Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  For Barr and York, the advent of Princess Diana was the equivalent of a genie throwing open the doors of a bank vault and inviting them to help themselves. York, in particular, was everywhere in the early 1980s, as he would have put it. He was always popping up to offer a few heavily italicized insights into everything from Bryan Ferry’s taste in antique furniture to the alleged craze for ‘knickerbockers for men’ – which like many of York’s discoveries, never quite made it to Stoke-on-Trent. But nobody would have listened to him if he had not had acute things to say. And even decades on, much of the Official Sloane Ranger Handbook still rings true. The name ‘Diana’ might have fallen from grace, but there are still plenty of Charlottes, Georginas, Henrys and Archies. The heirs of the Sloane Rangers still share their fondness for ‘BMWs, powerboats and new garden machinery’. And Barr and York even spotted the trend for upper-class actors, noting that ‘public-school boys are working like navvies to people all the television dramas of high life’. Crucially, they recognized that what really made the Sloanes tick was not their obsession with horses or even their enthusiasm for Range Rovers, but their ruthless commitment to their own privilege. On the back cover, a little first-place rosette perfectly captures the Sloane ethos. The words around the edge read: ‘Who Sloanes Wins’.23

  To some extent the Sloane Rangers had always been there. But York was right to spot a shift in the cultural temperature, which he called ‘Reactionary Chic’. In effect, the Sloanes had become louder, more confident and more visible, while their style and values had begun to filter into the mainstream. ‘Over the last six or seven years’, he wrote in 1984, ‘there’s been this box opened, and unbelievably, out have come the most incredible sentiments – now hold on – the most insensitive language, the most extraordinary symbols of … what? Forward into the past, backward into the future.’

  For York, Reactionary Chic was an inevitable backlash against the self-consciously right-on ‘social-worker-speak’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a new ‘aggression and divisiveness: an instinct, one way or another, against the melting-pot, against the style of pluralism which by then was the everyday reality of Britain’. Partly it was born of frustration with the downbeat, defeatist political culture of the Heath, Wilson and Callaghan years. But there was also an element of overt anti-egalitarianism, as well as an impatience with the moralizing, apologetic cultural tone after Suez and Vietnam.

  When, only a few months after becoming Conservative leader, Mrs Thatcher had issued a full-blooded attack on egalitarianism, emphasizing ‘the right to be unequal’ and promising to let ‘our children grow tall and some taller than others if they have the ability’, many commentators had been shocked. But even in 1975, York thought, the cultural mood had been turning in her favour. ‘It was the end of guilt,’ he wrote. ‘Money style, le style Ritz, looked attractive when there seemed to be less around. From the mid-seventies a Grand Hotel or country house was the backdrop for every other fashion shot.’ And by the turn of the 1980s Reactionary Chic, ‘an imaginary upper-class style’, had reached its ‘fullest flowering … Never had there been so much swirling of taffeta, so much planning of balls, such a cottage industry in gossip columns, such eagerness to get into what the columns still called … stately homes.’ Hence the Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark video at Blenheim and Stowe; hence Duran Duran on their yacht; hence all those interviews with Gary Kemp, not feeling ‘guilty because I’ve made enough money to own my own home’.24

  Tempting as it might be to dismiss all this as marketing waffle, there was undoubtedly something to it. In February 1981 the Sunday Times Colour Magazine sent Ian Jack to Oxford for an article about ‘the return of the bright young things’. This was not Jack’s natural territory. He had grown up in working-class Fife, while the Sunday Times had a reputation for encouraging grammar-school-educated meritocrats. But the vaguely egalitarian values he took for granted left him ‘completely unprepared for the animal spirits of the students I met at Oxford’, young people who ‘talked in a way I’d never heard them talk before’.

  To Jack’s astonishment, the young men and women he met in Oxford betrayed no hint of guilt about their privileged backgrounds. He began with a modern languages student, Paul Golding, the son of a businessman in the Canary Islands, who wore glittering make-up and dreamed of becoming an interior designer. Golding explained that he was ‘much more sophisticated than the average English child’. He and his friends were not ashamed of having ‘a fun time … I suppose if I looked on it from the outside I’d loathe it, but the fact is that most of these people are very talented, very nice and very beautiful.’ Golding was talking about people like Nigel Lawson’s daughter Nigella, Christopher Soames’s son Rupert and the critic Milton Shulman’s daughter Nicola. ‘They form clubs and elect themselves to office,’ wrote Jack. ‘They are photographed for Tatler magazine. Friendships formed at Eton or Winchester (Harrow at a pinch) are their basis; female qualification for membership is usually wealth, wit and beauty. The women enjoy dressing-up. The men enjoy getting drunk: “hog-whimpering drunk” in the words of Rupert Soames.’

  Some of this, of course, was just posturing. Some of it was typical youthful high jinks, only with ‘Muscadet, Côtes du Rhône, Burgundy, Sauternes, port and “limitless” champagne’ in place of the beer ordinary students might have drunk. But Tatler’s young editor Tina Brown, who had graduated from Oxford a few years earlier and had devoted gallons of newsprint to the emergence of Diana, thought it reflected a deeper trend. ‘What has changed in Oxford’, she explained, ‘is that it’s fashionable again to be rich and smart … In the Sixties and Seventies the rich and smart went on existing but were rather more on the defensive.’ Rupert Soames, the most affable of Jack’s interviewees, said much the same. ‘You see, students went through the Sixties thinking the world was organised in a bad way and that they could do something about it,’ he said. ‘Absolutely wrongly, as it turned out. Now people take themselves less seriously, which is very, very attractive.’ For his part, Soames’s ambition was ‘to be rich and to love and marry a beautiful woman.’ How rich? ‘Very, very rich. As rich as one can possibly be.’fn2

  Perhaps the most striking interviewee was a third-year history student called Caroline Kellett, who had already appeared in Tatler and later worked as the Evening Standard’s fashion editor. The new Oxford elite, she said, was not about ‘money particularly, it’s much more a hierarchy based on style’. Jack asked her to elaborate. ‘It’s panache, élan, flamboyance and a certain amount of intelligence,’ she said exasperatedly. ‘For God’s sake, it’s a cultural and aesthetic standard as well as a question of self-projection. You can come from any class and have it.’ She belonged to an exclusive drinking club, the George. By an amazing coincidence, its members had all been to private schools. It seems unlikely that many of them spent much time cheering on the People’s March for Jobs. And although Kellett denied that they were in any way political, her next remarks told a different story. ‘Our generation believes that the future lies in self-belief,’ she said. ‘Everyone here, even the Northern chemists, are out for themselves. If you’re at all bright you know that you fuck other people before they fuck you.’

  In the published piece, Jack changed ‘fuck’ to ‘screw’, and explained that ‘Northern chemists’ was shorthand for ‘drudges in the sciences, up from comprehensives’. Oddly, he resisted the temptation to point out that the most famous ‘Northern chemist’ in Oxford’s history was the current Prime Minster. And although it is tempting to see Kellett and her friends as Mrs Thatcher’s children, the truth is more complicated. The date was February 1981; they had arrived at Oxford well before she entered Downing Street. If Michael Foot had been Prime Minister, their views would not have changed. And although Mrs Thatcher’s critics maintained that Kellett’s mantra was the kind of thing she secretly believed, the Methodist alderman’s daughter would surely have recoiled from anything so obviously self-interested. Rereading the conversations decades later, Jack tho
ught they showed ‘how much the entitled prized their entitlement and how they intended to increase it’. But this was not quite the same as Thatcherite aspiration. The arrogant complacency of the entitled elite was one of the things Mrs Thatcher had set out to destroy – in her own mind, at least.25

  In this respect, she clearly failed. Quite apart from the fact that policies such as tax cuts and mortgage interest relief played into the hands of people who were already rich, the cultural tide was always running in the upper classes’ favour. The biggest influence, obviously, was Diana, ‘the 1980s Supersloane’. But the vogue for New Romantic fashion undoubtedly had something to do with it, too. By the spring of 1981, dressing up, always easier when you have a lot of money, was the order of the day. As early as March, The Times reported that London’s fashion houses were knee-deep in breeches, taffeta and lace, having been ‘given an almighty push by Lady Diana Spencer’s taste’. A few weeks later, it claimed that London was now ‘the evening capital of the world, with the ball gown sweeping all before it’. Even Vivienne Westwood, the woman who had dressed the Sex Pistols, yielded to the new trend; indeed, she had been one of the first to embrace it. Fashion, she told The Face at the beginning of 1981, was heading upmarket. ‘The children shall inherit the earth,’ she explained: ‘they should be allowed to cover themselves in gold dust if they wish. To look rich is great.’26

  The magazine that really captured the mood, though, was Tatler. Formerly a moribund high-society monthly, it had recently been relaunched by the ferociously ambitious Tina Brown, who described it as an ‘upper-class comic’. And just as the Beano had Dennis the Menace, the Eagle had Dan Dare and 2000 AD had Judge Dredd, so Tatler had Lady Diana. ‘The season’s surprise fashion success is the Lady Di look,’ the magazine announced in May 1981. ‘Girls all over the country are frenziedly cloning themselves: Lady Di hairstyles, Lady Di hacking jackets, Lady Di knickerbockers, and the quintessential Lady Di blouses with the pie-crust frilled necks.’ Of course Tatler hardly spoke for the man and woman on the Clapham omnibus, but the Lady Di look was already trickling down to the high street. ‘Fashion is putting a little romance back in our lives,’ declared the Express a few weeks later. ‘After seasons of functional blue jeans, downbeat dungarees and low-key khaki, the mood is for frills, flamboyance and frivolity. Lady Diana Spencer has blazed the trail with her choice of romantic ruffles and frothy frills. And now the new, softer, prettier look has arrived, I believe it’s here for quite a while.’27

  On the train to see Oxford’s ‘bright young things’, Ian Jack had started reading a paperback copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). Both a lament for the dying world of the country house and an exploration of the workings of divine grace, it had become an ‘etiquette manual for a certain kind of upper-class male’. It appealed to the sort of Oxford student impressed by Waugh’s Sebastian Flyte, who introduces himself to the narrator by vomiting through a college window. It also appealed to executives at Granada, who had spent the last four years working on a television version, starring Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews, Diana Quick, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Claire Bloom.28

  As Granada saw it, Brideshead Revisited had all the ingredients to match The Forsyte Saga (1967), which had tapped a growing nostalgia for a vanished age of tradition and hierarchy. But Brideshead had an exceptionally troubled birth. After location filming on the island of Gozo, a strike shut down production for four months. The director had to leave for another job and was replaced by the novice Charles Sturridge, who was still in his late twenties. Sturridge and his producer, Derek Granger, promptly decided to expand the series from five hours to eleven hours, an extraordinary decision that would be impossible today. That meant they were filming and writing at the same time, spending their evenings scribbling dialogue for the next day.

  By Christmas 1979 the script was finished, and the next few months were plain sailing. But then another disaster struck. Because of the previous hiatus, Granada had renegotiated all the actors’ contracts, and Jeremy Irons had been promised time off if he was cast in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Since Irons, who played the hero Charles Ryder, was in almost every scene, production had to be shut down until the autumn of 1980. So the last scenes were not filmed until early 1981, more than a year and a half after the cameras had first rolled, while estimates of the total cost ranged from almost £5 million (according to Granada) to more than £11 million (according to the newspapers). As The Times put it, ‘the operation of divine grace has proved breathtakingly expensive … Nothing could sound more like a recipe for disaster.’29

  In fact, it was a recipe for triumph. Before broadcast, the novelist Anthony Burgess wrote a preview for the house magazine of Exxon, the oil giant which had invested some $300,000 in the production. Burgess proclaimed it not merely ‘the best piece of fictional television ever made’, but ‘even better than the book’. And many viewers seemed to agree. When the first episode went out on 12 October, some 10 million people tuned in, an astonishing figure given that Waugh’s novel is hardly an obvious crowd-pleaser. ‘We’ve had letters about the fashions, the morals, the cookery, the furniture, the interior decorations, the gardens, even the place settings at dinner,’ said Granger. ‘We really have touched a nerve.’30

  The Guardian claimed that the series had ‘divided the nation’. In reality, critical voices were vanishingly rare. The Times thought it ‘gorgeous’ and ‘irresistibly seductive’; the Guardian’s own Nancy Banks-Smith thought it ‘splendid’ and a ‘great cut-and-come-again fruit cake of longing’. By mid-December, when the series ended, it had become one of the cultural landmarks of the age: ‘the drug of the middle classes’, according to the Express. With dinner bookings down on Tuesday nights, the nation’s restaurateurs were praying for the series to end. But everybody else was cashing in. The paperback version of Waugh’s novel sold 200,000 copies and topped the bestseller list for six weeks, while the soundtrack album sold 75,000 copies. At an exhibition to promote the series at the National Theatre, the giant posters of Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews kept being ‘stolen by teenage girls’. Admissions at Castle Howard in North Yorkshire, which doubled as Brideshead, had soared beyond the owners’ wildest dreams. Even sales of teddy bears had reportedly boomed, with viewers wanting their own version of poor, doomed Sebastian’s bear, Aloysius.31

  Why was Brideshead such a hit? It looked sumptuous, the performances were exceptional and it obviously fulfilled a need for escapism, conjuring up the reassurance of a lost world of wealth and privilege. Later, it became common to say that Brideshead had ignited a national love affair with the country house. But it would be more accurate to say that it reflected trends that had been building for years. As bestsellers like Edith Holden’s Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady (1977) and Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House (1978) had proved, there was already an enormous appetite for country-house nostalgia. In 1980 Britain’s historic houses had welcomed a staggering 29 million visitors, while National Trust membership had surged from 158,000 in 1965 to more than 539,000 in 1971, reaching 1 million in May 1981.

  Middle-class homeowners did not need Brideshead Revisited to give them a taste for chintz fabrics, William Morris-inspired wallpaper and the ‘country farmhouse’ look, all of which had been popular since the mid-1970s. Even in 1977, four years before Brideshead reached the screens, Laura Ashley had shifted £8 million worth of stock, the firm’s founder explaining that ‘people in the cities’ wanted a ‘pastoral romantic’ aesthetic. The Brideshead look was rather grander, of course. But it was part of a trend for what the historian Raphael Samuel called ‘retrochic’, embodied by everything from Victorian-style conservatories and farmhouse kitchens to ‘authentic’ brickwork, cobbled streets, ‘re-traditionalized’ pubs and even neo-Victorian street lamps. Already the critics that Samuel mocked as ‘heritage-baiters’ were sharpening their knives. In 1983 another historian, David Cannadine, launched an early attack on the ‘worship of wistfulness’, complaining th
at ‘depression is the begetter of nostalgia, disenchantment the handmaid of escapism’. Full-scale battle about the meaning of the heritage boom, though, would have to wait until later in the decade.32

  But Brideshead undoubtedly had an effect, not least on the way people looked. By Christmas 1981, Harpers & Queen had already advised its readers to ‘make a bid for decadence’ by adopting the ‘Brideshead look’, while Menswear magazine thought trend-setting men should go for ‘an indulgent, extravagant look – wider ties, cravats and bow ties … stripes, polka dots, Panama felt hats, braces and armbands for shirts’. By the following February the Guardian was advising its readers that an aspiring man-about-town should invest in such garments as a ‘traditional cricket sweater trimmed in … soft pastel colours’, a ‘classic oxford [shoe] in grained leather’ and even ‘a cricket shoe’, which sounds remarkably similar to the Edwardian cricketing outfit Peter Davison had unveiled in Doctor Who a few weeks earlier.fn333

  Not everybody welcomed the Brideshead ethos. As the television critic James Murray pointed out, Sebastian Flyte, a weak, tortured and deeply unhappy man who dies alone in a North African monastery, was hardly an obvious role model. And even on the fashion pages some writers felt uncomfortable about glorying in glamour at a time when so many people were out of work. ‘The poor may be always with us, but so are the rich, and the tinsel glitter of the rest of us seems to have inspired them to come out of the closet,’ wrote The Times’s fashion editor, Suzy Menkes. Everywhere she saw ‘glamorous ball gowns and mummy’s jewellery’, reflecting the trend for looking ‘very, very rich’. It was tempting, she thought, to be struck by ‘parallels with the 1920s, a rerun of Brideshead on the dole money of the unemployed. I feel genuinely uneasy when I sit in a Bond Street boutique and watch women buying £2,000 worth of clothes.’ But since the vogue for ‘ruffled blouses, cavalier frills, dashing knickerbockers and swinging skirts’ was not going away, the only thing to do was to embrace it. ‘Throw out the worthy wooden bangles. No-one wants to look poor any more.’34