Class of ’83

No one remembers this now but there really was a period, not so long ago, when the Eighties were universally reviled as the ‘decade that style forgot’.

For a time it got so bad that none of us survivors could even bear to look at old photos of ourselves: mullets, feather cuts, Limahl-style bleaching, pastels, legwarmers, unflattering suits so boxy they made you look broader than you were tall…

But try telling this to the kids today and they won’t believe you. The Eighties, as far as they’re concerned, are so achingly, incredibly, bleeding-edge cool that there’s no way their parents could possibly have lived through them and, ‘Oh, by the way, Dad, do you mind if I take that old jacket of yours back to school?’ (That last quote is a lie by the way. They never ask. They just assume.)

So it’s no wonder that Deutschland 83 (Channel 4) has established itself as such a seductive Sunday night TV rival to War and Peace. Even if the drama were rubbish (which it’s not, though it does teeter occasionally on the verge of silliness) you could just sit back and wallow in that echt early 1980s ambiance: the haircuts, the charmingly old-fashioned geopolitical tensions, the thrill of encountering your first Walkman…

And, of course, that immaculate soundtrack. I don’t remember at the time being particularly smitten by Duran Duran’s ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’, let alone Bowie’s ‘China Girl’. But the intervening decades have lent them the patina of classics that can now happily rank with the Eighties stuff that was always good such as New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’, Eurythmics’ ‘Sweet Dreams’ and — I’m sorry — Nena’s ‘99 Luftballons’.

The drama concerns a sweet-looking East German border guard Martin Rauch (Jonas Nay) who is recruited via his wicked aunt to work as a deep-cover spy as aide-de-camp to a West German general.