Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (51 page)

Comedy of this kind – as of most kinds – was not to the prime minister’s taste. According to her press secretary, she turned the television off whenever
Spitting Image
came on.
⁵⁸
She did, however, make time to watch
Yes Minister
(1980–4), a BBC sitcom about an ingénue Cabinet minister, Jim
Hacker, whose efforts to initiate change are constantly outmanoeuvred by his department’s senior civil servants, who are invariably interested only in defending the status quo against reform
of any kind. ‘
Yes Minister
is my favourite programme,’ trilled the prime minister. ‘Its closely observed portrayal of what goes on in the corridors of power has given me
pure joy’.
⁵⁹
Both it and its sequel,
Yes, Prime Minister
(1986–8), proclaimed no party political standpoint, though its
concurrence with a Conservative administration promising to cut bureaucratic red tape and confront Whitehall’s ‘management of decline’ ethos naturally ensured an association with
the party in power. Thus it was that the actor Paul Eddington, who played Jim Hacker, noted: ‘Whenever I meet a Cabinet minister I get treated as a colleague, while the opposition regard me
with suspicion.’
⁶⁰
The depiction of the well-intentioned man at the mercy of officialdom was hardly novel, having been central to the plots of
the Ealing comedies of the 1940s – though those, too, were interpreted as conveying an anti-socialist message. More detached verdicts concluded that whether or not Jim Hacker’s
tribulations represented Thatcherite propaganda was not the point. From across the Atlantic,
Variety
offered the perspective of American idealism by showing surprise that a series that
presented a ‘pretty cynical view of politics . . . seems to have struck a chord in Britain, where the program is popularly regarded as being accurate’. Nearer to home, another critic
put it succinctly: ‘
Yes, Prime Minister
could only happen in a country which had stopped taking itself seriously.’
⁶¹

The British Are Coming . . . and Going

In 1981,
Chariots of Fire
became the first British film since
Oliver!
in 1968 to win the Academy Award for best picture. When its scriptwriter, Colin Welland,
received one of the film’s four Oscars, he concluded his words of thanks by startling his Hollywood audience with the roar: ‘The British are coming!’ Perhaps an American
auditorium was not the place for a Briton to revive a famous War of Independence warning about approaching redcoats. Yet given the stereotypical British national characteristic of repressed
emotion, his pride and lack of reserve seemed refreshing. For all that, the boast was rather bewildering. If the past decade was anything to go by, the British were nowhere near taking on
Hollywood. Yet for a brief and tantalizing moment, Welland’s prophecy looked as if it might indeed be spectacularly prescient. Complete with its three hundred thousand extras,
Gandhi
,
directed by Richard Attenborough, won the best picture Oscar in 1982. In 1984, a runner-up was yet another British film,
The Killing Fields
, which, like
Chariots of Fire
and another
commercial and critical success,
Local Hero
, was produced by David Puttnam and made by the British production company Goldcrest. With other significant films planned and Goldcrest becoming
increasingly ambitious, it appeared that a return to the nation’s finest cinematic hours of the 1940s was within grasp. But just as this prospect appeared tangible, Welland’s
appropriation of a war-cry from 1775 proved unhappily double-edged. Goldcrest’s 1985 film about that transatlantic showdown,
Revolution
, boasted as director
Chariots of
Fire
’s Hugh Hudson and starred Al Pacino, but it was released prematurely and flopped so spectacularly that it all but brought down Goldcrest with it. Instead of orchestrating the great
British film revival, Hudson’s talents were diverted to making – admittedly highly artistic – advertisements for Benson & Hedges, British Airways and Neil Kinnock’s 1987
general election campaign. Puttnam moved to Hollywood for a brief and bruising tenure as chief executive of Columbia Pictures. Meanwhile, the number of home-made feature films collapsed back to the
level of the dog days at the start of the decade: thirty-two in 1980, up to eighty in 1985 and down to twenty-seven by 1989.
⁶²
It was 1996 before
another (at least nominally) British film,
The English Patient
, won the Oscar for best picture.

That the great British film renaissance lasted for half of the eighties was, in the long perspective, a story of business failure. However, anyone gifted with hindsight at the end of the
seventies might easily have concluded that such a period of success represented a minor triumph. During that decade, output had become concentrated around the increasingly exhausted humour of the
Carry On
films (which ended in 1978) and equally low-budget horror films and sex romps. Racking up a record for the longest continual showing
at a West End cinema, it
was scarcely a source of professional pride that
The Mousetrap
of the British film industry was David Sullivan’s dismal soft porn effort
Come Play with Me
, which opened in 1977
and was still showing to full houses in 1981, a full two years after its star, Mary Millington, had taken her own life. The hope that mainstream entertainment would be kept afloat by Lew
Grade’s company ITC effectively ended with its involvement in
Raise the Titanic! –
a disaster movie in every sense of the term which left Grade famously quipping that it would
have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic. The ship that became a metaphor had seemingly added British cinema to its incident log.

Where it had been expected that ITC would solve the conundrum of why a country that made popular television drama and comedy programmes could no longer translate that success into film-making, a
partial solution was instead offered by the launch of Channel 4 in 1982. Its board was persuaded by the dramatist Stephen Poliakoff that the channel should have a film development arm which would
finance, or part-finance, films, and Channel 4 would enjoy the screening rights. To this end, the channel’s fiction commissioning editor, David Rose, was given an initial £6 million
budget with which to get twenty films made. Working out at £300,000 per production, this was not much of a fighting fund, but the success ratio was such that the sums soon burgeoned. In the
eleven years following its launch, Channel Four Films invested almost £100 million in 273 films and demonstrated that decent box-office takings in the cinemas could follow, as well as
precede, exposure on television.
⁶³

Besides the roller-coasting fortunes of Goldcrest, Channel Four Films was a central component of the home-grown industry’s run of accomplishments in the eighties. With support from the
British Film Institute, it was behind the intriguing/perplexing Restoration-era drama
The Draughtsman’s Contract
(1982), which brought to public attention the talents of its director,
Peter Greenaway, and the composer responsible for its neo-baroque soundtrack, Michael Nyman. Their collaboration continued with
A Zed and Two Noughts
(1985),
Drowning by Numbers
(1988) and
The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover
(1989). Greenaway was a maker of ‘animated paintings’ and the last film’s art-house sex and nudity proved
internationally enticing. Other successful British films of the eighties that Channel 4’s film arm helped develop included Richard Eyre’s
The Ploughman’s Lunch
(1983), a
critical dissection of the romantic and social ambitions of a journalist covering the modern Conservative Party, written by Ian McEwan;
A Private Function
(1984), the Alan Bennett-scripted
comedy about rationing; and
Letter to Brezhnev
(1985), in which two girls seek romance with a couple of visiting Soviet sailors in the hope of escaping their prospect-free existence in
eighties Liverpool. It was also Channel Four Films that funded
My Beautiful Launderette
(1985),
which, being set in the British-Asian community and featuring
interracial sex (both straight and gay), white racist thuggery, an Asian girl flashing her breasts, and – perhaps no less controversially – an Asian businessman extolling Thatcherism,
had failed to find a backer for its £650,000 budget. Channel 4’s punt on Hanif Kureishi’s script proved shrewd and the film became the first major success for a new production
company, Working Title, which went on to become the most significant creative force behind British cinema over the following quarter-century.

In particular, Channel Four Films helped fund a genre indelibly associated with British cinema in the eighties. What these films had in common was an Edwardian or inter-war setting and a plot
involving characters attempting, with varying levels of success, to overcome social or sexual inhibitions and the persistence of class constraints. A preponderance of stiff upper lips and floppy
public schoolboy haircuts was shown off to good effect in visually splendid settings, further enhanced by beautiful cinematography. The popularity of the genre had been firmly established by the
great successes of 1981,
Chariots of Fire
and the eleven-part television series
Brideshead Revisited
. It was subsequently indulged by several Channel 4-funded films, including
Another Country
(1984), Julian Mitchell’s inter-war boarding-school drama, which helped launch the careers of Rupert Everett and Colin Firth, and
A Month in the Country
(1987),
which starred Firth alongside another emerging talent, Kenneth Branagh. The (partially) Channel 4-funded film that really caught the popular imagination, however, was
A Room With a View
(1985). Starring Helena Bonham-Carter, it was the first of three adaptations of E. M. Forster’s novels by the producer–director partnership of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, whose
films came to epitomize the style so effectively that the Merchant–Ivory tag became synonymous with the entire genre. Indeed, the Merchant–Ivory vision of Englishness attracted such
recognition that it could easily be forgotten that neither producer nor director was actually English. Besides lush period settings, good-looking leads, public school education and old-fashioned
social constraints, the genre was distinctive for its sympathetic portrayal of homosexuality. Whether active, repressed or hinted at, gay men were central characters in
Brideshead Revisited
,
Another Country
,
A Month in the Country
and the Merchant–Ivory film
Maurice
(1987), which cast Hugh Grant in his first major role. The problem was that the intended
message of all these films – that love and emotion should conquer traditional norms and mores – got diluted by the sumptuous and aesthetically pleasing nature of the production,
ensuring that the films ended up indulging and celebrating the look and feel of a stultifying social order. This might explain their appeal to otherwise conservative and nostalgic audiences and the
consequent dislike for such ‘heritage’ films on the part of liberal-leaning critics, who might otherwise have endorsed their message of social and sexual
liberation. It was certainly the case that their popularity coincided with one of the eighties’ most striking cultural phenomena, the admiration for old-fashioned class
distinctions and dress sense embodied by the Sloane Rangers.
^EN21

While the Sloane Ranger paraded the values of ‘old money’, the young upwardly mobile – ‘yuppies’ for short – were the
arrivistes
on the lookout for new
wealth. Sharing the attitude pervading theatre and literature, British film-makers did not trouble to portray this aspirational culture in a positive light. The lacuna was filled by Hollywood,
where the overlooked wise guy who seeks a just reward for having a clever idea was always an essential component of the American Dream. Among the social-aspiration films that Hollywood successfully
exported to Britain were
Trading Places
and
Risky Business
, which were both released in 1983, and
The Secret of my Success
in 1987. There was no British equivalent to the roles
played in these upbeat comedies by Eddie Murphy, Tom Cruise and Michael J. Fox. Indeed, it is noticeable that in eighties British films, black tie is worn in the context of class-based historical
costume dramas, while in the Hollywood films being made at the same time the tuxedo continually pops up in contemporary settings and is worn as a badge of modern smartness by young and old alike,
regardless of the social circumstances in which they find themselves at the start of the movie. Denied aspirational role models by their own cinema, Britain’s yuppies therefore found
affirmation either in the cinema of Reagan’s America or in the one sector of their own country’s creative arts that did actively seek to glamorize those ‘on the make’,
namely the pop music industry.

The different transatlantic attitudes towards those moving onwards and upwards was also evident in the ‘rites of passage’ genre. Aside from
Gregory’s Girl
(1981), Bill
Forsyth’s engaging teen comedy of first love in a drab Scottish new town, British film-makers conceded the rich vein of adolescent anxiety to Hollywood. What cinema offered the eighties
generation of British teenagers thus transpired to be the growing pains of white, middle-class adolescents going to school in the American Midwest. The profitability of youthful and family-friendly
franchises had been ably demonstrated by
Star Wars
in 1977, and in the eighties by its two sequels, along with the Indiana Jones movies. Introducing the ‘Brat Pack’ stars, John
Hughes’s indulgent and sentimental ‘coming of age’ films
Sixteen Candles
(1984),
The Breakfast Club
(1985),
Pretty in Pink
(1986) and
Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off
(1986), alongside Joel Schumaker’s tale of Georgetown graduates in
St Elmo’s Fire
(1985), were box-office hits on both sides of the Atlantic. Even in
their country of origin there were those who despaired at their success, the American film magazine
Variety
reviewing
The Breakfast Club
with the ostentatious lament: ‘When the
causes of the Decline of Western Civilization
are finally writ, Hollywood will surely have to answer why it turned one of man’s most significant art forms over to the
self-gratification of high-schoolers.’
⁶⁴
Yet unlike the most tiresome sequels of the period’s youth franchises, which may be summed up
by the release in 1989 of
Friday the 13th, Part Eight
, the Brat Pack films were at least gently kooky, wry and charming. In this respect, they were distinct from the one British cult classic
of the period,
Withnail & I
, whose student-age audience was drawn to its powerful themes of drink, drugs, friendship, the passing of youth and the fear of failure.