Dominic Sandbrook is a capable but conservative historian; when not making TV programmes he writes for the Daily Mail. And The 80s With Dominic Sandbrook is a capable but conservative history of the 1980s. It shows how the decade rolled out across the popular surfaces of Middle England, of Delia Smith, the Austin Metro, moral panic over Aids, Ikea, microwaved food. All of these played their part in a consumerist, individualist decade, in which the old certainties of industrial Britain were left behind.
Yet there was another 80s, one mostly written out of histories like this, a counterculture to whose intentions Mail readers were oblivious, which articulated the convictions of a large, disaffected minority who held that whatever Mrs Thatcher said, there was an alternative; multiple alternatives, in fact. Operating in film, TV, music, it rejected everything Thatcherism held dear in its drive to roll back the progression of the postwar years. It was racially and sexually inclusive, experimental and challenging, rather than pandering to consumerist cravings. And, Ben Elton apart, it spurned mullets.
Take pop. Whoever selected the soundtrack to Sandbrook’s history imagines the decade consisting entirely of shiny synthpop. There’s an over-emphasis on Duran Duran and new romanticism, often seen as mirroring Thatcherite values. The reality was more complex, however. The Associates, Scritti Politti, ABC and Simple Minds were punk entryists intent on radicalising pop. If they were flamboyant, it wasn’t out of narcissism but a desire to dress up rather than down in the face of early 80s recession. And the pop stuff was merely the tip of an incandescent tendency which also included the still less remembered 23 Skidoo, Cabaret Voltaire and The Cocteau Twins.
Early 80s pop represented a wider social idealism. Multiracial lineups and embrace of black music was commonplace (the Beat, the Specials, the Selecter). White acts embraced funk and soul. Ironically, it was the 1983 arrival of the Smiths, hailed as “saviours”, that saw post-punk indie revert to the jangly Caucasian consensus that paved the grey way for Britpop, with Morrissey showing his reactionary colours from the outset in his hostility to black music (“Reggae is vile”; “Diana Ross is awful”).
Morrissey was at least sexually ambiguous, at a time when despite the general homophobia of public life, pop was abundantly queer. Just look at Culture Club, Pet Shop Boys, Frankie, Bronski Beat. This was underpinned by a thriving gay club scene, pounding the rigid beat of hi-NRG, fuelled by poppers. Add to that the tribal subcultures from goth to “positive punk”, the Jesus & Mary Chain and futurists such as Sigue Sigue Sputnik, and it amounted to more than the retro grab bag of the Human League and Spandau Ballet heard here.
Then there was the triumph of alternative comedy, cursorily noted by Sandbrook, but whose legacy of political correctness forced light ent to raise its game and led to a golden age of realist and surrealist comedy that spurned stock stereotypes. It sprang from the same counter-conservative instinct as post-punk. Its zenith was the Channel 4 show Friday Night Live, which made stars of Harry Enfield, Fry And Laurie and Ben Elton, a hero in the mid-80s, who also penned the never-repeated Filthy, Rich & Catflap, which satirically chased veterans like Jimmy Tarbuck up a tree.
Channel 4’s early remit was gleefully “loony left” in its early days, with a diet of arthouse films, alt-comedy and daring commissions like the now-unthinkable broadcast of Robert Ashley’s avant-garde TV opera Perfect Lives. British cinema, too, offered more than the sumptuous escapism of Merchant Ivory. Ken Loach continued to protest the effects of Thatcherism, while Terence Davies sought a new cinematic vocabulary that expressed the mundanity of Liverpudlian life in a beautiful, harrowing way, and Derek Jarman lashed the screen with paint buckets of queer punk energy (see 1986’s Caravaggio).
Much of this is forgotten. Jarman died of Aids, Ben Elton went mainstream, the 80s’ New Pop Dream faded. Channel 4 started a slow race to the bottom, today too often vying to out-5 Channel 5. The margins in which this counterculture thrived shrank; eventually, there wasn’t even a Top Of The Pops to subvert any more. Maybe this is why TV histories fail to acknowledge the dissenting narrative this stuff represents even when popular, or the creative rage which continues to be a beacon to young artists today. Because pop history is about documenting the “winners”, the big pop sensations, the Roland Rats and Shake’n’Vacs - and that especially applies to that most winner-takes-all of decades, the 80s; everything else is written out in favour of the froth. Whatever social historians say, it wasn’t just new romantics, the Falklands and yuppies. There were others in the 80s writing a more vital history of their own.
The 80s With Dominic Sandbrook airs on Thursday August 4, 9pm, BBC2
