It wasn’t long before Hallowe’en that I noted many of the significant women in my life – including my wife and the editrix of this august publication – were devoting exhaustive amounts of free time to watching the television adaptation of Dame Jilly Cooper’s novel Rivals. Doubtless some of the men I know were watching too, though perhaps less ready to admit it. From what I could gather, whether from those glued to it, or from slavering press reports of its contents, the action consisted largely of sexual activity (notably a man whose most private part was described – with I hope some exaggeration – as resembling a baseball bat) but also every other form of self-indulgence imaginable. I observed that many devotees of the series, which is set in the 1980s glory days of Mrs Thatcher’s Britain, were just old enough to have been there at the time. I don’t doubt they were attracted by the quality of Dame Jilly’s storytelling and by the high production values of the enterprise. But an important consideration, too, would be sheer nostalgia for a happier time.
For as most of us who lived through the 1980s will tell you, they were bloody wonderful. I was almost twenty when they started, and 30 when they finished, during which time I had been to university, landed a job in Fleet Street, bought a country cottage on an affordable mortgage, got married and had enough disposable income remaining to have a very good time. I’m unembarrassed about this because I worked hard – this was an age when we properly understood the link between effort and reward – and I know most of my contemporaries did the same. It was an era of freedom: the censoriousness we endure today simply didn’t exist then.
Rivals displays the ambience marvellously. People are drinking, smoking, shagging, partying and overeating incontinently. They did so because, suddenly, they could. It is deeply unfashionable and indeed regarded by many as being in bad taste to say so, but in the era of privatisation, Big Bang (for those not around at the time, not what you might think: it was shorthand for the deregulation of the City of London) and the spread of home and share ownership, people suddenly had the resources to improve their standard of living. Yes, I know, there were three million unemployed in the early Eighties (for a few months after I left university, I was one), old industries were expiring, the miners were on strike and large parts of Britain appeared in terminal decay, but it was not remotely like that for the majority. And for a gilded minority, who figure in Dame Jilly’s stories, things were very good indeed.
In the Eighties people were drinking, smoking, shagging, partying and overeating incontinently, because suddenly they could
It was, in the end, all the fault of that beacon of freedom, Margaret Thatcher. Like so many of us, she surveyed the horror of the 1970s and decreed enough was enough. She could not have done it on her own, of course. It required the democratic mandate she received in May 1979, won precisely because the so-called post-war consensus had collapsed. Not least because the state, which through the nationalised industries employed a vast swath of the country’s workforce, had proved so useless at guiding the lives of the people. Because of its ineptitude, those industries were crumbling – even when they had a relevance to the modern world such as the then publicly-owned British Telecom. An oft-cited fact (and it is a fact) was that it could take three months to have a telephone put in. I seem to recall my family waiting perhaps twice as long as that to have an extension fitted. This was no golden age of the white heat of the technological revolution: it was the rusting age of a state utterly incapable of running anything, and yet reluctant to share power with people who might, given the opportunity, transform the country by changing its ability to create wealth. And it is the creation of wealth, and some of its decadent effects, that Rivals is all about – not that a link between wealth and decadence should necessarily count against the idea of the former.
The lack of freedom Thatcherism tackled in the 1980s went far beyond the inability to have a telephone installed quickly. The 1970s were the last golden age of the trades unions, symbolised by tobacco-stained men with horn-rimmed spectacles and bad teeth in off-the-peg suits who were pictured day in, day out, coming and going from Downing Street and government departments where they had been giving their comrades in the political wing of the Labour movement their orders. The general public had never voted for these people, and indeed many of their members hadn’t either. Yet they controlled the economic life of much of the country, and thus were responsible for its decay. The great denouement of union leaders came in the 1978 Winter of Discontent, when they told the Labour government, struggling and failing to keep the country solvent, that it needed to shovel even more money down the throats of the trades unions. It was they who lost Callaghan the 1979 election and, and though they still can’t quite bring themselves to admit it, ushered Mrs Thatcher through the door of 10 Downing Street.
The world of Rivals was created partly as a reaction to the ghastliness of the 1970s. It reminds one of the indulgences in the 1920s of those who lived through, and survived, the nightmare of the trenches, and were determined to have a good time to compensate. But it was also the inevitable consequence of introducing more personal liberty into the lives of the British public. People were incentivised through the tax system to take risks, and many of those risks paid off. In allowing people to choose how they spent more of their money, the government facilitated investment, innovation, creativity and growth. There was a massive shift of resources from the unproductive to the productive sectors of the economy. The rich did indeed get richer, but so did a great many of the relatively poor. Whole areas of Britain, previously shabby and dowdy, now displayed the badges of ownership and self-reliance, as new front doors appeared on what had been council houses, and their gardens smartened up. In short, many people discovered a sense of ambition and aspiration that had been largely stifled by the pervasiveness of the welfare state since 1945.
For some, change was traumatic: one cannot dispute that many of those in mining communities who blindly supported the manipulative tyrant Arthur Scargill in 1984-85, did so out of genuine, and understandable, fear of profound change. Yet one of the few things for which Mrs Thatcher is given credit is her forward thinking about the environment. Then, men demanded the right to toil at the bottom of coal mines; now, it causes outrage that anyone should wish to burn coal at all. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Yet there is something less tangible, more abstract, which we have lost in the last 40 or so years, that attracted so many people to watch and revel in Rivals. It was the sense of innocence. Now, everything comes with a health warning. Smoking (even of extravagant cigars) is regarded as atrocious. Sexual relations have been put into a different context by the #MeToo movement; I don’t doubt that there remain many predatory men, but I just think women 40 years ago were better equipped to deal with their impertinences. Drinking is heavily policed with minimum unit prices and strict guidelines about how much is too much. The day of the petrolhead is over. We are all expected to be very cognisant indeed of our behaviour, and its consequences, however likely or unlikely they might be. Back in the 1980s, the view was rather, “if I die, I die”. And life was, believe me, far the better for it.
Simon Heffer is a historian, columnist for the Telegraph and Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham
