Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (46 page)

The theme unifying many of these and other works was an attack on the destabilizing consequences of upward social mobility, especially when self-advancement happened without regard for those
left behind. Those who did well in finance, advertising, public relations, property and sales were particular targets for the arts sector’s assumption that success in these eighties growth
areas was unearned and unmerited. As John Self discovered, such apparently easy wealth was a chimera. For all the arts community’s loathing of the newly moneyed in Thatcher’s Britain,
it was the character of the corporate raider, Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone’s Hollywood film
Wall Street
, that most satisfyingly embodied all that was
regarded as wrong with getting rich quick. Gekko’s indifference to the social consequences of the hostile takeovers he engineers in pursuit of his belief that ‘greed, for lack of a
better word, is good’, provides a morality tale. The real message – delivered in the film’s penultimate line by the blue-collar father of Bud Fox, the trader who has been sucked
into Gekko’s world, as he drives his son to court to answer for his crimes – is that it is better to ‘create instead of living off the buying and selling of others’.

Made in 1987 and released in Britain in April of the following year,
Wall Street
lent the phrase ‘greed is good’ to the entire decade. Caryl Churchill’s 1987 play
Serious Money
was the nearest British equivalent. Its opening at the Royal Court Theatre was well timed, coming in the aftermath of the Big Bang deregulation that had
‘democratized’ the City and the arrests of the ‘Guinness Four’ on charges of fraudulently manipulating Guinness’s share price during its takeover of Distillers.
Churchill’s comic satire on market amorality and insider-dealing, performed in rhyming couplets, featured crudely stereotypical characterization and a plot whose central riddle (the
mysterious death of futures-trader, Jake Todd) is not resolved. City traders are depicted as repulsive, foul-mouthed alcoholics, whose ties and suits mask the reality that they are uneducated
barrow boys (in the derogatory term of the period, ‘oiks’) now rubbing shoulders with the ‘old money’ that had previously ruled the Square Mile. A public relations expert
persuades Corman, the corporate raider, of the self-serving benefits of sponsoring the arts: ‘Theatre for power, opera for decadence / String quartets bearing your name for sensitivity and
elegance’; and an Ian Dury-composed chorus jubilantly hails another Thatcher election victory: ‘Five more glorious years, five more glorious years / We’re saved from the valley of
tears for five more glorious years / Pissed and promiscuous the money’s ridiculous . . . (etc. etc.) five more glorious years.’ Undaunted by its condemnatory intent, genuine City
traders were among the most vocally enthusiastic regulars in the audience, hooting, cheering and crying ‘hear! hear!’ whenever their stage
caricatures and values
were being portrayed at their most venal. These unscripted interventions reached a crescendo on two evenings when the investment banks Morgan Stanley and Shearson Lehman Brothers bought every seat
in the house as a works outing for their employees. Whether their laughter and applause subverted or confirmed the playwright’s earnest indictment was necessarily a matter of opinion, but the
Royal Court’s finances were improved by the corporate buy-out of the auditorium for these performances, the theatre’s management deciding that ‘everybody attending would be given
a letter outlining sponsorship opportunities’.
²¹
At the time, Churchill did not find the irony amusing, though on the long view she at least
had the last laugh over the bankers from Lehman Brothers.

Where ‘new rich’ barbarians were welcomed at theatreland’s gates, the results were transformative, though often still contentious. The Old Vic was rescued and restored by Ed
Mirvish, owner of Honest Ed’s department store in Toronto, who bought the theatre in 1982 for £550,000 and spent a further £4 million renovating it. Commercially, the most
enduring successes of the period were Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals.
Cats
opened in 1981 and ran for twenty-one years, while
Starlight Express
(1984),
Phantom of the
Opera
(1987) and
Aspects of Love
(1989) also proved extremely popular – all, apart from
Phantom
, directed by Trevor Nunn. There was no overt political message attached to
these performances, unless interpretation was stretched as far as Michael Billington’s assertion that the onstage struggles of individuals seeking to fulfil their dreams represented the
espousal of a right-wing rejection of collectivism. On such a reading, much of the Western literary canon would need reclassifying as right-wing. It was more the fact that they represented
middlebrow culture, composed by someone who contributed music for the Conservatives’ 1987 general election campaign, that reinforced the prejudices of those who believed popularity was as
inseparable from cultural debasement as subsidy was from serious art. Yet for all that Billington feared that Lloyd Webber’s crowd-pleasers were ‘Thatcherism in
action’,
²²
there was no escaping the fact that they helped ensure that the West End overtook Broadway as the place where new musicals were
premiered and promoted, with all the resulting box office receipts and investment that this brought to the London stage. Indeed, the Lloyd Weber-composed and Cameron Mackintosh-produced musicals
not only dominated the West End, they led a ‘British invasion’ of Broadway, almost entirely eclipsing the American musical, which had for so long been dominant in its own backyard. Now,
it was musicals composed, directed, produced, choreographed and performed by Britons that conquered stages across the Western world.

For most of the decade, the concern that this great renaissance of British musicals would ultimately make it more difficult for serious drama to find a platform seemed remote. After all, under
Sir Peter Hall’s directorial tenure,
the National Theatre remained unafraid to court controversy. Howard Brenton’s
The Romans in Britain
(1980) memorably
involved a Roman soldier sodomizing an Ancient Briton (Brenton’s metaphor for the modern British ‘occupation’ of Northern Ireland). The scene became a court case two years later
when the anti-smut campaigner Mary Whitehouse unsuccessfully brought a private prosecution for gross indecency. In 1985, the National hosted another of Brenton’s dramatic parables. Co-written
with David Hare,
Pravda
concerned the dire consequences when a right-wing South African tabloid owner, Lambert La Roux (played by Anthony Hopkins), bought and transformed a well-respected
British broadsheet newspaper and sacked its ineffectual editor, Elliot Fruit-Norton. The obvious target was Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-born owner of
The Sun
, who had rescued
The
Times
from closure in 1981. Having dispatched his wife to the National to watch
Pravda
, the press magnate batted off inquiries by declaring, through grins, that the
Daily
Mirror
’s owner, Robert Maxwell, might find it actionable.
²³
Fruit-Norton was assumed to be artistic revenge on Sir William Rees-Mogg, who
had followed editing
The Times
with implementing the government’s budget constraints as chairman of the Arts Council.

By the time the curtain lifted on
Pravda
, the National Theatre’s relations with the Arts Council were fraught. Having achieved commercial success with Richard Eyre’s direction
of
Guys and Dolls
in 1981, Sir Peter Hall hoped to repeat the formula three years later with a new musical,
Jean Seberg
. Costs overran by £132,000 and the resulting flop was
described by the critic Bernard Levin as ‘one of the most frightful stagefuls of junk ever seen in London’.
²⁴
With his theatre’s
deficit nearing £500,000,
²⁵
Hall went to the arts minister, Lord Gowrie, demanding an additional £1 million on top of the existing state
subsidy. When Gowrie refused, Hall called the press to the foyer of the Olivier Theatre where he mounted a coffee table to announce ‘bluntly’ that ‘the Arts Council has betrayed
the National Theatre’.
²⁶
Jobs would have to be cut and the National’s smallest auditorium, the Cottesloe, would close. In the event, the
Cottesloe was reprieved when the Labour-controlled Greater London Council increased its grant by an additional£350,000. Other saviours were found too: having spurned larger offers only four
years previously, by 1985 the National was bringing in an additional £250,000 through corporate sponsorship.

While the most vocal members of the arts lobby petitioned relentlessly for more state support for London’s national institutions, a parallel complaint held that the capital actually
enjoyed a disproportionate subsidy compared to the rest of the country. This was acknowledged by the Arts Council’s 1984 policy paper,
The Glory of the Garden
. Claiming that ‘we
live as two artistic nations – London and everywhere else’, the document sought ‘the largest
single programme of devolution in the history of the Arts
Council . . . a step back from centralized bureaucracy as a mode of administering the arts in Great Britain’. Jonathan Miller immediately charged that the real aim was political, ‘to
extinguish voices which, in the view of the Arts Council, are inimical to the political views of this particular government’.
²⁷
In reality,
there was nothing obviously Thatcherite about ensuring that £6 million was diverted from London to enhance the patronage powers of twelve regional Arts Council grant-awarding bodies. Hopes
were entertained that eastern England could acquire its own world-class orchestra, by inducing one of London’s four main orchestras to relocate as the price of retaining its subsidy. But the
orchestras proved adept at finding ways to stay put, and the move never came to pass. Although the decade ended with the closure of the twenty-year-old Kent Opera, which was unable to survive
without the taxpayer’s benefaction, elsewhere in the country there were significant artistic achievements. Glyndebourne prospered without seeking government grants or compromising standards.
Under the baton of Simon Rattle, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra achieved international recognition. Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet took up residency at the Birmingham Hippodrome in
1987 and moved there permanently in 1990, becoming the Birmingham Royal Ballet. The combined efforts of private sector sponsorship and public sector funding through the Arts Council, the Museums
and Galleries Commission and the National Heritage Memorial Fund (which the government set up in 1980 to safeguard art and architecture), together with increasing local government grants, helped
unblock the cultural bottleneck of the capital city. In 1984, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh moved from cramped surroundings into the spacious and imposing classical
building of an abandoned private school, and in 1988 the National Gallery of Scotland benefited from an extensive renovation. Long in the planning, the Burrell Collection finally opened in its own
purpose-built museum in Glasgow parkland in 1983. Enhanced as part of the ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ campaign, the city’s reward came in 1990 when it became European City of
Culture and its Royal Concert Hall opened. Nor was Glasgow the only provincial city where investment in culture was identified as a route out of industrial decline. Having been established by the
government in 1981, the Merseyside Development Corporation did more than seek out investors in Liverpool’s business future. Tate Liverpool was opened in 1988 as the centrepiece of the
corporation’s redevelopment and restoration of the previously derelict mid-nineteenth-century warehouses of the Albert Dock. With its collection of British and international modern art, it
quickly became a major visitor attraction.

The vast sums pumped into the cultural infrastructure with the launch of the National Lottery in 1994 came to overshadow the scale of eighties
investment, the considerable
extent of which tended to be masked in public debate at the time by the focus on the shortfall between what the state offered and what the arts lobby demanded. Even the opening of the Clore
Gallery, a new wing of the Tate to house its collection of Turners in 1987, provided an occasion for its chairman, the architect Richard Rogers, to launch an attack on government funding in front
of the Queen – despite the £1.8 million of public funds that had gone into building the wing.
²⁸
A further £6 million had been
provided as a legacy from the foundation of Sir Charles Clore, whose money had come from the Sears retail empire which he had expanded through an unrelenting policy of company takeovers.

While the Thatcher government hoped that encouraging a new generation of Clores – their private wealth helpfully taxed at a more lenient rate – would ensure the greatest outpouring
of arts philanthropy since the Victorian age (of which the Tate was itself an example), one of the most visible cultural consequences of the new money was the soaring value of art at auction. When,
in 1984, Sotheby’s sold Turner’s
Seascape Folkestone
so that Colin and Alan Clark, the sons of the art historian Kenneth Clark, could pay their late father’s considerable
tax bill, it fetched the then world record-breaking price of £7.37 million. It soon looked like a bargain. Four years later, Christie’s had pushed the record sale price up to
£24.75 million for Van Gogh’s
Sunflowers
. Within eight months, even that had been trumped by a Van Gogh painting of irises. Between 1979 and 1989, the auction prices for
Impressionist works rose by 974 per cent.
²⁹
Victorian art also came back into fashion. As with the financial markets in the City, so with the art
market – London’s old institutions adapted quickly and successfully to becoming the favoured trading place for international investors on a scale that dwarfed what had gone before. Some
of the critics who had spent the decade berating the lack of money in the arts did not seem much happier when the money did roll in. ‘Old-fashioned love of art could increasingly be replaced
by hunger for investment,’ worried Richard Cork. Worse, it could infect more than just the purchasers, for ‘this emphasis on monetary value alone meant that museum visitors, confronted
by a great painting, would be tempted to regard it simply as a multi-million-dollar banknote framed on the wall’.
³⁰