No Such Thing As Society

by Andy McSmith

  All this ready money had its cultural spin-offs. First, there was the arrival of the word ‘yuppie’, which was new to the language. The Official Sloane Ranger Diary, published in 1983, contains multiple references to ‘noovos’ (nouveau rich), but no yuppies. By the end of 1984, the word ‘noovo’ had disappeared, elbowed out by an American import, which was originally short for ‘young urban professionals’ and used to describe those who backed Senator Gary Hart against the more conservative Walter Mondale in the contest for the Democrat nomination in the 1984 presidential election. The Americans had a separate acronym ‘yumpie’, meaning young and upwardly mobile, but only ‘yuppie’ crossed the Atlantic, taking on both meanings. It was so popular that it spawned other new acronyms, such as ‘dinkies’, meaning ‘double income, no kids’, and ‘nimbies’, short for ‘not in my backyard’, which applied to homeowners who accepted in principle the need to build roads, houses, shopping centres, but not near their properties. The sociologist Laurie Taylor noted in 1985:

  The pressure to categorize yourself has become obsessive. No sooner have you decided whether you are a Mayfair Mercenary or a Sloane Ranger than you have to check your NAFF or WALLY tendencies and consider whether you have what it takes to be a YUPPIE, a Yap or a Young Fogey. If you want a grand theory for this phenomenon, you could, I suppose, suggest that it is linked to a firm belief that our present status is unlikely to change in these difficult economic times and that, therefore, we should hang on tightly to what we have got.27

  The rise of yuppies followed hot on the heels of another fashion, which seems to have arisen as an indirect result of the 1981 riots. While Brixton and Toxteth reverberated to the sound of bulldozers clearing away the debris from the riots, the new fashion was to sound streetwise. Well-educated young people from comfortable families struggled to shed the middle-class accents that gave away their backgrounds, and talked like their working-class contemporaries. The expression ‘street cred’, an abbreviation of ‘street credibility’, entered the language around 1982, alongside ‘ace’, used as an adjective, and its synonym ‘brill’, an abbreviation of ‘brilliant’. ‘Street cred’, like ‘yuppie’, was an American import. In November 1980, the Washington Post paid tribute to the ‘street credibility’ of the new rock superstar, Bruce Springsteen. Ten months later, a Guardian journalist reported hearing ‘street cred’ used in conversation in Britain for the first time. ‘It seems to be used most frequently as a term of approbation among students and others who are anxious not to seem to be exploiting their privileged positions,’ he observed.28 I first heard the expression ‘street credibility’ used by the future cabinet minister, Mo Mowlam, at a CND meeting in Newcastle in 1982. Soon, the expression had reached advertising copywriters, giving rise to one of the wittiest advertisements ever produced for British television. It was created in 1985 by the Lowe Howard-Spink agency for Heineken lager, whose long-standing boast was that it ‘refreshed the parts that other lagers cannot reach’. It was a pastiche of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, set in a School of Street Credibility, where a cockney tutor is struggling to teach a young woman with perfect diction and a cut-glass accent how to say ‘the wa’er in Maj’jorca don’t taste like what it ough’a’ – which she achieves, at last, after a youth called Del arrives with a six-pack of Heineken.

  Manufacturers of beer and lager needed to advertise, because they were losing trade. The overall level of alcohol consumption in the UK fell during the recession at the beginning of the decade from 9.7 litres per adult per year in 1979 to 8.9 in 1981, and did not return to the 1979 level until well into the 1990s. Part of the explanation was that people were switching from beer to wine and spirits as a mark of upward mobility. Wine consumption fell only slightly at the beginning of the decade, and then increased every year from 1982 for the rest of the decade.29 Consumer habits were also on the move among those who took illegal drugs. Drug-taking had increased substantially since the 1960s, and whereas the use of cannabis had been associated with the rejection of material values, with ‘dropping out’, by the 1980s drug-taking had become a way of declaring that you were rich, self-indulgent and proud of it. The Official Sloane Ranger Diary observed: ‘If a Sloane will take a drug, it will be one that is expensive, e.g. cocaine or heroin, the so-called champagne drugs. Lavatories in some stockbroking firms are full of cocaine-sniffers and senior partners wondering where all the cloakroom mirrors have disappeared to.’30

  One item that distinguished a ‘yuppie’ was that he or she carried a Filofax, which served as a diary, address book and whatever else. ‘Loadsamoney’ did not possess one, which put him a step behind Del Trotter, of Only Fools and Horses, who had both a mobile phone and a Filofax. Mobile phones were obvious status symbols because they were new, rare, and expensive, but the rise of the Filofax is no more than a parable about the power of marketing. Portable filing systems that looked like fat, oversized wallets were not a new invention. A little firm called Norman and Hill started importing them from the USA in the 1920s. A typist at that firm, named Grace Schurr, who rose to be company chairman (until she retired in 1955), had the idea that they could manufacture their own organizers under the name ‘Filofax’, which was registered as a trademark in 1930. She did not see them as an item for the mass market and never employed a sales force, but built up a healthy niche market, particularly among army officers. Filofaxes were sold across the counter in only the best shops – Harrods, Fortnum and Mason and John Lewis – and never for less than £20.

  In 1980, the company was bought by a thirty-three-year-old businessman named David Collischon, who hired a designer to change the product’s image, widened the range to include plastic versions costing as little as £5, and set out to persuade the arriving generations of Sloanes and yuppies that their lives were so busy, and their friends and contacts so numerous, that they could not get by without Filofaxes. The world’s first shop dedicated to selling nothing but Filofaxes opened in Camden, north London, in 1983, though even then a consumer journalist observed that the Filofax:

  seems to sell almost entirely by word of mouth. I have never seen it advertised or promoted but there are those who become so enthusiastic about it, who are prone to talk in rather evangelical terms about how it has changed their lives, that its circle of fans seems to widen all the time.31

  Actually, it was being subtly promoted as a useful fashion accessory for busy, over-committed young professionals at the very time when political fashion made it acceptable to let people know if you were in a well-paid job that kept you busy. From about 1983, sales grew and grew. Paul Smith, a celebrity fashion designer who had a shop in Covent Garden where he sold an eclectic range of clothes, and soon-to-be fashionable luxuries for men, put a Filofax on display. Company turnover multiplied from £100,000 in 1980 to £5m in 1985. The company even took what had been an American invention back to the USA, posing as a British discovery at a time when all things British were fashionable again, and sold them for about five times what they cost to manufacture. About $0.5m worth sold in the USA during Christmas 1985 alone. Woody Allen was said to own twenty. His former co-star Diane Keaton had a Filofax insert named after her.

  Filofax was one of the characteristic 1980s toys and gadgets that advertised that their owners were busy, go-ahead people. Peter York wrote: ‘From 1985 onwards, we began to get more and more obsessed with the toys of the age – mobile phones, in-car faxes, Sony Walkmen and tiny TVs, lap-top computers – because they said that we were well-heeled busy people, people whose time was in short supply.’32 These toys included the Amstrad computer, which advertised that its owner was busy and upwardly mobile. Soon, Britain was welcoming the American expression ‘quality time’, which is what exceptionally busy parents reputedly set aside for their children. This phrase, seized upon by working mothers or two-income couples who felt vulnerable to the charge that they were allowing their children to grow up as strangers, had been in use among upper middle-class Americans since the late 1970s. However, even in 1986 it was heard rar
ely enough in the UK for the Guardian to report that the ‘latest in tooth-gritting New York terminology is the phrase Quality Time, as in “I’m spending with my kids at the weekend” – that is, as opposed to Quantity Time, which is what stay-at-home housewives give their children’.33 By 1987, it was no longer necessary to go to New York to hear the phrase; it had infiltrated the English language, at least in the metropolis.

  It was socially acceptable now for the young to aspire to a difierent lifestyle to that of their parents, to own property, to be too busy working to have ‘quality time’ to spend with children. In some parts of society, it was even fashionable, for the first time since before the Second World War, to behave like the rich young wastrels in the novels of Evelyn Waugh. In 1981, an aspiring young photographer named Dafydd Jones won second prize in a competition organized by the Sunday Times, with a portfolio of portraits of Oxford undergraduates from rich families entitled ‘The Return of the Bright Young Things’. They included the Hon Pandora Mond, with nipple exposed, and Nigella Lawson. The pictures captured the attention of Tina Brown, editor of Tatler, and inspired waves of students to ape this behaviour. Jones said in a recent interview: ‘I had access to what felt like a secret world. There was a change going on. Someone described it as a “last hurrah” of the upper classes.’34

  One of the stars of this new firmament was Darius Guppy, an old Etonian who helped revive the Bullingdon Club, whose antics had been recounted in Waugh’s novels. Guppy later went to jail for fraud. Another was Count Gottfried von Bismarck, a descendant of Prussia’s Iron Chancellor, who liked to dress up in lederhosen or in women’s clothes, lipstick and fishnet stockings. An Oxford contemporary, Toby Young, recalled:

  It was as though Oxford – and no doubt the same was true of Cambridge – was a stage and people like Gottfried von Bismarck and Darius Guppy were the theatrical stars we had all come to see. The reason they paraded around in tailcoats, empty champagne bottles strewn in their wake, was not because they didn’t care what ordinary people thought of them. On the contrary, they were playing up to people’s prejudices about what people from privileged backgrounds were like – and revelling in the attention it brought them.35

  Guppy, Bismarck and their contemporaries sat their finals in July 1986, which coincidentally, was the month that the 1986 Wages Act became law. This legislation removed all employees under the age of twenty-one from the protection of the wages council. It had no impact on university students, unless they took part-time jobs in the vacation. Its intention was to depress the wages of hundreds of thousands of school leavers who had gone straight from school into menial jobs, in the hope that lower wages would mean more jobs. The average wage for a sixteen-year-old working a forty-hour week was then £45; the minimum wage for a hairdresser was £34 a week. Without the protection of the wages council, the chairman of the British Youth Council, Malcolm Ryan, forecast that a teenager’s average wage could fall below £1 an hour.36

  None of this needed to worry the bright young things who threw wild parties in Christ Church College, Oxford, when their finals were over. On one occasion, drink and drugs were imbibed in such quantities that several of the revellers didn’t leave until after dawn. One youth woke up in a bed in Count Bismarck’s rooms to discover that he was lying alongside a woman’s dead body. She had overdosed on heroin. Bismarck burst into tears when he learnt what had happened. He flew back to Germany as soon as the inquest was over and sent a servant back to Oxford with a cheque book to pay his debts. He returned to Britain after three months and was fined £80 for possession of amphetamines. A woman undergraduate was also jailed for nine months on drugs charges. The most sensational aspect of the case was the identity of the dead undergraduate. She was Olivia Channon, aged twenty-two, a member of the dynasty that owned the Guinness breweries. Her grandfather, Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, her grandmother Honor Guinness and her father had each in turn been Tory MP for Southend West; Paul Channon had been promoted into Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet as secretary of state for trade and industry just two months before losing his daughter.

  Years later, two journalists researching the life of David Cameron came upon a photograph of the members of the Bullingdon Club, which Cameron had joined, for the academic year 1986–7. The photograph showed ten supremely confident young men posing in their navy-blue tailcoats, with white silk facings and gold buttons, and mustard waistcoats. Sitting on a step at the front was twenty-two-year-old Boris Johnson and standing languidly at the back, like the prince of all he surveyed, was David Cameron, aged nineteen or twenty.37 These ‘Buller’ lads needed funds way beyond the reach of most people of their age. Their tailcoats alone cost £1,000 at 1984 prices, and their alcohol-fuelled dinners at Oxford’s finest restaurants cost about £400 a time.38 Dinner of en ended with high jinks, in which these privileged kids displayed their indifference to law and order. Cameron went to bed early on the night that the police were called after members of the Bullingdon Club had thrown a pot plant through the plate-glass window of a restaurant, so was not involved. Johnson ran from the scene fast enough to avoid arrest.39 After the old Bullingdon Club photograph was uncovered, the local firm that owned the copyright withdrew permission for it to be used again, which did not stop it being pirated across the internet and in leaf ets distributed during the 2010 election. It was an image that Cameron, for one, wished would be forgotten.

  CHAPTER 11

  FLEET STREET IS UNWELL

  Fleet Street in 1980 was more than the highway from the Aldwych to Ludgate Circus; it was a way of life. Every national newspaper and all the major news agencies had head offices on or near this celebrated London street. Its pubs and wine bars were meeting places for heavy-drinking journalists living off their nerves in the manner immortalized in the stage play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, a celebration of the unexemplary life of one well-known Fleet Street habitué written by another, Keith Waterhouse. Bernard was played in the original version, which opened at the Apollo Theatre in 1989, by Peter O’Toole, who also was no stranger to insobriety. Fleet Street’s only rivals in the news business were the evening bulletins from the BBC at 1 p.m., 6 p.m. and 9 p.m., and from ITN at 1 p.m., 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. Anyone who was not in front of a television at one of those times, or one of the small number of people who owned one of the VCR recorders that had recently come on the market, had to rely on Fleet Street for the day’s news.

  By the end of the decade, Fleet Street as a cultural institution was no more. The national newspapers had all gone elsewhere. Their domination of the news market was under threat. Satellite television had arrived, offering all-day news for its small number of subscribers, and there were more terrestrial channels. In 1980, there had been just three: BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. The first new arrival was Channel 4, which began broadcasting on 2 November 1982 and was rubbished by almost everyone who commented on it. Lord Nugent of Guildford, a seventy-five-year-old former Tory minister, informed the House of Lords in the month the new channel was born:

  I have not personally seen Channel 4 [but] the reports I have show that a whole new perspective of obscenity and bad language has been introduced. I had a reliable report that in a recent programme, A Star is Born, there were no fewer than 36 occasions when a four-letter word beginning with ‘f’ was used. Really, my Lords, can you beat it! How can any responsible person put out such programmes which are going into the homes of our people?1

  Ominously, on Channel 4’s first night there were no advertisements in Scotland, Northern Ireland, or the north-west of England, because of a union dispute. The new channel’s brief was ‘to cater for tastes and interests not catered for by ITV; to encourage innovation in the form and content of programmes [and] to provide overall a service of a distinctive character’. However, its first programme on its first night was a quiz show, Countdown, presented by Richard Whiteley (and until his death twenty-three years later). The critic from the Financial Times also remarked on the presence of ‘a blonde hostess with big breasts and a slit skirt’,2 whom
he did not name, but his attention had probably been caught by the twenty-one-year-old Carol Vorderman, who stayed with the show for twenty-six years. Other offerings from the opening night were not well received either. The new soap Brookside was seen as too much of an imitation of Coronation Street, while Five Go Mad in Dorset was likewise seen as an imitation of Michael Palin’s Ripping Yarns. In time, the channel would establish itself, and Countdown and Brookside became long-running favourites with large audiences. Five Go Mad is remembered as the first television vehicle for Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and others.

  Another service that the new channel gave to the nation’s cultural life was to put up the money that drove a short-lived revival of the British film industry. Channel 4 funded the highly acclaimed 1983 film The Ploughman’s Lunch, written by Ian McEwan and directed by Richard Eyre. Its lead, played by Jonathan Pryce, was a soulless, opportunistic newspaper journalist, described by the New York Times as ‘a fascinating variation on all of the angry, low-born young men who populated British novels and plays in the late 1950s and 60s . . . Jimmy Porter of Look Back in Anger updated to the 1980s.’3 But by the end of the year, Channel 4 was picking up just 4 per cent of the total television audience, compared with 46 per cent for ITV, 41 per cent for BBC1 and 9 per cent for BBC2.4