I always loved a good Brookside style rant. In its last few years, this show became a jumble of bizarre nonsense, but from its start in 1982 to the early 1990s, it was startlingly brash and realistic - in a soap sense, of course...
In 1980, we left the boring and depressing (and nowadays ridiculously hyped and rewritten) 1970s behind. The '70s were hopelessly overshadowed by the '60s (would we never shake off flared trousers or ghastly middle class pomp rock?).
In 1980, it felt like high time for a new decade.
The '80s are now reviled as the cause of all modern ills, but as we sit here, steeped in apathy, heaped high with possessions which were new, unavailable or too expensive for many of us back then, can we really believe we were greedier? And was that decade, which contained a maelstrom of conflicting ideologies and technological clunkiness, really so decisive? Did the decade of yuppies and Thatcher, Greenham Common and the miners' strike, Clause 28 and Red Wedge really set the seal on now? In 1990, were things really irreversibly set on this course?
I believe not. Seeing the first episode of revolutionary Channel 4 soap Brookside again brought a lot back. The '80s had a great deal of zeal and spirit - and many people did not spend it attaining loads of dosh. Oh sure, the yuppies existed, and there was a greedy, almost pantomime element to the mid-decade, but it fizzled in 1987, and there was always plenty else going. Things polarised. Clashed. There was uproar.
Stuff the 70s hype. If you look at media from that decade you realise that only geeky, comfortably off middle class kids were living in a hippie '60s afterglow and the majority of us were bloody fed up, with 1930s, 1950s and 1960s retro lapping all around us.
Stuff blaming the '80s for now. Now is now and the people of today are responsible.
Oh dear. I'm becoming a ranter. Let's go and watch Big Brother or listen to our Pink Floyd LPs, shall we?
