Alwyn W. Turner

According to a report published in the British Medical Journal the suicide rate in Britain doubled in the month after each of Margaret Thatcher’s election victories. This extraordinary statistic, unknown by me before reading this history of Britain in the 1980s, is a sharp reminder that not everyone was overjoyed by Thatcher’s new model Britain. As Alwyn Turner notes, she stamped herself on the public consciousness more successfully than any other post-war prime minister, while only ever show more securing a third of the popular vote. Her thumping parliamentary majorities were the result of the peculiarities of the British electoral system, a divided opposition and, in the first half of the ‘80s, a Labour Party apparently hellbent on self-destruction. Having lived in Britain at the time I remember it as a decade characterised by dogmatism, extreme social division, mass unemployment, the elevation of greed to a credo, callousness in high office and intolerance.

One of the virtues of Rejoice! Rejoice! is that it provides a nuanced account of a polarised era. In retrospect this most dogmatic of decades was groaning with political ironies, paradoxes and contradictions; all Turner has to do is point them out, which he does. All the political highlights - or perhaps that should be lowlights - are here, but he also focuses on how the events and issues of the day were reflected through popular culture. With the anti-Tory vote split between Labour and the breakaway SDP some of the strongest opposition to Thatcherism was expressed through pop music, comedy and popular fiction. The 1980s saw the rise of alternative comedy - ‘alternative comedian’ was synonymous with ‘anti-Thatcherite’ - and the return of political satire to television after being almost entirely absent since the 1960s. Despite the satire and agitpop, however, Thatcher sailed triumphantly through the decade. Peter Cook’s famous remark about how the political cabaret of the Weimar Republic helped to avert the rise of Hitler inevitably springs to mind.

Turner writes with a pleasingly dry wit (Thatcher ‘addressed the nation not as an equal, but as if it were a child or a slightly confused elderly relative.’) but is ultimately outclassed by the numerous examples of entirely unintentional humour from the period itself. Margaret Thatcher’s very personal take on the parable of the Good Samaritan, for instance: ‘No one would remember the good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well’. Or Home Office minister Douglas Hurd informing the House of Commons that they could disregard American studies on the effects of nuclear weapons because ‘British houses tend to be somewhat more solid than American houses’. There is also the strange case of Errol Brown, lead singer with Hot Chocolate, performing John Lennon’s utopian anthem “Imagine” at a Conservative Party rally. This is so transcendentally bizarre one can’t help suspecting that Errol must have been taking the piss. show less

The Edwardian era lasted little more than a decade and, rather confusingly, Edward VII himself died four years before it ended. Alwyn Turner makes a convincing case, nonetheless, that it was a time of considerable change - a busy transitional period between the old world and the new. As in his previous books about late-twentieth century Britain, Turner is keen to show how the events and concerns of the time were reflected in popular culture, so we get a great deal about the music hall, the show more rise of the popular press, cinema, children’s comics, and the popular novelists and playwrights of the day. One of the things that struck me is that the division between ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ fiction had yet to be created (modernism hadn’t quite got going), so you had writers like H. G. Wells and G. K. Chesterton producing novels that were both serious and entertaining, and read by a large audience.

The past may well be a foreign country but, in many respects, Edwardian England seems remarkably like the current model. There was the death of the then longest-reigning monarch in history and her succession by a son who was, as Turner says of Edward, ‘a very different proposition’: a division between those who thought Britain should play a role in the wider world beyond the Empire, particularly in Europe, and the insular little Englanders of the title; widespread concern about immigration; political and social unrest; serious rioting on the streets; panics about the morally deleterious effects of new technology (What the Butler Saw machines were all the rage); the spectacular fall in 1906 of a long-serving and tired Conservative Government beset by splits and divisions. There was even a Labour Party leader called Keir. The parallels with the present pile up remorselessly throughout the book, but Turner allows the reader to make the connections.

He’s particularly good with the biographical vignette which is emblematic of the period - the roguish yet very popular politician Horatio Bottomley, and the strange case of the tragic heiress Violet Charlesworth. This is excellent popular history - wide-ranging, insightful, and fun to read. show less

The decade and a bit between the death of Queen Victoria and the start of the First World War occupy a curious place in the British popular imagination.

We see it as a sort of last hurrah for the ‘old world’, a place of fields drawn along Doomsday lines and fading family names on shop awnings as Larkin would have it. When it ended with the lines of men in boaters and blazers waiting patiently to sign up for the war to end all wars like it was a bank holiday lark. After which nothing show more could ever be properly innocent again.

Historical reality and what the public chooses to remember are, of course two entirely different things. When it comes to recalling the, relatively, recent past we are capable of hallucinating like a chatbot that has had its drink spiked at a party.

A case convincingly proven by Alwyn turner in this clever and blessedly concise single volume history of an era that feels on closer examination worryingly familiar in its mix of moral panics and insecurities.

Turner has form in this area; he is the author of three previous histories covering the 1970’s to the 1990’s. His approach is to dig into the popular culture of the time and draw the connections that show how it reflects contemporary political, social and economic concerns. This is infinitely more readable and probably more enlightening too than having to wade through pages of turgid academic prose that is never so impolite as to make anything like a point.

In, for example, Crisis? What Crisis? his exemplary examination of the collapse of the postwar consensus in the seventies he drew on pop music and Saturday night television. Here music hall routines and penny dreadfuls penned by the likes of Edgar Wallace perform the same purpose.

He shows how the Britain in which Edward VII took to the throne was, for all its ostensible imperial might, a country with serious problems bubbling away under its straightlaced surface.

A war against the Boers in South Africa had put a dent in the country’s aura of military invincibility that no amount of noisy jingoism could hide. At home the rise of the Labour Party along with the battles for trades union rights and women’s suffrage were shaking the establishment.

Added to this was a fear that soft living and loosened morals had made Britain weak and unable to counter the threat posed by an increasingly militaristic Germany and an America limbering up to become the economic and cultural powerhouse of the new century. All these tensions were exacerbated by a tabloid press that was seldom shy when it came to stirring up a moral panic.

The similarities between the nervousness of the Edwardians about the future of a nation that tends to try and reverse into the future and those haunting our own age are obvious. Immigration, the influence of attention hungry celebrities; dithering politicians and a host of others are all there to be identified.

Which can make for an amusing parlour game, I for one will forever now link 1910’s chancer Horatio Bottomley with Nigel Farage. They are very much peas from the same bumptious pod separated by a century but doing the same schtick to much the same audience.

The message with this book, and I’d hazard the rest of Turner’s books, is that who we were in the past, is closely linked to who we are now. Popular culture shows that more clearly than any amount of data drawn from official papers and government statistics.

The Edwardians may have done so through a Mutoscope on the pier; our device of choice is a mobile phone on the couch. We, like them, are paying our penny to enjoy the peepshow that shows more than we think of our national character. show less

Books on the 1970s tend to divide between serious history and fluffy pop culture nostalgia. Crisis? What Crisis? brings the two strands together in a survey of ‘the high politics and low culture of the times’. This political and social history of Britain in the ‘70s pays particular attention to how the events and issues of the decade were reflected in the films, sitcoms, soap operas, popular novels and pop music of the era.

Britain in the 1970s has often been characterised as a show more decade-long collective nervous breakdown: strikes, the Three-Day Week, power cuts, mass unemployment, runaway inflation and IRA bombs. All this and the Bay City Rollers. Turner’s book suggests that this common characterisation is something of a caricature. He cites research carried out in 2004 by the New Economics Foundation based not on GNP but on ‘the measure of domestic progress’ - including such factors as crime, family stability, pollution & inequality of income. The startling conclusion of the survey was that Britain was a happier country in 1976 than it had been in the 30 years since.

He also points out that the 1970s was something of a golden era for British television, popular fiction and pop music. Having grown up in ‘70s Britain myself I can attest to the truth of Turner’s assertion that it was a great time and place to be young and not in the least depressing or dreary. A time when left-field ideas entered the mainstream and challenging dramas by the likes of Harold Pinter, Dennis Potter and Alan Bennett were shown even on commercial television.

The ‘70s was the decade in which the post-war consensus of full employment and the welfare state began to fracture. Many contemporary expert commentators thought that strike-torn Britain was on the verge of a socialist revolution. This book suggests that if the experts had been watching more popular television they might have been less surprised when the revolution eventually came from the Right in the shape of Margaret Thatcher. There were very few left-wing characters in popular sitcoms, for example, but they were replete with proto-Thatcherites: Basil Fawlty, the seedy landlord Rigsby from Rising Damp and Alf Garnett (intended as a satire on bigoted and reactionary attitudes working class Tory Garnett inadvertently became the idol of the reactionary bigots he was created to lampoon).

The myth of the rebel was widespread in the popular culture of the period with rule breaking detectives on the box and rule breaking footballers on the pitch. It was instructive to be reminded by Turner that, when she became leader of the opposition in 1975, Mrs Thatcher tapped into this mythology. She was admired by many as a rebel against both the old Tory establishment and the perceived new establishment of trade union leaders and bureaucrats.

Given the prevalent disunity it’s no surprise that people took refuge in nostalgia with the spirit of the Blitz being evoked in comedies like Dad’s Army (repeats of which can still be seen pretty much every day on British television. And a good thing too - it’s wonderful). Perhaps paradoxically Thatcher’s radicalism drew on this nostalgic mood. She made a strong appeal to all those who wished to return to the - entirely mythical - united and law-abiding Britain before multiculturalism, counterculture, football hooliganism and the permissive society.

The idealism of the ‘60s had not completely disappeared by the start of the ‘70s. In fact, a number of radical and progressive movements such as gay liberation, feminism and environmentalism first entered mainstream consciousness during the decade. The environmental movement found fictional expression in the amiable sitcom The Good Life. Jack Gold’s groundbreaking television film of Quentin Crisp’s autobiography The Naked Civil Servant was a welcome departure from the usual cliched portrayals of gay men of the time. Glad To Be Gay, by the Tom Robinson Band, became a hit record despite being banned by the BBC and subsequently airbrushed out of history by the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles.

Robinson was active in Rock Against Racism an alliance of punks and politicos which did much to neutralise the emergent neo-fascist National Front. Altogether less honourably, Margaret Thatcher also played her part in sidelining the Front, by echoing much of its poisonous rhetoric with her odious talk of Britain being ‘swamped by people with a different culture’.

Turner’s book is wide-ranging and eminently readable. He stays on the right side of the history/nostalgia divide and skilfully weaves together the fact and fiction, the politics and pop culture. Still, reading it I couldn’t help thinking that no history is as ancient as that of the popular culture from the day before yesterday. Who or what were: George Roper, Meg Richardson, The Likely Lads, Margo Leadbetter, Jack Regan, Hughie Green, A Bouquet of Barbed Wire, Hilda Ogden, Upstairs, Downstairs, Kendo Nagasaki, Brentford Nylons and Blake’s 7? If you don’t know, you probably didn’t live in Britain in the 1970s. show less