Teenage Revolution

by Alan Davies

  There is no humorous element here, other than Joe Don Baker’s CIA good guy, whose robust manner contrasts so well with the stiff English establishment figures that Craven has to contend with. Very little relieves the tension and grief in Bob Peck’s exceptional portrayal of the bereaved, determined father whose world view is shaken by every new thing thing he learns. The show was watched by huge audiences and won six BAFTA awards. As with Boys from the Blackstuff, it was so well received that it was repeated within a few weeks, in early 1986.

  This exceptionally high standard of television drama was maintained later that year when Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective was shown over six Sunday nights leading up to Christmas.

  While Boys from the Blackstuff had its roots in gritty kitchen sink dramas of the ’50s and ’60s, with its single-play format fusing with dialogue reminiscent of the best sitcoms, and while Edge of Darkness drew on dramas, more common in the American cinema but familiar none the less, about high-level corruption, with a principled man facing the might of the state alone, The Singing Detective ploughed a new furrow.

  Dennis Potter’s grim depiction of a psoriasis patient, torn from his profession as a writer of detective novels by a spell in hospital, while all the time wrestling with hallucinations about characters in his books and flashbacks to his troubled childhood, set a new standard in invention and originality, the like of which is so rarely even attempted, it is likely never to be bettered.

  Multiple narratives fall over one another to absorb and divert the viewer, with actors playing several characters as figures from the past merge with those both in the present and in the imagination of the main character, Philip E. Marlow, played by Michael Gambon. Marlow undergoes what amounts to an investigation of his life, both in his own mind, and in the presence of a psychoanalyst. Throughout, characters burst into song and perform elaborate dance routines, as his hallucinatory imagination takes hold. Gambon’s perfect take on the embittered humour of a highly intelligent man, talked to as if he were an infant because he is perceived as helpless by the medical staff, is both funny and brittle. Marlow’s childhood traumas, involving seeing his mother with a man, and the violent mistreatment of another boy, unfold before the audience as a series of overlapping narratives with jumps in time and place. There is no hope for a viewer who is not prepared to meet Potter halfway, to commit to understanding what is presented to them, and the rewards, in gymnastic story-telling, fine acting and suspenseful drama, are very great

  Glued to the tiny portable telly in the front room of our grimy student house in Whitstable, I was prepared to listen to and imbibe every last syllable, to see every nuanced look and glance, to relish every exchange between analyst and patient. Nothing like this had ever come our way before. I bought the soundtrack album and Jill gave me a copy of the scripts as a present the following year when I’d finished my third-year finals. It was my favourite show. I became determined to see all of Potter’s work and never missed an episode of anything he produced from then on. Much of it was obtuse or disturbing, and struggled to meet the strict criteria for sexual politics that I had been indoctrinated with at Kent, but equally much of it reached the highest standards and none of it detracted from the memory of The Singing Detective, possibly the finest television drama ever made.

  Of all those dramas from the 1980s though, it is EastEnders that survives, planted in the schedules like a tumour that has grown and grown over the subsequent decades, demanding attention with its insistent promise that nothing in the show will be beyond your comprehension, so long as you agree to watch every episode, in the expectation of some greater climax that may come tomorrow but will actually never arrive.

  1987

  Nigel Mansell

  John Watson led the British Grand Prix in 1981. Alan Jones, the reigning world champion, had crashed into Gilles Villeneuve; Nelson Piquet, who would be champion that year, had blown a tyre; and Alain Prost’s Renault had broken down. Watson overtook three cars and was running in second place to the delight of the crowd, when the fastest car in the race, René Arnoux’s Renault, began to falter. Watson overtook him with eight laps left. Sitting high up in the stands on a family outing, complete with ham sandwiches and warm orange squash, it was difficult to keep up with what was going on, but the crowd around me knew Watson was in front and cheered the Belfast driver all the way around Silverstone. Ten of the first twelve cars on the starting grid had retired, leaving the Argentinian, Carlos Reutemann, the only one of the eight remaining racers on the same lap as Watson, but nearly a mile behind. Watson had started fifth on the grid in his McLaren, he wasn’t expected to win, having won only one Grand Prix five years previously. Would he make it? Or break down? Would he spin off? Or be taken out as he lapped the back markers? It felt set up for glorious failure. He’d never have a better chance to win his home race. All he had to do was keep it on the road for eight laps, and not, please not, run out of petrol…

  He won. We stood and cheered as he whizzed past the chequered flag. My first and only Grand Prix and a British winner! Very exciting it was too, sustaining us for the two hours it took to escape the car park, which must have been designed to prevent thousands of people trying to re-enact what they’d just seen by stalling them in a holding pattern.

  Among those who narrowly failed to qualify for the race were a couple of British drivers. The first, future World Sportscar Champion Derek Warwick, features in my favourite ‘if only this happened every day’ anecdote, in which a friend of mine was hitchhiking and Derek Warwick offered him a lift. The other Brit who missed out was Nigel Mansell.

  By 1986 it had been ten years since James Hunt had been Britain’s last World Champion, but now the blazingly fast and madly competitive Mansell was set to triumph. He only had to keep his position on the track, for the last twenty laps of the final race in Adelaide, to win the championship. Like Watson in 1981 he just had to stay on the road, not crash, or run out of petrol, or suffer a puncture.

  When his left rear tyre blew out he was travelling at 200 mph. Sheets of hot rubber flew around the track. Sparks burst from the rear of the Williams car as it dragged along the road. Only one front wheel was touching the ground. The car kicked and squirmed as it hurtled towards the television cameras at the end of the straight. Mansell wrestled with it as it snaked along, slowing it down before bumping into a wall at the end of the straight’s run-off area.

  Murray Walker was frantically yelling in the commentary box: ‘And look at that! Ow! That’s a collos—That’s Mansell! That’s Nigel Mansell! – and the car absolutely shattered!’

  ‘What an absolute tragedy for Mansell,’ said James Hunt.

  Mansell’s Williams team-mate Piquet was pulled into the pits to change tyres in case he too had a blowout, leaving Alain Prost free to win the race and the championship.

  Sitting at home watching, we were all terribly disappointed. It’s just possible to imagine millions of oblivious Britons, going about their business, neither knowing nor caring what the outcome of the Australian Grand Prix was, but they hadn’t grown up in our house. My dad bought (or possibly leased, from Granada or Radio Rentals) a colour television when they first became available, mainly because it would make it easier to identify the cars when the Grand Prix was on. The first time (and every subsequent time for several years) a race was broadcast on the new colour set, Dad would stand in front of it saying:

  ‘Look at the colours! Crystal clear, absolutely crystal.’

  Our interest in the sport had been nurtured years before. My dad’s enthusiasm for rallying, and participation in rallying events as a navigator for many years, meant that he would say, ‘This would be a good rallying road,’ every time we hurtled down a country lane. Each time we passed a sign with the white circle and diagonal black stripe denoting that national speed limits apply he would call out: ‘Fast as you like!’ and gun his Cortina/Morris 1800/Austin Princess forwards with a quick downshift.

  1981 was our first trip to Silverstone but we’d been
to Brand’s Hatch to watch Barry Sheene racing and to the Isle of Man TT, where the distinctive castor oil smell of Castrol racing oil hung deliciously in the air. Dad would sniff deeply:

  ‘What a marvellous smell!’

  It was inevitable that we would have motorbikes at sixteen and cars at seventeen but not necessarily inevitable that I would want to motor around Essex like, first, Sheene and then Mansell. I did though. Having fantasized about racing as an eleven-year-old on a pushbike I was no different as a teenager on a fizzy or driving a Mini. A favourite game was to speed through Buckhurst Hill, up to the top of the hill itself, which runs steeply down for a mile into Loughton, then shove the Mini into neutral and coast, in the dead of night with Epping Forest whistling past on both sides, before screeching (I loved that) right and coasting up Spring Grove to the hill halfway down, just over the brow of which was our house. I never made it over the top; gravity would beat the Mini every time.

  Hand-brake turns were another favourite. Dangerous ones, between parked cars outside the Burgess sisters’ house, which would bring Melanie running out, shouting:

  ‘Bilbo Baggins!’

  This was her name for her pet cat, not her pet name for me. She lived in constant fear of his being run over by a teenager.

  On one occasion, racing someone up Buckhurst Hill, with friends in the car, my unknown rival pulled alongside and his passenger showed me his constable’s helmet. The police would ask you your age, and whether you wanted to see eighteen, and then would issue you with a ‘five-day wonder’ instructing you to ‘produce your documents’ at your local police station.

  Fortunately, I never hit anything in the Mini (other than the back of the Co-op) though I did once hit a child on the motorbike. He was about eleven and standing in the road outside the Minor Public School when I came round a corner. I hit his foot and flew off the bike. He was still standing as I bounced down the road. That could have been worse.

  I had always wanted to go fast. My dad raced, and men do like to compete with one another. When leaving a plane after a flight, I can’t resist trying to beat my fellow passengers to passport control. It’s nice not to have to queue for long, but I have been in foot races with men, all of us pretending that we always walk at that speed, even when the immigration desks in the distance are completely clear.

  Some of this is genetic evolution in action, thousands of years of hunting a limited supply of food, that lingers on in the species. It’s this, plus testosterone and adrenaline, which makes men speed through airports while women struggle behind in wedged espadrilles shouting:

  ‘Where’s the fire?’

  Partly it’s anger, though. Why some of us are afflicted with the capacity for road rage, and others are not, must go beyond genetics. Something has gone on in our lives that predisposes us to turn everyday situations into conflicts.

  For me, I had to compete with my older brother all my life with all pleasantries abandoned very early in the piece. Trying to prove yourself day after day, for year after formative year, in angry contest after angry contest, leaves deep-seated behavioural patterns that can be quickly, and not always consciously, triggered.

  In early 1987, as I drove my second-hand Vauxhall Cavalier round the M25 back to Kent, I found myself in a race with a small red sports car that kept tail-gating me. I decided to floor it (the Cavalier could go from eighty to a hundred in under five minutes) but then noticed a police car in my mirror. The police went off at an exit and I immediately put my foot down. They pulled me over a few miles later, having gone off the motorway to allow me to accelerate, and then enjoyed themselves chasing me down.

  It went to court in Brentwood. I drove there and parked outside the court, which was adjacent to a police station.

  The court heard that I was doing:

  ‘Between a hundred and six and a hundred and eight miles an hour.’

  I’d have said: ‘That’ll be a hundred and seven then,’ had I had the nerve, or thought of it at the time and not later.

  The magistrates banned me from driving for fourteen days and fined me £95.

  ‘How am I going to get home?’

  ‘That’s your problem.’

  ‘No one said I’d be banned.’

  I was told to go next door to the police station and ask them how I could find my way to Loughton. A police-woman gestured vaguely:

  ‘There are buses up there.’

  In the car park a feeling of injustice took over. I was being hard done by and it wasn’t fair. I decided to drive. If the police stopped me I’d say I was going to a phone box to call someone to pick me up. Foolproof.

  About fifty yards down the road the blue lights came and I was arrested for driving while disqualified, which meant being uninsured too. Fool.

  ‘You’ll get eighteen months for this,’ said the arresting officer gleefully. For a moment I thought he meant in prison, but he was referring to a driving ban.

  There were an astonishing number of cigarette burns on the floor of the room I was locked up in and much graffiti on the walls. Rather than write AL of AFC everywhere, I sat and anxiously scribbled my ‘mitigating circumstances’. These were never heard, which was a shame, because they were unintentionally hilarious.

  After a couple of hours I was humiliatingly taken back into the court that had just banned me, and seated, at first, in the public gallery. The man next to me, enjoying a day’s spectating, said:

  ‘You should have parked in the hospital over the road, they catch about three people a week like that.’

  A few weeks later I had to go back. This time my dad came with me and we had a solicitor on legal aid. I was banned again, this time for twenty-eight days, and fined £125 at £5 a week. My dad was almost sympathetic when he’d heard I’d been doing a hundred on an empty motorway. He’d always thought seventy was too slow and was a fan of the German autobahns with their limitless freedom.

  That summer, we watched on TV as Nigel Mansell pursued Nelson Piquet, in an identical Williams, at Silver-stone in the British Grand Prix. He made up twenty seconds in twenty laps, before passing with a spectacular feinting, swerving manoeuvre. He won the race and was then unable to finish his parade lap as thousands of celebrating fans covered the track. Murray Walker was jubilant:

  ‘Amazing! What an absolutely incredible drive! We’ve always known that Nigel Mansell had enough guts, grit and determination for any ten men. He has shown that more than ever before!’

  In qualifying for the penultimate round in Japan, Mansell crashed badly, missing both that and the last race through injury, handing the 1987 title to Piquet despite winning six races to the Brazilian’s three. Five years later he became World Champion, having cut out the crashes. He’d learnt his lesson. I learnt mine too. I haven’t been to Brentwood since.

  David Rocastle

  Tony Adams destroyed my dreams of playing for Arsenal. Never mind that I hadn’t been good enough for Loughton Boys, I still fantasized about Highbury as I dribbled a tennis ball around our Alsatian in the garden and fired it between two trees. All hope was gone though, when the scrawny seventeen-year-old Adams ran out against Sunderland at Highbury in November 1983. He was six months younger than me. The first boy to play for Arsenal who was born after I was. The dream was over for me.

  Early in the game Adams tried to control a high ball and Sunderland’s centre forward pounced to smash it into the net. It was an inauspicious start for a player who was to become a great captain for Arsenal and England.

  Some debutants become exhausted by the pace after ten minutes, recover enough to join in the game, and are considered a success if they make no big mistakes, remain unambitious in their passing, and leave the field to encouraging applause when substituted after an hour.

  Occasionally a debutant shines, terrorizing the opposition defence, showing apparently limitless running power, dribbling past defenders with the crowd roaring him on, before coming off at full time frustrated he was unable to do enough to force a win, dissatisfied with
a goalless draw with Newcastle. That was how David Rocastle’s debut in September 1985 went anyway.

  Rocastle was powerful, not lean like a conventional winger, but he played on the right with commitment and excellence in every touch. By the end of the 1985–86 season he was a regular, as was Tony Adams. The manager, Arsenal legend Don Howe, had resigned, having heard that the club was involved in clandestine approaches to Terry Venables, who was managing Barcelona. Arsenal also approached Aberdeen’s Alex Ferguson, before settling on an ex-player, the Millwall manager George Graham, to take over in the summer of 1986.

  Rocastle became emblematic of a new young Arsenal team that was motivated, energized and unrecognizable from the mediocre side that had underachieved for several seasons. Many fans were still bemoaning the sales of Liam Brady and Frank Stapleton in 1980 and 1981. The new young players rejuvenated the team and when the opportunity arose, halfway through the 1986–87 season, to re-sign Liam Brady from Ascoli in Italy, George Graham passed it up. He was building his own team, players who all owed him something. Brady joined the Arsenal Retirement Home at West Ham. I was disappointed by Graham’s decision, especially when I saw Brady score a spectacular goal against Arsenal, in a 3–1 win for West Ham at Upton Park in April 1987.

  Graham’s team was improving though and had been on a then club record, twenty-two-game unbeaten run that took them to the top of Division One and into the semi-finals of the Littlewood’s Cup (as the League Cup was known).

  The run came to an end in a violent January encounter against Manchester United at Old Trafford. Many years later Sir Alex Ferguson (who had taken over at United two months previously) acknowledged that Norman Whiteside ‘committed about forty-five fouls that day’. After Whiteside had kicked Rocastle again, the nineteen-year-old South Londoner turned to confront him. Following a brief fight with the much bigger Ulsterman, Rocastle was sent off, while Whiteside retained his impunity. It is very difficult for a United player to be sent off at Old Trafford, short of breaking a linesman’s leg, they can do what they like. Rocastle was in tears in the dressing room afterwards. Arsenal lost 2–0 and went another eight league games before winning again, forfeiting their place at the top of the league.