kind of a party was that?

But then, in 1988, very few people had heard of acid house parties.

# What people really want to know

# Is how the story all goes about acid... #

Inspired by the music played in the gay clubs of Chicago and Detroit,

acid house had impeccable anti-Establishment credentials.

And like so many youth subcultures,

it had a very pronounced sense of its own importance.

Here, insisted its devotees,

was a genuinely egalitarian counterculture.

Black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight,

just like the hippies of the 1960s.

Well, sort of.

But for many bored and disaffected teenagers growing up in Margaret Thatcher's Britain,

rave offered a heady blend of idealism and escapism.

Saturday night in south London.

Hundreds of young people are gathering for the latest craze,

an acid house party in a disused warehouse.

Coaches will take them to a destination

which is deliberately being kept secret to evade the police.

-Where do you think you're going to?

-Mystery tour.

-We don't know.

-That's why it's a mystery.

-That's the mystery about it.

This is acid, man.

The man behind the Apocalypse Now party was a young promoter called Tony Colston-Hayter,

and it was this enterprising young man

who turned the underground rave scene into a tabloid phenomenon...

..because as well as inviting 3,000 youngsters

to his supposedly exclusive party, he also invited an ITN news crew.

The one we went to, held in a disused warehouse,

3,000 people turned up.

£5 to get in, 3,000 people. It's big money for the organisers.

At first, the press treated acid house as a refreshing change

from the traditional weekend booze-up.

Britain's bestselling newspaper, the Sun,

even came up with a rave-themed cash-in of its own.

"It's groovy and cool - it's our acid house T-shirt!

"Only £5.50, man."

But only five days later, amid reports of rampant drug-taking,

the Sun pulled off a spectacular U-turn.

Groovy and cool? Not a bit of it.

"Evil of ecstasy.

"Danger drug that is sweeping discos and ruining lives."

Acid house music has been described as a sinister and evil cult.

One person has died after taking ecstasy,

a drug associated with the music.

-It must affect the brain in some way.

-Unless it's just the music that does it.

All them lights flashing don't do you any good either, do it?

I wouldn't even go in a pub where them lights are.

-No, no.

-They drive you mad, don't they?

As the moral panic mounted and the police cracked down,

rave organisers began to evade the authorities by moving their parties

out of the cities and onto the fields and airstrips surrounding the new London orbital, the M25.

So, if you're on the way to a rave,

you'd set off and then, en route, you'd pull over at a petrol station

and you'd ring the number on your flyer.

And then, and only then,

would you be given the last-minute recorded instructions on how to find the party.

And then, armed with some suitable refreshments - bottle of water,

chewing gum - you get back in your car...

..swallow a pill...

Headache pill, naturally.

All those repetitive beats gave me a bit of a headache.

# I can feel it coming in the air tonight... #

..and head off into the night in search of your party.

Sometimes the only clue was a laser beam emanating from some farmer's field.

Soon, it really wasn't that hard to find your rave.

By the summer of 1989,

Tony Colston-Hayter's raves, with their state-of-the-art light shows

and enormous funfairs,

were attracting some 20,000 paying customers.

And now the enterprising mastermind behind these money-spinning raves

was invited onto prime-time TV,

where he proudly championed

the cause of a genuine teenage rebellion.

There's going to be a rebellion.

There is going to be... Eventually, the press and the authorities

and the government and general society will get the rebellion they want.

They want to have that youth... Hold on one second.

-Voice of rebellion, as you can tell.

-They want to have...

Sadly, neither Jonathan Ross nor his other guest,

the music journalist Paul Morley, seemed terribly impressed.

..Which has been used by the government...

-I can't listen to you with that hat on.

-Oh, come on!

-Get off!

It's pathetic. Get that hat off. Talk seriously.

Listen, calm down or they'll all be at home putting their Good Life videos on.

SHRIEKS

Hold it. You do that again, I'm going to thump you.

All right? And I'm not joking. So put it down and behave yourself.

APPLAUSE

-Listen...

-Thatcher's Britain...

-Thatcher's Britain indeed.

Paul Morley had certainly got the measure of Tony Colston-Hayter,

because in the hands of people like Colston-Hayter,

acid had been turned into a glossy, entrepreneurial product,

teenage hedonism repackaged as pure commercial entertainment.

"Maggie should be proud of us," Colston-Hayter once said.

"We're a product of her enterprise culture."

In 1987, another warehouse on the outskirts of Warrington

had become the venue for a much more enduring social revolution,

fuelled not by MDMA, but by MDF.

The revolution began one bright October morning,

spearheaded by a group of young men and women

wearing traditional Swedish dress

and trembling with nervous anticipation.

They really didn't know what was about to hit them.

You see, this was the opening of a new superstore

that was about to become a fixture of national life,

perhaps the ultimate symbol of our obsession with cheapness,

convenience and home improvement.

At the time, nobody had even heard of...

Well, how did you pronounce it?

Ick-EA? Eye-KEA?

And if you thought pronouncing the name was hard, well,

just wait until you try to put together the flat-pack furniture.

To Britain's traditional old-fashioned furniture stores,

the Swedish invaders represented a mortal challenge.

There's a new threat to the sluggish British market.

IKEA, the huge Swedish furnishing group,

has at last opened in Britain.

Its megastore in Warrington dwarfs anything we have here at the moment.

IKEA was more than just a retailer, it was a destination in itself.

You know, I'm not ashamed to admit that, on Saturday afternoons,

my brother and I used to persuade our parents to take us to the IKEA

in Wednesbury so that we could waste our pocket money on cheap

desk equipment that we didn't really need and would never use.

'So what can IKEA teach us about stimulating the urge for furniture?

'For one, it hands out 44 million free catalogues every year.

'Then there's the family atmosphere.

'Children get red-carpet treatment.'

Since opening his first store in Sweden in 1958,

Ingvar Kamprad's guiding principle

had been to create better everyday lives for the many people.

And IKEA did just that, offering families all over Britain

contemporary design at an astonishingly low price.

I remember finding the unpronounceable names almost impossibly glamorous.

Sore. What a great name for a lamp.

Nodvandig. That says bowl to me.

What better name for a cushion than

Tillfalle Fjadrar?

Although personally,

I always preferred a Gurli. Or perhaps a Mulig.

And while British designers were still peddling chintzy nostalgia,

IKEA's cool modernism represented something refreshingly daring.

And of course, what IKEA was selling wasn't really just furniture.

It was an aspirational European lifestyle,

because by buying your Varv,

you were identifying yourself as somebody who was ahead of the game,

a connoisseur of cutting-edge design.

But before you unveiled your new streamlined Swedish look,

you had to get to grips with, well,

minimalist instructions on how to assemble your new flat-pack chair.

'Your typical Swedish family man has two children,

'drives a Volvo and spends four times as much on furniture as the average Briton.'

'Oh, no. I hate the screws.

'Chances are he shops at IKEA and is a keen do-it-yourself-er.

'It took Anders Moberg ten minutes to put this chair together.'

It's sort of like that.

Ah! All my own work.

# What is love? #

But IKEA wasn't to everyone's taste.

And if there's one person that you can bet

would never have been seen dead squatting over

a Scandinavian flat pack, it was the Prime Minister.

Her decorative style was less European minimalism,

more Laura Ashley.

'Everything is in light-pastel shades.

'Mrs Thatcher hates dark colours.

'Chintzy, very British, very understated.'

# How do you say...gorgeous! #

And in this, as in so much else,

she remained adamant that British was best.

But in the same year IKEA opened in Britain,

work began on a major project that rather challenged Mrs Thatcher's

bulldog spirit...

..the Channel Tunnel, linking us directly to Europe for the first time.

In public, the Prime Minister was all for it.

It will be absolutely historic, and we hope on time.

But she was rather less enthusiastic at the thought of Britain becoming

just another Continental country.

We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the State

in Britain, only to see them reimposed at European level,

with a European superstate

exercising a new dominance from Brussels.

And of course, what IKEA represented was precisely Mrs Thatcher's

nightmare vision of a blandly uniform European Union.

After all, what IKEA were selling here in Warrington,

they were are also selling in every other European country.

Walk into an IKEA living room and you could be in Malmo,

you could be in Milan, you could be in Middlesbrough...

if you were really lucky.

# Young Parisians are so French

# They love Patti Smith... #

But despite Mrs Thatcher's reservations,

European taste was now all the rage.

# At the Champs-Elysees... #

And by the late '80s,

our high streets were awash with brasseries and bistros.

Merci.

Safely installed at your table,

you might even think yourself in the heart of gay Paris itself.

Time now to enjoy some of those seductively sophisticated luxuries

that advertisers have been telling you about.

Remember du pain, du vin, du Boursin?

# She is so witty, so pretty

# I may be a fool

# And the world can fall. #

Du pain, du vin, du Boursin.

-J'aime bien.

-Mm!

And who can ever forget the ads for that very finest of French wines?

Les Francais adore Le Piat d'Or.

In fact, far from adoring Le Piat d'Or,

the French have never actually heard of Le Piat d'Or.

But the admen would never let a little detail like that get in the way

because, to us in Britain, Frenchness meant elegance, glamour,

a certain je ne sais quoi.

But what if you didn't drink wine?

Well, for teetotallers, there was this refreshing alternative.

And now that the genie was out of the bottle,

Mrs Thatcher's hostility to Europe was looking decidedly passe.

And in 1989, Mrs Thatcher's dream of a proudly United Kingdom,

with its own distinctive customs and identity, came under attack,

not from across the Channel but from much closer to home,

because in that year she made Scotland a testing ground

for perhaps the most controversial policy of all.

She called it the community charge.

She made her ministers call it the community charge.

Nobody else called it the community charge.

They called it the poll tax.

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie.

MANY: Out! Out! Out!

THEY CHANT

Thousands of people have marched through the centre of Edinburgh to

demonstrate against the community charge,

or poll tax, which comes into effect in Scotland today.

Protesters turned out in force to dispel any doubts about the strength of feeling

against the community charge in Scotland.

10,000 were expected - nearly double that number came.

Never in modern times had any government initiative

driven such a wedge between the Westminster political elite

and ordinary people in Scotland.

They should have paid it first.

-Them in the south, where all the money is.

-I think it's the most...

..terrible tax since the days of William the Bastard.

It's a shambles, you know. We shouldn't be paying it at all.

The poll tax inflamed Scottish opinion

and gave an overnight boost to the Scottish National Party,

then a fairly marginal force.

And the SNP seized on the protests as a way of whipping up local support.

We can't pay, we won't pay and we must not pay.

We can win, we will win, because we must win.

Over the next few months, the SNP whipped up public outrage,

encouraging thousands of people to set fire to their poll tax demands.

Why, they asked, should Scotland be used as a laboratory by a government

for which most Scots have never voted,

a government that barely seemed to know that Scotland even existed?

What is Scotland?

Erm, it's that island off the Falklands, isn't it?

No, no, no, Scotland! It's that place up north.

North? North... Refresh my memory, Hurd.

Here!

Oh, you mean the testing ground.

-Oh, my God, yes.

-DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS

Now, the irony is that Mrs Thatcher

actually thought that she was doing the Scots a favour.

She launched the poll tax a year earlier in Scotland

to please the local Tories, who were increasingly worried

about public hostility to the old rates.

She genuinely thought this was going to be a fairer system,

one based on people rather than on property.

So, if there were ten people living in the street, she thought,

they all used council services,

and so they should all face the same charge.

But up and down the country,

millions of ordinary people saw things rather differently.

How can they justify that the Sultan of Oman,

who lives in a £10 million mansion,

he is only going to pay about £800,

my sister and I live in a mobile home and we're going to pay,

twice, about £477?

-THEY CHANT:

-No poll tax!

No poll tax!

By the summer of 1990,

the poll tax had been introduced in England and Wales,

and now even the Tory heartland of Windsor and Maidenhead

was in open revolt.

Will you be paying the community charge?

-No.

-No.

-There is no way.

No way.

That means that you may be taken to court, you may end up in jail.

Very well, we'll go to court and we'll end up in jail.

If they so dare.

MUSIC: Step On by the Happy Mondays

The protests reached a violent climax in Trafalgar Square

on 31st March 1990.

'There's been serious rioting in central London.

'More than 100 people have been injured after

'a mass demonstration against the poll tax ended in violence.'

The '80s had seen more than their fair share of urban riots,

but nothing like this.

This wasn't a deprived inner-city neighbourhood,

this was the centre of the nation's capital

on a sunny Saturday afternoon, turned into a bloody battlefield.

But if the poll tax riots had come as a shock,

many people feared that even worse was to come.

# Rule Britannia Britannia rules the waves

# Britain never, never, never shall be slaves

# England! #

MUSIC: U Can't Touch This by MC Hammer

Because only two months later,

thousands of young Englishmen were on their way to Italy

to cheer on their heroes in the 1990 World Cup.

'England's notorious band of followers on the road again,

'carrying their own brand of nationalism to a city

'that has every reason to

'be wary of those who follow English football.'

Throughout the 1980s, England's fans had disgraced themselves

at one international tournament after another,

causing Mrs Thatcher great embarrassment, and turning

English football into our most shameful national export.

'England's walking wounded were back on the training ground today.'

And as the players prepared for their opening games,

the pressure could hardly have been greater,

not least from the British press,

who treated the early performances with withering scorn.

But in the youngest member of the squad,

England's manager Bobby Robson had found a rare jewel -

Paul Gascoigne, a rough diamond from the industrial north-east.

A bit of a clown...

LAUGHTER

..but a breath of fresh air in a game that, for more than a decade,

had been blighted by violence.

And all of a sudden, armed with a remarkably good official song,

England began to look like world beaters.

# Express yourself

# It's one on one

# Express yourself

# It's one on one... #

England, Egypt - 1-0.

England, Belgium - 1,0,

with a goal in the last minute of extra time.

England, Cameroon, 2-1 down, with seven minutes to go,

final score 3-2 to England.

And now, almost out of nowhere, England were in the semifinals.

90 minutes from destiny, 90 minutes from a place in the World Cup final,

and the only thing standing in our way, the old enemy, the Germans.

'Those are the England players

'who walk out for the most important match

'our international team have played since 1966.'

26 million people were watching that night,

with thousands congregating in pubs to cheer on the boys in white.

MUSIC: Nessun Dorma by Luciano Pavarotti

'Deflected...'

The Germans went flukily ahead.

England came fighting back.

-'And it's gone in!'

-Yes!

THEY CHEER

'Oh, dear.'

But then, famously, poor old Gazza

picked up a yellow card that ruled him out of the final,

and promptly burst into tears.

And all over England, eyes welled up.

At last, with the score still 1-1,

it was down to a penalty shootout.

And we all know what happened next.

Oddly enough, though, the result of that game hardly mattered,

although it certainly didn't feel that way at the time,

because I think that night, 4th July 1990,

was a transformative moment in our modern cultural history.

In one evening, English football threw off its reputation

as the game of thugs and hooligans

and was reborn as pure spectacle,

appealing to young and old, rich and poor, men and women alike.

And today, England's Premier League is not just

the most watched sporting league anywhere in the world,

it's one our most successful exports of any kind,

a gigantic carousel of money and melodrama.

By the time the team returned home, disappointed but undaunted,

Gazza-mania was in full swing.

But while England's footballers were now national heroes,

reborn in the eyes of an adoring public,

the Prime Minister's popularity was in freefall.

Britain is in serious recession,

and business confidence is at its lowest level for ten years

according to the Confederation of British Industry.

The mid-'80s boom had long since burst,

the economy was sliding into recession,

and the poll tax had eaten away at Mrs Thatcher's support.

And to make matters worse, the lady herself seemed to be

turning into her Spitting Image puppet.

We have become a grandmother

of a grandson

called Michael.

Nothing lasts for ever.

And now her fall from grace became the premise of one

of the most gripping TV dramas of the decade.

Even the longest,

the most glittering reign

must come to an end some day.

House Of Cards was written by Michael Dobbs,

who had previously been a special adviser for Mrs Thatcher,

and the audience loved it.

No TV drama had ever exposed with such relish

the medieval intrigue and Byzantine backstabbing at the heart

of the Palace of Westminster,

or what the real Prime Minister

called "the treachery and hypocrisy" of her assassins,

and certainly no drama has ever been better timed,

because at exactly the moment that the first episode went out,

Mrs Thatcher's own ministers were sharpening their knives to strike.

The crucial faultline was Europe...

..for, by now, Mrs Thatcher was making no secret of her hostility

to European integration.

The President of the Commission, Mr Delors,

said at a press conference the other day that he wanted

the European Parliament to be the democratic body of the Community,

he wanted the Commission to be the Executive,

and he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the Senate.

No. No. No.

Two days later, Sir Geoffrey Howe, previously her most loyal associate,

walked out in protest,

and in his resignation speech,

Sir Geoffrey delivered a devastating blow.

The tragedy is - and it is for me personally,

for my party, for our whole people,

and for my Right Honourable Friend herself, a very real tragedy -

that the Prime Minister's perceived attitude towards Europe is running

increasingly serious risks for the future of our nation.

Margaret Thatcher had always defined herself through conflict,

but the end came not on the political battlefield,

but in the dead of night,

behind the walls of the bunker

as, one by one, her assassins trooped in to see her.

Many of them had agreed their line beforehand -

she been a great Prime Minister, they said,

of course they'd support her,

but she couldn't win.

Better to go now, to fall on her sword.

"It was treachery", she said later, "with a smile on its face."

Mrs Thatcher's years of power are over.

She resigns to make way for...

Ladies and gentlemen,

we are leaving Downing Street for the last time

after 11-and-a-half wonderful years,

and we're very happy that we leave the United Kingdom

in a very, very much better state

than when we came here 11-and-a-half years ago.

MUSIC: There She Goes by The La's

There were tears in Mrs Thatcher's eyes when she left Number 10.

Gazza, the Iron Lady - it had been quite a year for public sobbing.

But the truth is that Britain at the end of the 1980s really wasn't

the country that Mrs Thatcher had set out to build

more than a decade earlier.

She sought to unleash our entrepreneurial spirit...

..but she saw us plunge into a dizzying whirl

of financial speculation.

She talked of restoring Victorian values,

but she saw a generation seduced by hedonistic individualism,

and she tried to hold back the tide of European integration,

only to see us embrace all things Continental like never before.

The reason, of course, is that things rarely turn out quite

as the politicians think they will.

Now, it's true that no other prime minister has ever left an imprint

quite like Margaret Thatcher,

and certainly none has ever been so controversial,

and perhaps I should put my cards on the table.

I think she carried out some much-needed and long-overdue reforms,

although at often far too high a human cost.

But you know where the real story of the '80s was decided?

Not in Number 10 Downing Street, but in number 10 right here,

and number 9 and number 11,

and in millions of other number 9s and number 10s

all over the country.

You see, the politicians don't make our history, we do.

And if the world we live in today is the world the '80s made,

then we've only got ourselves to blame.

Or to thank. I quite liked the '80s.

# I got love for you if you were born in the eighties

# The eighties

# I've got hugs for you if you were born in the eighties

# The eighties

# I'll do things for you if you were born in the eighties

# The eighties. #