Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (52 page)

The contrast between the backing and resources offered to Brat Pack film-maker John Hughes and to
Withnail
’s writer–director Bruce Robinson well demonstrated the gulf between
the Hollywood studios and those at Pinewood and Shepperton. Having written the Oscar-nominated script for
The Killing Fields
, Robinson was hardly an unknown figure in the British film
industry. Furthermore,
Withnail & I
was to be made by Handmade Films, which George Harrison, the former Beatle, had set up in 1979 initially to produce two financially troubled
productions, Monty Python’s
Life of Brian
and
The Long Good Friday
, and thereafter the equally acclaimed
Mona Lisa
(1986). For all this impressive pedigree, almost
everything about the making of
Withnail
was shambolic. Robinson had never directed before and announced on his first day of filming that he did not really know what he was doing. The lead
actors were Richard E. Grant, who had only done one small television part before, and Paul McGann, who had television experience but was untried in feature films. As the dimly lit tale of two
‘resting’ actors at the end of the 1960s took shape, the American executive producer, Denis O’Brien, thought
Withnail
unfunny. Failing in his aim of shutting it down, he
tried to limit the damage by cutting its budget to the bare minimum. Ultimately, it cost £1.1 million to make with Robinson, who threatened to quit several times, paying for some of the
scenes out of his own pocket. It took the better part of a year to find a distributor. At its launch in 1987, it went largely unnoticed, taking only £500,000 at the box office, and was pulled
from cinemas after a fortnight. Only later, and through the haphazard process of word of mouth, did it come to be recognized as one of the jewels of British comedy and regularly cited among the
nation’s best films of all time.
⁶⁵
Of course, its quirky Britishness meant it could never have been made by Hollywood, but then, despite
everything in its favour, it was nearly not made in Britain either. If it was this difficult to succeed with a peerless script, what hope was there for anything less? Robinson’s subsequent
directorial work flopped, while Handmade got into financial difficulties and was sold at a knock-down price in 1994.

Handmade’s plight, like that of Goldcrest, showed that there was insufficient financial depth to sustain a production company that risked at least one expensive failure (
Shanghai
Surprise
did
for Handmade what
Revolution
did for Goldcrest). In the space of a few months between 1985 and 1986, most of the British film industry’s
remaining advantages were swept away. A combination of the strong dollar and a generous tax structure had lured American investment into British films. From 1979 until 1986, film investors had
enjoyed a first-year capital allowance which was, in effect, a tax write-off. This tax break was ended in 1985. Investment (much of it American) in British films, which had hit a record £300
million in 1985, fell to £126.5 million in 1988 and by the decade’s end was down to a paltry £64.5 million.
⁶⁶
Part of the rapid
decline may be attributed to the depreciating exchange rate for the dollar and to the international Plaza Accord of 1985, rather than to anything specific to the British film industry, though the
removal of the tax break clearly did not make British investment easier. Other factors were also significant. In 1986, one of the most important native investors, Thorn-EMI was bought by the Cannon
Group, which was owned by the Israeli cousins Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan. Since Thorn-EMI owned 40 per cent of all British cinema screens, as well as Elstree Studios, the takeover had great
significance, though the trade and industry secretary, Paul Channon, saw insufficient grounds to refer the matter to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. In retrospect, this was unfortunate:
Cannon was actually nearing bankruptcy and would face investigation in the United States for presenting misleading accounts. As part of the terms of its rescue by Pathé, Cannon
asset-stripped its British acquisition, with predictable consequences for the domestic film industry.

Hanging over all these developments was a vast social change manifest in the shutting down of the cinemas. Television’s advent had made it inevitable that British cinema-going would
decline significantly from its post-war peak (1,635 million admissions in 1946). But the extraordinary boom in home video machine ownership in the early eighties accelerated the trend. One fifth of
households owned one by the end of 1982 and more than half did so by 1987. With the number of cinemas contracting quickly and some towns finding themselves no longer served by any picture house,
admissions sank to forty-three million during 1984. However, not all the videos being watched in homes would necessarily have been viewed in cinemas. Unlike cinema films, videos carried no
age-restricted classifications, leading to a boom in what the press dubbed ‘video nasties’ – most infamously the rape-revenge flick
I Spit on Your Grave
. In an editorial
headlined ‘Rape of our children’s minds’, the
Daily Mail
charged that ‘Britain fought the last World War against Hitler to defeat a creed so perverted that it spawned
such horrors in awful truth. Now the nation allows our own children to be nurtured on these perverted horrors and on any permutation of them under the guise of
“entertainment”.’
⁶⁷
In 1984, the law was duly changed to extend the British Board of Film Classification’s remit to cover
videos and it established a list of
seventy-four prohibited titles, among them
The Evil Dead
, which had been the most rented video of 1983. Whether family-friendly or
not, the preference for watching films at home instead of in cinemas seemed irreversible unless urgent action was to be taken. Since the 1950s, the Eady Levy had taken a statutory cut of all cinema
box-office receipts, which various government agencies then passed on as a subsidy to those producing British-registered films. In 1985, the government concluded that the levy was increasingly
funding distribution rather than production, while acting as a tax on already hard-pressed cinemas. The levy was abolished, along with the government’s subsidy-distributing body, the National
Film Finance Corporation.

Thereafter, cinema-going, as distinct from film-making, made a partial recovery. Cinema admissions went back up to 94.5 million in 1989 and continued to climb thereafter. The Eady Levy’s
scrapping may only have made a small contribution to this turnaround; other factors included the waning sense of novelty in home video watching and the construction of new, often out-of-town,
American-style multiplexes which increased screen choice and combined cinema with other youth-oriented facilities like ten-pin bowling and fast-food restaurants. The government, meanwhile, drew the
same enmity from film-makers as it did from the other sectors of the creative arts. It was hardly surprising that resentment should be expressed at Britain’s lack of state support, given the
extent to which it was still available in other European countries. There, film was viewed less as a commercial enterprise than as a cultural treasure, which required protection from the very
market forces that the Thatcherites believed offered the only viable means of funding films (like other cultural creations, such as books and newspapers) in the long term. Both sides found
arguments to back up their principles. Subsidies had failed in the seventies to save the British film industry from producing both low-quality and loss-making movies; and the same was true of
attempts to reintroduce tax breaks and distribute funds through government quangos in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The occasional British successes of the 1990s and 2000s were
largely the product of American funding and were only British in the sense that British talent helped make them. This was not really a fundamental change, but a historic continuity that pre-dated
the eighties: in 1967, 90 per cent of the finance for British film production was American.
⁶⁸
In other areas of the arts, the Thatcher government
was able to claim it had created an economic climate in which lower taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations had encouraged a significant increase in philanthropy and sponsorship for the arts.
It was a significant cultural shift to which home-grown film finance remained largely impervious. The United Kingdom remained essentially unchanged from its status in 1979 – a country of
significant film-makers in search of a significant film industry.

After Modernism

In eighties Britain, a surprisingly violent cultural battleground proved to be a tussle over architecture. Across the visual, literary and performing arts, strong and at times
vitriolic dissent was expressed against Thatcherite attitudes. The political and cultural agendas occupied different, exclusive and mutually antagonistic spaces. Architecture was the artistic
exception. There, the defenders of the post-war consensus lost their cultural predominance and were thrown into retreat by an insurrection mounted from inside as well as outside their profession.
The assault brought together conservatives with a big as well as a small ‘c’ who succeeded in their aim of breaking up the monopoly of modernism.

Sent reeling by these counter-revolutionary forces, the immediate response of architectural progressives was to blame their defeat on the Prince of Wales, whose interference seemed to them a
misuse of royal influence so egregious that it bordered on the unconstitutional.
¹
They accused Prince Charles of whipping up the popular press and
untutored opinion to foist timid traditionalism upon the architectural profession’s innovators. Unsurprisingly, His Royal Highness became a hate figure to those who, having spent at least six
years in training, deeply resented having their work insulted by a public figure whose only qualification was that he was the heir in a hereditary monarchy. However, the allegation of elitism cut
both ways. The prince’s attack wounded its target precisely because he skilfully articulated the contempt that a large section – perceived to be the overwhelming majority – of the
population supposedly felt for those who had shaped the post-war built environment. What was more, the lofty condescension the architectural profession meted out to this princely-led
peasants’ revolt only reinforced the belief that they were indeed an insulated and haughty club, from whom it took constant pressure to extract so much as a whimper of contrition for even the
most egregiously dispiriting creations.

Few cultural ideologies have swept aside their competition more completely than modernism. Its central tenets were inflexible and uncompromising: the design and appearance
of a building must express the industrial means of its production; form must follow function; decoration, unless serving some useful purpose, was unacceptable. Le Corbusier had pronounced that a
house was a ‘machine for living in’ and machines had no use for artifice that concealed the beauty of pure form and design. To those who remained unconverted, modernism resembled a
puritanical religion, obsessed with ‘purity’ or ‘integrity’ of design and ‘honesty’ towards materials – language that suggested the art of building was one
giant fight against such immoralities as historical reference, debased ‘homeliness’, pastiche or a sense of place. Between the 1940s and the 1970s, this modernist ideology determined
the aesthetics of the capitalist West as completely as Marxism–Leninism framed the only officially recognized mode of thought in communist societies. Save for some war-damage repair work and
the occasional extension to a boarding school or a venerable college, scarcely a single public building of importance was erected in Britain in the thirty years after 1945 that did not conform to
the modernist mantra. The movement’s theorists argued that this monopoly was not the triumph of their particular style but rather a victory
over
style. After all, from the 1840s to the
1940s, British architecture had been a continuous style war – classical, Gothic revival, Greek revival, Ruskin-inspired Venetian Gothic, Arts and Crafts, art nouveau, art deco and so on.
Modernism’s rejection of non-functional decoration very abruptly and effectively ended this fashion show of fancy dresses. The extent to which modernism’s monopoly over expression was
finally challenged in the 1980s may be gauged by the diversity of styles that suddenly jostled, often self-consciously, for attention during the decade: high-tech, neoclassical, vernacular,
postmodern. Having disappeared for forty years, style – with or without substance – was back.

While it was the Prince of Wales’s chastisements from 1984 onwards that particularly irked modernist architects, he was the follower rather than the setter of a trend. The intellectual
case against the modernist monoculture had been ably and succinctly made in 1977 by the Cambridge art historian, David Watkin, whose
Morality and Architecture
drew what, for modernists, were
uncomfortable parallels with the Victorian moral self-certainties of the Gothic revivalists. For the lay person, opposition to modern developments bulldozing their way through charming old terraces
and communities was perhaps most poignantly expressed by the poet laureate, John Betjeman. During the 1970s, the conservation movement had begun to fight back against the developers as popular
anger mounted at modernism’s unsubtle building materials, insensitivity to setting and ‘futurist’ priority for cars over pedestrians. What was more, modernism had sown the seeds
of its own
destruction. Its lack of interest in the skills of the craftsman bequeathed mass-produced, prefabricated methods of construction with materials that were ill
adapted to the British climate. The result, too often, was buildings that fell apart. The functional quickly ceased to function.

Nevertheless, this failure of practicality and the growing chorus of critics played only a part in modernist architecture’s retreat during the eighties. Like so much else in the decade,
the main cause was the preference of private enterprise over the state. The spending restraints imposed first by the Callaghan government and continued under Thatcher massively restrained the
public sector’s role as the great patron of modern architecture. Since the Second World War, national and particularly local government had sponsored vast building programmes as the welfare
state took shape in steel frames and concrete. Huge housing estates as well as new schools and hospitals were needed. With local councils adjudicating on the appropriateness of their own schemes,
the demolition of whole town centres was sanctioned, to be replaced with new amenities, civic centres and offices for the burgeoning bureaucracy. Local authority bodies like the London County
Council architects’ department became giant employers of like-minded modernists who were given the chance to master comprehensive redevelopment. Modernism was a neat solution on economic
grounds, since it promised easy-to-assemble and relatively cheap construction techniques which allowed councils to do more for less. Its historically liberated form also appealed at a visceral
level to those who looked at the presumed elitist manifestations of the country’s class-ridden past with distaste and could not wait to replace them with a more egalitarian industrial
aesthetic. Now, central government’s efforts to balance its budgets withdrew the grants that were needed for local government to continue in this fashion. In 1979, the multi-storey concrete
Alexandra Road complex in Camden proved to be the end of the road. It was the last of Britain’s vast housing estates to come out of a local authority planners’ department.