The Rules of Drinking Timeshift

# Drink, drink, drink

# To eyes that are bright as stars when they're shining on me

# To the drink, drink, drink... #

It's the magic liquid that unlocks the door to the human heart.

In celebration, in commiseration, for hatches,

matches and dispatches, most of us to reach for alcohol of some kind.

# May those lips that are red... #

The fundamental truth of drinking that goes back

to the dawn of humanity is that alcohol lowers social inhibitions,

makes us feel more benign and makes us feel better about ourselves.

# Drink, drink, drink... #

-I drink, I drink like a fish.

-Isn't that a drug?

-No.

Oh, no. A drop of beer does you good, mate, keeps you fit.

Our relationship with drink

is so deep-seated we've developed a set of unwritten codes

and rituals which govern every aspect of the way we consume it.

You're not supposed be drinking double whiskies on a Wednesday

night in the club, that's what you do on New Year's Eve.

There's a time for port, and a time for sherry, and a time for champagne

and a time for a gin fizz.

Over the centuries, these checks and balances have changed and grown.

At times, they've been pushed to the limit.

Brandy and Babycham is easily like a Molotov cocktail.

Folk speak Spanish

and don't remember their life after brandy and Babycham.

# All I ask is the right to see... #

This is the story of a nation with a deep love of rules,

and an even bigger love of drink.

When the two collide, strange things happen that define us

more than we'd like to think.

# Drink, drink, drink to lovers To lonely sweethearts, let's drink! #

MUSIC: The Lambeth Walk

In 1945, after six years at war,

Britain could celebrate victory in Europe.

Never was there a greater excuse for a good drink.

I think if we were to say travel back to Britain the morning after

VE or VJ Day and hope to drink the way we do now,

we'd be sadly disappointed.

There wasn't much around to drink.

The little beer that was available was weak.

Pubs often ran out of beer.

People were drinking a third of what they had done before World War One.

They were drinking a quarter of what the French drank at the same time.

The 10-15 years after the war were not great for the drinker.

Pubs were either bombed out, or if they were still in business,

there was no money or materials to renovate or refurbish them.

A lot of beers have been lost altogether.

If breweries were bombed, you've lost the recipe and that was it.

Pubs were not the warm, welcoming social places they had been before.

Britain has always been a nation of drinkers,

with plenty around to quench the thirst.

In the Middle Ages, beer was even preferred to water

as it was less likely to contain dangerous bacteria.

But in the early 20th century, a series of dramatic curbs

were placed on alcohol, starting at the outbreak of the Great War.

In the First World War, drink was seen as an enemy.

Drink was going to make workers work less hard,

the drunkenness was a real threat to worker efficiency,

and also morale, so during the First World War drink was restricted.

Beer and spirits were taxed and the price of whisky increased fivefold.

Pub licensing hours were reduced to just five and a half hours per day.

And things very nearly went much further.

We came within a hair's breadth

of total prohibition of alcohol in the UK.

It was only the perceived threat of communist revolution

in places like Glasgow and Liverpool that prevented

total prohibition of beer,

because they thought it would be the final straw that caused revolution.

By the Second World War, the lesson had been learned

that actually access to pubs and drink was a positive

in terms of morale, so people were encouraged.

Churchill, himself a heavy drinker,

realised the importance of the role alcohol had to play.

The troops serving abroad, Churchill personally mandated

that every fighting man, wherever he was in the world, had a ration

of eight pints of beer per week before anybody at home got a drop.

Arriving home after the war,

troops were shocked to find the stock cupboards looking rather bare.

Rationing meant there was little grain to make beer, and what whisky

there was being sold abroad to help pay off Britain's debts.

They might make the stuff and they like it,

but they, like other people in the British Isles, find it hard to get,

and it rolls up a large credit to Britain abroad.

As rebuilding the country got underway in the 1950s,

supplies of beer started to come through.

Good thing too. The workers were developing quite a thirst.

People wanted to have a good time. They were fed up with the hard times.

They were fed up with making do and not having any entertainment.

And in many ways, clubs stepped into that role.

# I love you, my rose I love you... #

The central part of what went on in working men's clubs was drinking.

As the night wore on and you had a half, or another half,

then people would get loosened up.

# For my one sweet Jane. #

APPLAUSE

Working men's clubs had been inspired

by the gentlemen's clubs of the 19th century.

But, initially, drinking was never part of the plan.

You had well-meaning clergymen and philanthropists setting up

the working men's club movement for working men and the idea there

was that this would be a place of education, a place for stimulation,

a place to kind of bring people on and turn them

into more rounded, healthy citizens.

But you can't pull the wool over people's eyes.

These working men would join these clubs, and say,

"So, right. We're a club?"

"That means we can have a club licence,

"like the private members' clubs? OK, we'll do that."

So what had started as an attempt to broaden minds,

had been seized on as an opportunity to drink.

In this Horton club,

they told me they took £2,000 over the bar during one recent holy day.

At a shilling a pint, that's 40,000 pints in one day.

The reason they drink so much is because they work down the mines.

I don't know if you've been down a mine, but I have.

I was down about a year ago and I was absolutely scared stiff

and when I was down there,

you get all the dirt and grime into your throat.

On when you come back up, the first thing you want is something

to drink and obviously you don't want to drink water,

so they have a wash and they want to go out to a pub

and have a drink of beer, you see.

A trip to the club was part of every working day,

and twice a day at weekends.

After a shift at the factory or shipyard, the working man

would go home to have his tea with the family and then off to the club.

Once you've stepped inside a working man's club,

you're almost expected to have a drink.

There was pressure on you to drink.

And it was almost you were shunning the company

if you didn't have a drink.

But this was drinking in moderation,

and it was heavily ritualistic with numerous unspoken rules and codes.

You learned that perhaps people could drink a bit more if it was

a special celebration, a birthday or a wedding, or something like that.

You also learnt, in a working man's club, if you ever went beyond that,

if they were drinking too much, or the wrong type of drink

on the wrong occasion, that they weren't long for the club.

They would be thrown out.

You're not supposed to be drinking double whiskies on a Wednesday night

in the club, that's what you do on New Year's Eve.

It's the wrong time, or the wrong time of day.

So you learned that there were certain rules and regulations.

I had a lovely story from one man who grew up in a place like this,

and the more mature men who sort of quietly ruled the place

would drink on a carpeted part of the bar, and the younger drinkers,

the trainee drinkers, had to stand on the lino which wasn't as nice.

And this bloke was telling me about the time

he was called over by the men drinking on the carpets,

"Just come over here, I want to ask you something."

They asked, "While you're here, let me get you a pint."

And that was his transition, his right of passage.

He was now one of the carpet drinkers, with the mature guys,

and his more childish mates were left on the lino, crestfallen,

and had to wait a lot longer before they made that transition.

In pubs, the unspoken rules were no less strict.

They even extended to the dress code.

We had a pub on almost every street corner and it's where

all the men, at the weekend, turned up in dark suits, straight out

the factories and into their suit and into the pub

and then smoked hundreds of cigarettes and drank hundreds,

and we weren't allowed to go in there, because it was

a really bad social stigma if you had a child standing outside a pub.

But as a trick, my friends used to open the door and throw me in,

and I would tumble in amongst all these men in dark suits

and my dad would roar when he saw me.

You got picked up and thrown back out.

But just the memory of being in there and the smells

and that whole atmosphere, and smell of smoke and beer and murmuring,

that background noise.

I was fascinated.

# So, set 'em up, Joe

# I got a little story you want to know

I remember my mum ironing his trousers.

"It's Friday night, your Dad's gone to the pub!" And he dressed smart,

and all his friends dressed smart as well,

so I think it was a kind of social, we've worked all week,

and this is us in civilian clothing now and we can relax

and talk about men things, and football,

and drink until we can't stand up and then sing some Frank Sinatra songs

and wander home.

That's the plan.

# So make it one for my baby

# And one more for the road

# That long, long road. #

While the working man's routine revolved around a pint of beer

or perhaps the odd whisky, on the other side of the social divide,

the choice of drinks was much wider.

My father was never a pub man. They would go to drink parties.

They would drink martinis.

They would make martinis in a jug, a glass jug.

They seemed to have them seven parts gin, one part vermouth.

They would get quite sloshed on martinis is my memory.

The higher you ascended the scale, the more diverse the range

of drinks was likely to be, until you came to the aristocracy

who had cellars full of French wine and a drink for every occasion.

A time for port, and a time for sherry, and a time for champagne

and a time for a gin fizz.

Lynette is 19 and a debutante.

She's giving this party in a friend's flat. Her own's too small.

Lynette enjoys parties.

Oh yes, I love parties, but not too many, of course,

because one does get a bit blase, so they say.

And I must admit one speaks the most enormous amount of drivel.

For all the great variety of drinks,

the established rules of drinking were still very traditional.

But things were changing.

When the austerity years came to an end and people

started drinking again, they began to do so in slightly different patterns.

We could call it a great deal of social mobility in drinking.

People started experimenting and drinking different things.

So not only did levels of consumption recover,

but the things which people did consume also began to change.

# Hey, mambo! Mambo Italiano!

# Go, go, go, you mixed-up Siciliano

# All you Calabriase, do the mambo like-a crazy. #

Cocktail bars serving the punches, sours and slings,

seen in the movies, started springing up in larger cities.

# Hey mambo! Mambo Italiano!

# Try an enchilada with-a the fishy bacalan

# Hey, goombah, I love-a how you dance the rumba

# But take-a some advice, paisano, learn-a how to mambo,

# If you're gonna be a square, you ain't-a gonna go nowhere.

# Hey, mambo! Mambo Italiano! #

And bistros offering them exotic food

served with a charming splash of Mediterranean eccentricity.

# When you Mambo Italiano. #

But alcohol had other more rebellious uses.

For the beatniks, it was a potent symbol of their non-conformity

with the familiar order of Fifties Britain.

You'll see it in the sort of Soho painters and writers

who inhabited that circle,

that they all seemed to be exploring the darker side of drinking.

Drinking for oblivion, drinking to forget.

Drinking to see how far down and

how much they can demean themselves, as much as drinking in the good

old-fashioned sense that one gets a rosy hue around the drinkers

and it comes into a magic circle of drunkenness.

Making a challenge of his own, but for very different reasons,

was the young, working-class man.

# I can't get no satisfaction

He'd been told he'd never had it so good, but even in this time

of full employment, that didn't feel good enough.

You know, the work had come, people had money in their pockets,

but what had come wasn't the promised Land of Hope and Glory

that the war had been fought for.

We see the young workers beginning to get the fruits of his labours.

It's very much a new generation

from those who gave themselves in sacrifice in the war.

We can please ourselves exactly when we work

and when we don't want to work.

That's the best sort of life. Do what you want, be your own gaffer.

You'll never get me working for a boss.

We don't want no-one forcing us out of bed and having to clock in

and all that game.

We like to work when we feel like working.

The old order of hard work and moderate drinking

handed down from generation to generation was now being rejected.

And we begin to see a new sort of drinking,

they seem to drink in quite a negative way.

They would go out and have their 10 pints on a Friday night

and drink to escape from their work,

as opposed to celebrate life in general.

Whatever men were using the pub for, it was very much their world.

# This is a man's world

# This is a man's world

# But it wouldn't be nothing, nothing,

# Without a woman or a girl. #

Despite frequenting pubs during the war,

women were now being made much less welcome.

They were allowed in, but only under certain terms and conditions.

I think women in pubs were accepted initially

when they were there with their men.

If the man is a regular, and he brings his wife in,

probably on a Saturday night.

When I was growing up, Friday night was when you went out with the lads,

and Saturday night was when you went out with the missus.

And there were rules about it.

And if you went in on your own, as a woman, I think

there would have been raised eyebrows and quite probably some harassment.

Once inside a pub - with her husband, of course - the female

drinker would be expected to stay in her clearly designated area.

# Message understood. #

The pub itself was split into different sections.

Standing at the bar was largely a male preserve.

Men tended to order drinks at the bar.

Women tended to sit,

and they certainly won't go into the vault, which was the men's area.

And in some pubs today you still see evidence, the evidence of those

different parts of the bar, the different uses of pubs.

But there was one area of the pub which women could call their own.

Every pub then, and I remember it clearly, had a snug,

or an off-licence as it was called, which is where the women went.

It was basically a glass door that had stripes on it, and you open that

door, and there was no seat and there was a bench where the barman

would come and sell you drink to take away.

Some pubs in Glasgow didn't even have a ladies' toilet.

Because there was no need for one to be there.

And I used to go with my mum into the off-licence, the snug bit,

and I would try to peer over and see all the men drinking

and she would get a couple of cans of Sweethearts Stout, because it

had the word "sweetheart" in it, so that was OK for women to drink.

Yet attitudes were slowly changing.

And as women ventured into the pub a little more,

so the pubs started making an effort to accommodate them.

And the results? Carpets, upholstered comfort,

wood carvings, coquetry.

For feminine scenes of civilisation.

In working men's clubs, it was a different matter altogether.

Rules being rules, women were by no means guaranteed membership,

even in the Sixties.

Working men's clubs, as in the name, were for men. Right from the word go.

But even from the word go there was always a debate about

whether women should be allowed in.

Mr Chairman, I'm strongly against the admittance of women

as members to this club.

And some clubs just simply said no, no women at all.

I'm quite definite about that.

Others decided and eventually changed their minds,

and said we'll let them in, but only on certain days

and they have to be accompanied by their father or their husband.

So there were constant negotiations.

It's got to go. This old archaic system whereby the man is the lord,

and the woman the docile servant.

Surely Horton Working's Club will go

and we'll have a Horton Social Institute where a woman

is on the same equality and same lines as a man.

And some women did manage to get in. In some clubs, it was allowed,

but there was always limitations.

Once we have lady members in this club, we will have no rights

at all, unless we make a bylaw to keep them out of the bar.

Some places would say they could come in the club

and sit in that room, but they can't come in this room.

Well, we used to sit in the ladies room, drinking and we were

very lonely and the men were all in the bar, so we decided we'd form

a ladies' darts team, and ever since it's been a great success.

-One ton!

-Ooh, well done, Ethel!

Now that women were becoming more accepted in pubs and clubs,

there was the small matter of what they should drink.

Women became a commercial target audience as they started

to enter the workplace and started to earn a bit of independence

and money of their own, they became a target.

So, for example, lager brewers who had failed time

and time again to get men interested in lager said, "Right,

we'll spend millions advertising lager as a woman's drink,

and there were all these ads for things like Carling Black Label

with slogans like, "A blonde for a blonde" - talking down to women.

Then, of course, lager created a rod for their own back,

because when they decided they wanted to sell it to men,

men said it was an effeminate drink,

so they had to spend more money saying,

"No, it wasn't a drink for women, Don't know where you got that idea!"

I think the interesting thing about women's relationship to drink

is the women are far more adventurous than men.

Men, when they go out to drink,

and this is a massive generalisation, but on the whole there tends

to be that idea that men will drink beer or lager or maybe,

if they're feeling a little bit frisky, they might have a Guinness.

Whereas women are going to drink a whole range of drinks potentially.

They might be drinking red or white wine,

might be having a whisky and Coke.

There is that sense that the female market is a market where

you can introduce completely new,

sometimes completely mad, drink items.

It's women who might drink the new things such as Taboo or Mirage.

You might have a Snowball, which was this wonderful,

yucky yellow drink in a round glass with a fake cherry on top.

Pints and pints of eggnog.

-Campari.

-A rum and black.

-Babycham.

-Babycham.

Babycham, a pear champagne, or perry, was created

by a Somerset businessman trying to ferment fruit juice.

It had crept onto the market in the late 1950s.

Helped by sophisticated television advertising, by the 1960s,

bottles were selling by the million.

I guess the drink that was famous at the time was Babycham.

Certainly my aunty used to drink it

from my earliest memories.

So she must have been drinking it in the Sixties.

I remember Babycham been derided as quite a comical drink,

I guess because it was marketed specifically to women

and it had a cartoon deer on the front,

but when you pour it out now and have it as a perry,

and against other perries, because that's making a comeback,

it's actually quite a decent drink.

WOMAN: Babycham! I'd love a Babycham!

The aesthetics of drinking, or of drink, is quite interesting.

The Babycham glass, the Babycham itself, it looks beautiful.

And it's delicate.

If you ever come across those Babycham glasses today,

you'll see they're smaller than you would think.

Smaller than the classic, wide-open champagne glasses.

They're really, really dinky.

And it is their dinkiness alongside the fact that they

are relatively low alcohol, which I think makes them a woman's drink.

# Summertime is with us once again... #

Soon the meagre choice of drinks that Britain had got used to

would change beyond recognition.

# And the cold days of winter are behind us now

# And that the spring time promises all come true. #

The availability of cheap package holidays meant the average man

and woman was now exposed to an abundance of new drinking delight

previously afforded only to the upper classes, in particular, wine.

In the Sixties, when people began to travel abroad,

it changed their views on drinking.

Prior to that, they had only been used to what they saw in Britain,

quite a simple choice of drinks.

Once they got over the Channel and into the continent,

and saw where drinking was much more of a unisexual activity,

people of all ages, and all status, drinking wine,

this changed their attitudes

and they tried to bring it back home with them.

MUSIC AND CLAPPING

Back home, television allowed these new travellers to be bombarded

with adverts promising a taste of the exotica they'd just glimpsed.

# Any time, any place, anywhere

# There's a wonderful taste you can share

# In the right one, the right one

# That's Martini. #

But some aspects of this foreign invasion had more to do

with the Cold War than sunny holidays.

Some of the influence on wine-drinking didn't come

from carefree holiday makers, but from the vast amount of troops

and their families stationed in Germany.

So the first wine market outside let's say the traditional claret,

burgundy-drinking squires and politicians,

had been the troops and their wives who were exposed

to the much weaker, more floral, sweeter, German wines.

One thinks of the later adverts for Blue Nun and Black Tower.

Tonight, I've remembered everything.

I remember Lucy was coming round for a cosy evening

in front of the telly.

I remembered the little eats.

Supper in the oven, phone off the hook,

and, of course, the Black Tower.

Definitely a German white wine worth remembering.

Wunderbar, as they say.

And my guest on Friday Night Live, Leslie Phillips!

Leslie?!

Whatever you forget, don't forget The Black Tower.

LESLIE?!

By the arrival of the 1970s we were becoming much more relaxed

about how we were drinking.

And now there was more choice, everyone could enjoy a bit more.

Then, there was George Best.

MUSIC: "Whisky in the Jar" by Thin Lizzy

Best was the first celebrity footballer, but he would become

as famous for his drinking as for his wizardry on the field.

He came from a family who were steeped in alcohol.

His mother was an alcoholic and died of the disease.

He's seen it around him as a kid.

He'd come from the Protestant area of East Belfast

where there was a lot of drinking.

When he got more money

than he, or almost anyone else in the country had ever dreamed of,

when he got the adulation,

when he got the screaming girls, he didn't know how to cope with it.

And we have to be sympathetic here.

There were no rules. How would you cope with it?

# Wait for my daddy-o

# There's whiskey in the jar-o... #

In 1972, aged just 25,

Best walked out on his Manchester United team-mates

and decamped to Marbella.

There he participated in the sort of drinking

which would one day be his undoing.

By his own admission, he would wake up mid-morning,

have a couple of shandies - this was purely, as he put it,

just to clear his head.

Then as the morning drew on, he would have little wine,

then as lunchtime drew further on,

he would have quite a few beers.

Then, as you do, he would go and sleep it off,

waking up just in time for the afternoon,

where this fantastic athlete would then go onto the hard stuff,

ie vodka,

which at the time was his favourite spirit,

and he'd go to bars frequented by tourists.

Ironically, because he was quiet drunk, a functioning alcoholic,

he's get regularly, repeatedly, annoyed by the drunken antics

of his fellow bar-dwellers.

So, he'd go back to his hotel,

ironically called The Skull Hotel, in Marbella,

and he would go to their cocktail bar where he would have a few nightcaps.

George Beat's downfall would prove great business on Fleet Street,

feeding an ever-hungry print media.

# Show me the way

# To the next whisky bar

# Oh, don't ask why

# Oh, don't ask why

# Show me the way

# To the next whisky bar

# Oh, don't ask why... #

With circulation through the roof and expense accounts to match,

journalists, not adverse to the odd snifter themselves,

went out drinking to epic proportions.

# I tell you we must die,

# I tell you

# I tell you

I tell you we must die... #

Fleet Street was boozy

and the whole notion of the long lunch

was not something that was made up.

People would disappear at one and not come back till four,

or not come back at all, and people would have two bottles of wine,

three bottles of wine over lunch, plus...a martini,

plus a gin and tonic, plus a something to get going on

and people would then more or less drink through the day.

In the newspaper world, or any media world,

there are a fantastic amount of functions and events

that kick off around 6, 6.30,

so you could just more or less barrel on into them.

I can remember quite a lot of days

where I'd be slightly sloshed more or less from one onwards.

It was a hugely drinking culture.

You look back and you think, how did people get any work done?

There's a lovely epigram in Ancient Greece which is that,

"If a man sticks to drinking water, he'll never write anything wise,

"but wine is a horse upon asses

"which carries the bard to the skies."

For those working on Fleet Street

like the celebrated journalist James Cameron,

dinking wasn't considered a luxury but a prerequisite for work.

I find drinking a certain amount is a necessary corollary to working.

There must be a chemical factor involved in this, I daresay.

I mean, I'm by no means a lush,

but I know that if I suddenly find myself with a job to do

in a hell of a hurry and I haven't got a drink, I'm in dead stuchk.

I think that anyone who writes and likes a drink

creates a romantic relationship

between alcohol consumption and creativity.

I see it terms of a graph

of creativity versus alcohol consumption

and there's a band in this graph where you hit creative heights

after you've been loosened up by a few drinks.

You think, I'll keep it going,

and you push it too far out the other end, drink too much,

and you've lost it, you can't write anything.

Journalists would go to extraordinary lengths

to keep the creative juices flowing.

It seems nothing could keep the hack from his pint.

Drinking in Northern Ireland during the Troubles

was a trial and a test

for the most hardened boozer, quite frankly.

I remember once being in a hotel at the bar on the first floor

and two masked men came in, as they did in those days,

and planted something on the bar and said,

"You've got half an hour to get out,"

which was how they did it then.

And I said, "Oh, we've got time for another pint of Guinness."

I looked up and the barmaid had gone,

as you might imagine, so there was no other pint of Guinness.

In fact, it was an hour and a half before the pub blew up,

so I would have had time for two or three more pints.

Pushing the excesses of Fleet Street's consumption levels

to the limit was the Spectator journalist, Jeffrey Bernard.

His column tracing his own alcoholic exploits

was described by another writer as,

"A suicide note in weekly instalments."

I pour myself a drink, which seems to lubricate the typewriter,

and it certainly makes me feel less inhibited.

It was probably abut 1975, I think, that I met Jeffrey

and we used to...

I was drinking pretty heavily by then.

I was drinking a lot of whisky, lot of spirits, lot of vodka.

Um...

I think it takes one to know one and we both recognised in each other

that we liked drinking,

we liked drinking pretty seriously, and we used to go drinking.

Large vodka and orange, please.

It was a ferocious drinking club culture

in which Jeffrey was an extraordinary character

because, despite the level of the drinking,

he still managed to write his column for the Spectator

and he still managed to be a genius.

I tried to get all my work done by 11.

There are always deadlines to meet

and I make mine opening time, whatever the editors may say.

There's a sense of urgency about lunchtime drinking that I like.

In the evening, people are just plundering time.

If I arrive at the Coach & Horses at 12 and not 11,

Tom Baker tells me that I'm late for work.

I think most people lead lives of such annihilating boredom,

paralysed by the awfulness of life,

that being in an alehouse drinking with a few acquaintances

and talking a load of rubbish half the time is a tremendous relief.

It's marginally less worse than not being, I suppose.

Yeah. Most people are bored out of their minds, aren't they?

Like Jeffrey Bernard, the dark extremes of heavy drinking

would lead his friend, Rosie Boycott, into alcoholism.

I was a heavy drinker, I liked to drink,

I liked to drink with the boys, I liked getting drunk, actually.

I liked the feeling of getting drunk.

But then, as the years went by, the drink got the upper hand on me

and it was no longer me running the drink, it was the drink running me.

I started to have blackouts, I smashed my car once,

I ended up in some very difficult compromising positions

and then I went into a treatment centre.

In the House of Commons,

professional drinking of another kind was taking place.

Here the combination of alcohol and power proved a heady mixture,

lubricating the kind of political gaffes

the Westminster press lobby was only too happy to write up.

Chris Moncrieff is the chief lobby correspondent

of the Press Association, Britain's national news agency

that supplies stories to virtually every newspaper

and radio and television station in Britain.

You know, if you needed to interview an MP,

a couple of pints of beer would always loosen him up, soften him up,

and very often if I needed quotes late at night,

I would go down to one of the more rowdy bars in the House of Commons,

because I'd know that by 11 or midnight

a lot of the MPs would be, excuse the phrase,

pie-eyed and they would pretty well say anything you wanted them to say.

It was really like taking candy from kids.

I suppose I should be ashamed of it, but I'm not.

I once went down late at night to the Strangers Bar

to get a quote and this chap came out.

He gave me a quote on whatever it was.

I filed it and went home, that was about midnight.

I got phoned up about three or four in the morning by this self-same MP.

He said, "Did we have a conversation last night?"

I said, "Well, yes, we did."

He said, "I've had the BBC on, they want me to go on

"as a result of some quote that appeared on the PA.

"They want me to go on the Today programme."

I said, "Oh, good."

He said, "Can you actually - sorry about this - remind me

"what I was talking about and what the subject was?"

So, I told him and he said, "Could you also just remind me

"what my view is on this matter, please?"

And he went on and was a hit.

Hello? Anybody at home?

Of course, you didn't need to be at work to have a glass at your side.

A new explosion in entertaining at home was now under way.

Be an angel, could you, gin and bitter lemon?

And it wasn't just the middle classes enjoying this.

Everyone was benefiting from easy access to an abundance of alcohol.

'If you can't pop out to the off-licence,

'why not let the off-licence pop out to you?

'Enjoy your drinks at home the Davenports way.

'There's magnificent beers -

'they should be, we've been brewing them for over 130 years -

'and wines, spirits, pop and squash,

'all at the right sort of prices and brought direct to your door.'

Homes are just nicer places to spend time

and entertaining your friends in your home

is increasingly something that you want to do.

You've got a nice house, you want to have people round to your house,

you will entertain them by feeding them and providing alcohol.

The idea of having a drinks cabinet

so that when people come round to your house

you don't just have a rogue bottle of wine

that you happened to have got from the supermarket that day,

you've got a range of items which you can offer somebody

according to their taste.

The pretensions of the home drinks cabinet

were excruciatingly satirised

in Mike Leigh's comedy of manners, Abigail's Party.

-Would you like a drink?

-Yes, please.

-What would you like?

-Bacardi and coke, please.

-Ice and lemon?

-Yes, please.

-Great. Angela?

-Have you got gin?

-Gin and tonic?

-Please.

-Ice and lemon?

-Yes, please.

Great. Laurence, would you like to get the drinks, please?

Tony would like a Bacardi and coke

with ice and lemon,

Angela would like gin and tonic with ice and lemon

-and I'd like a little fill-up. OK?

-Fine.

-Thanks.

Not all drinking at home was quite so aspirational, though.

Women started to drink more in the house,

and there would be a women's drinking party

and my mum and her friends would come round

and they would bring cans of beer

and then they would sing

really sad, sad...

# A man broke my heart... #

Those songs. And I used to think,

"There must be happy songs. Abba's... Sing an Abba song." "No."

It all had to be... # He broke...

# Cos I'm crazy for feeling so blue. #

And the woman sang these maudlin, sad, sad songs.

There was one wee women I remember. She got up and sang...

# Beneath the snowy mantle far away... #

And all the women went, "There'd better be a death in this song."

While the women were at home, the men were out,

together, watching football and drinking.

We would catch the train

and we would arrive, as much as we could,

to places in time for opening time.

Then we would drink, quite heavily,

not so much me, cos I was more there as a mascot.

I was much younger than them

and certainly not the hardy drinker that the guys I was going with were.

And for two, three, four hours before the match,

they would drink steadily.

They'd go to the game. At the game, it was possible

to buy alcohol in most grounds in those days.

Then we would return. There would be drinking on the train,

and if we weren't travelling too far away, we'd get back in time

for last orders and have a couple of nightcaps.

And much like the unwritten codes of male drinking 30 years earlier,

here, the young were being guided by the old.

Going on these football trips was a fantastic rite of passage.

It introduced me to drink in quite a gentle way.

I personally was always looked after.

I was not allowed to drink too much.

There was always the firm metaphorical hand on my shoulder

which would stop me from drinking and embarrassing everybody.

But when those codes collapsed, the result was very ugly.

I remember a time at Oldham when they played my team,

Sheffield Wednesday, and there was a riot.

Sheffield Wednesday supporters have been banned

from attending the club's next four away games following the riot

at Oldham Athletic on September 6th.

It was quite frightening.

It was quite a frightening experience for everyone.

There were an awful lot of arrests,

and everyone arrested had been drinking.

They weren't nasty people.

They weren't particularly violent people.

They were mild people who turned violent

under the influence of alcohol,

allied to the tribalism that football brings.

In Glasgow, the problem was even worse.

The Cup Final of 1980 between Celtic and Rangers

would provide the breaking point.

REPORTER: Celtic's fans, drawn mainly from Glasgow's Catholic population,

stormed over the ineffective barricades onto the pitch

to taunt Rangers' mainly Protestant supporters at the other end.

They counter-attacked.

The violence so close to the surface of this long rivalry spilled over

into the worst football riot here in living memory.

Football supporters play a big part in the drinking culture in Glasgow.

Every single time there was an Old Firm match,

Rangers versus Celtic,

domestic violence goes up by about 80% on those days.

So, it's a frightening aspect.

I'm sure I've got an ulcer somewhere to this day, worrying about it.

The 1980 Scottish Cup Final

would become famous as the match

which led to a total match-day ban on alcohol in Scottish football.

England would follow suit five years later.

Elsewhere, drinking patterns were changing.

Young men with money in their pockets

had a new drink of choice.

Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps, please.

Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps, please.

I'll have two pints of lager

and a packet of crisps, and pickled onions

and a bit of cheese, please, thank you.

Lager exploded in about 1976

from a very small base to start growing really rapidly,

thanks mainly to the really funny TV adverts.

But by the '80s, it wasn't just a new trend,

it was becoming increasingly commonplace.

It's what young men would go out and drink.

It became a symbol of affluence, a symbol of a new generation.

Ever since the first attempts

to introduce lager onto the mass market,

it had been regarded as the enemy of beer.

THEY CHANT: Save real beer! Save real beer!

In its infancy, it was considered to be

a foreign drop that wouldn't satisfy a man.

It lacked all of the cultural associations of ale and bitter,

and people were outright suspicious of it.

But now young men were looking to distance themselves

from the old traditions,

and in crisp, fresh lager, they found the perfect fix.

G'day. They're really nice people in this pub.

If you don't fancy a pint of Foster's,

they'll make you a nice mug of coffee.

They were funny, they made you laugh. And they were irreverent.

They referenced other advertising

and in a way tore down the fourth wall

between the viewer and the telly.

It became part of our culture and part of our language.

"Refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach."

"I bet he drinks Carling Black Label."

These all entered the vernacular.

I thought you had to wear a tie to get in here.

In an age when image was everything,

lager provided an identity for those who lacked one.

It even gave them a new leader.

'Life in a Bavarian forest was boring.

'The big event was me and Ronnie Rabbit

'watching a leaf fall down.'

-A leaf! I saw a leaf!

-Hey.

'Then one day,

'I discovered Hofmeister lager with a picture of my grandpa on it...'

The advertisers did very detailed research

into who their target audience was.

It was young men of the drinking age, but only just,

who were insecure, who liked to hang out in packs,

and who wanted a leader who they could look up to.

And then they formulated someone in a bear suit

who would fulfil these aspirations.

He was better at darts. He got the girls. "Follow the bear."

'The moral is...'

Being clearly identified with the other men in your pack

was essential, creating a whole subculture of conformity.

'Follow the bear.'

When I've spoken to guys who go out drinking from that culture,

they will say, "We go out, there are eight of us,

"and we have eight bottles of Becks.

"That's what we have. That's our round.

"Sometimes, we might get adventurous

"and have eight bottles of Bud instead."

But no-one can break that group code.

The difference between Bud and Becks is trifling to most of us,

but these tiny differences take on huge significance in a culture

where everything down to your cuff buttons is scrutinised

and is a symbol of the pack that you're in.

Away from the conspicuous consumption of lager,

in one of the country's most deprived areas,

a form of extreme drinking was taking place.

My husband and I ran this pub, and it was down in the East End,

which is a wee bit different from where I was born.

It was not a kind of pub where men dressed up in suits

and came out for a sing-song. It was hardcore alcoholics.

You were lucky if some of these men were dressed.

It was just proper hardcore wine drinkers.

And when I say wine, I don't mean, "Oh, that's a lovely rose."

I mean, "If I don't drink this, I'll be drinking methylated spirits."

The area had been run down, really run down.

In fact, there was no street lighting at that point. I remember thinking,

"This is like a post-apocalyptic scene from some movie."

The tenements had all been pulled down. It was just broken streets,

and this pub stood with nothing round it, no street lights.

It might have been a time warp.

WOMAN SINGS >

# And now if you should see... #

This was drinking to escape, drinking to forget.

But even in these circumstances,

it could take on a bizarrely exotic air.

Babycham was a big hit.

And it's a lethal combination - nobody knew it - brandy and Babycham.

Women thought that was a dinky drink to have.

Brandy and Babycham is easily like a Molotov cocktail.

Folk speak Spanish and don't remember their life

after brandy and Babycham, yet people thought,

"I'll have a wee brandy and Babycham."

It was like, "Yeah, you might get pregnant,"

but that was a crazy drink.

There was a great trend for cocktails.

They saw them in videos like Club Tropicana.

# Club Tropicana, drinks are free

# Fun and sunshine There's enough for everyone... #

Every single '80s pop video had a woman with a cocktail

or champagne glass, and everybody wanted to try it.

So, what the marketeers did

is they sent you a cocktail in a silver plastic bottle

that you shook and poured.

You weren't even allowed to make it yourself in case you got it wrong.

And it was all very pink and grey and silver, with cherries,

the wee cherry.

Women loved anything.

I suppose it's a sense of, "We can drink alcohol.

"As long as it tastes like custard then it's fine."

With the arrival of the 1990s,

the mood of the country changed again,

and with it, the drinking habits of young people.

This time, the rules of drinking

would be transformed beyond all recognition.

The '90s was quite a hedonistic decade when we look back on it,

not just with drink, but a lot of other things as well. In '93, '94,

the amount we were drinking briefly plummeted

as people were switching to recreational drugs.

The whole ecstasy and rave culture

had a massive impact on what we were drinking.

The drinks industry countered that with alcopops,

and started to get us onto spirits much earlier.

There used to be this transition

where you would start drinking something sweet, cider,

lager and lime, lager and blackcurrant.

Then you'd get onto bitter as you got more mature.

In your 30s, you'd go onto wine and spirits.

And suddenly you had people starting their drinking careers at 17, 18,

drinking quite hard spirits

and getting into big alcohol consumption a lot earlier.

Around '97, '98, you see the term "binge drinking"

appearing in the press for the first time.

MUSIC: "Cigarettes And Alcohol" by Oasis

SIREN BLARES

Now, the unwritten checks and balances

that had governed British drinking for years were being discarded.

This was over-indulgence on a scale not seen before,

and it was happening on the high street.

# Is it my imagination

# Or have I finally found something worth living for? #

I do remember, come the middle of the '90s,

when I was editing the Independent on Sunday,

we started to look then

at the fact that drink was suddenly making a massive impact

on society in a public way, and in ways that it had never done before.

The boast when I was a teenager was,

"Oh, I can have ten pints and still walk in a straight line."

The thing that changed in the late '90s

was glorifying drunken excess

and actually being cool if you're on the floor,

puking your guts up. Don't know where that came from.

# ..make it happen

# You gotta make it happen

# You've gotta make it happen... #

The ugly side to British drinking had always been kept locked away.

Now it was right there in front of us.

Roughly 10% of any society has some degree of problem with alcohol,

and roughly 5% of a society is alcoholic.

That seems to be true in most countries,

and probably is the figure that is true and has remained true.

What's happened is that

that 10% is in your face now. It's visible.

But for all the bad behaviour

that seems the modern face of British drinking,

we might not be the nation of excessive drinkers we think we are.

The real extent of our alcohol intake is quite unexpected.

People are drinking about the same

as they did at the turn of the 20th century.

We drink now about what we did in 1900.

It's gone through a great dip in the middle.

For 100 years,

our relationship with alcohol has been constantly changing.

We've run the gauntlet with measures to curb our drinking.

We fought for our country when the barrels were nearly dry.

We've had rows about who should drink, and what they should drink.

We've travelled the globe looking for new tastes.

We've drunk at home, and at work, drunk to remember, and to forget.

And at the end of all that, we're right back where we started,

drinking what we did 100 years ago.

I think that we often focus on the downsides of alcohol.

But actually, for various people at various points in their lives,

it is very pleasurable.

It's a really pleasurable thing to do,

and it can take you to a place that you don't otherwise go,

which is sometimes a nice place to go!

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail [email protected]