History of England 1-6

The Special Defence Initiative, better known by the sobriquet ‘Star Wars’, was Reagan’s suggestion as to how the Cold War impasse might be broken. The intention was to spend over a trillion dollars on a satellite system that would effectively end the possibility of conventional nuclear conflict. When the subject was raised during talks over the future of mid-range nuclear weapons, it became crushingly clear that the USSR could never match such an innovation. Thus began the end of the Cold War and, ultimately, the dissolution of what Reagan had once called the ‘Evil Empire’. SDI ended its days in 1993, stillborn. It was perhaps the greatest bluff in history, and a bluff all the more remarkable for being inadvertent.

The contribution of Britain to the end of the Cold War may easily be exaggerated. Neither the women of Greenham Common nor Thatcher herself were to lift that swaying sword from its hook, but it was Thatcher who made the first overtures to the eastern bloc. For all his personal warmth and evident goodwill, Reagan was seen as Thatcher’s charming guide, a guru without innate authority for the role. The enduring image of him was that captured by a new British television comedy: he was shown as hardly ever leaving his bed, his face either twisted in consternation or alight with a brainless smile. The president, along with every politician, actor, singer, celebrity, churchman, member of parliament and member of the royal family, was a latex puppet. Spitting Image not only lampooned the coarseness, cynicism and vulgarity of the time – in many minds it embodied it.

The puppeteers responsible were Peter Fluck and Roger Law. They mischievously altered their names to ‘Luck’ and ‘Flaw’ in the concluding credits, although alternative malapropisms had no doubt occurred to them. The humour was not so much a rifle as a blunderbuss, with shot flying everywhere and everyone wounded. If the Tory cabinet was presented as a court of nervous sycophants led by a dictator, the Labour party appeared as a crew of unelectable clowns. The voice artist captured perfectly the prime minister’s laboured mellifluousness, but also let her lapse into a Lincolnshire growl when crossed. However inspired its puppets or its jokes, the show could never be accused of delicacy. The puppeteers confuted their critics with an unanswerable observation. ‘People say we’re too savage, but you don’t hear anyone accusing Conservative Central Office of being gratuitously benevolent.’

These were the years when alternative comedy at last reached the home, though it was never domesticated. The Young Ones depicted four students sharing a sublimely dilapidated house. We were introduced to a hippy, a punk, a ‘wide boy’, a sociology student and their erratic Polish landlord. Of the four, only Mike, the wide boy, was a creation of the Eighties and yet he was the character who provoked the least laughter. For until deep into the decade, the favourites remained the old favourites. The Two Ronnies and Morecambe and Wise still set the nation laughing, as, until his death in 1984, did Tommy Cooper. Their baton was picked up by Cannon and Ball and Little and Large. The direct, apolitical and apparently artless comedy of former years never lost its hold, and many comics whose oeuvre might be thought antithetical to variety later paid tribute to that tradition.

In the Eighties, a second musical invasion occurred. After the dip of the Seventies, British pop music began once more to startle and surprise, and the American charts were soon awash with British acts. A third of all ‘chart-toppers’ were British; such an invasion had not been seen since the Sixties. For decades, popular music had been driven by a quest for the ‘authentic’, with the ‘serious’ musician habitually looking backwards to an heroic age of purity. In the Eighties the source of inspiration shifted: the future now issued a peremptory summons. The anthem for this change was the suggestively titled ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ by the Buggles. Style was all, and it was a style in which the wildest retrogression mingled with an almost astringent futurity. The names of the groups themselves evoked this: Visage, Depeche Mode, Culture Club, the Style Council, New Order, the Human League, Spandau Ballet, Ultravox, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Gary Numan and the Eurythmics. The alarmingly named Kajagoogoo had begun its brief life in the public eye as ‘Art Nouveau’. In Adam and the Ants, the dandy had returned, but without the menace and aggression of the Fifties Teddy boys. Adam Ant was swathed in the glittering lustre of a Regency beau at a masquerade or the voluminous cloak of a highwayman. Elegance could find other manifestations: Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran performed in what seemed to be the best of Savile Row tailoring. The ‘New Romantics’ was the term applied to many of these groups.