A myth seems to be developing about the 1990s. In a recent programme on Disney Plus called In Vogue: The 90s, a series of talking heads rhapsodise about the decade. ‘God, the 90s just changed everything,’ oozes Hamish Bowles, a fashion journalist. ‘It was a great time to be alive, it really felt like a revolution was underway,’ says model and actor Tyler Beckford. ‘Wow – what does the 90s mean to me?’ asks Naomi Campbell, suggesting it’s almost too vast a question to answer.
Outside the programme, others seem to agree. ‘The 90s were the best decade ever – a time of real fun, freedom and abandon,’ says a recent article in the Irish Mirror. Novelist Bret Easton Ellis adds: ‘They were completely awesome all the way round, from movies, to music to…just freedom. It was freedom.’
It was all going kaput, and this was true of many people too
Listening to the gush of this nostalgia, I can’t help wondering, did these people and I live through the same decade? Because the 1990s, as I remember them, were almost unremittingly dull.
Part of it was the feeling of having missed out on the Sixties – the really cool decade – or simply the turgid stability of 90s political life. Yes, the Berlin Wall had just fallen and the Cold War was over, but in Britain it seemed like things would never change. A decade of Margaret Thatcher had given way to seven years of John Major, a man so unexciting he was depicted on Spitting Image as grey all over and wittering on incessantly to his wife about the peas she’d served at dinner. We longed, as young people will, for a Labour government but, seeing them lose by a whisker in 1992, had to make do with watching smugly left-wing films like Truly, Madly, Deeply or wallowing in the misery of Ken Loach.
In so many ways, we appeared to have missed the boat. The generation born after the war at least had the three-day week, the power cuts of the 1970s and the Soviet menace to grapple with. Casting around for enemies, we came up with Rupert Murdoch, McDonalds and The Word presenter Terry Christian.
Even when Tony Blair came along – a Labour leader who would break the 18-year pattern of Labour defeat – his policies were so close to Tory ones it just seemed business as usual. It wasn’t Clement Attlee in 1945, building a New Jerusalem. It wasn’t even Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’. Instead, when Blair spoke, we got a dizzying array of verbless sentences with the words ‘new’ and ‘young’ in all of them, to hammer home just how knackered we felt.
There are plenty of things, looking back, to miss about the 1990s, but they were even more prevalent in the decades just preceding them. We could, until 1998, still get a free education. We young could bum around on the dole as long as we liked and property, even in central London, was still relatively cheap. Our behaviour was less rigidly policed and, in that last gasp before Twitter and mobile phone cameras, we weren’t each other’s potential spies and informers. We read books, wrote long letters to one another and, if we met up, it was face to face. ‘Inappropriate’ and ‘problematic’ had yet to become buzzwords and the culture, summed up by the whoops and giggles of the Big Breakfast audience, was engaged in a desperate hunt for fun.
Yet there was the feeling of coming to the end of something, and not just the Millennium. Routemaster buses and red phone boxes were starting to disappear, and the traffic in the capital, before the congestion charge, was becoming a bad joke. We still had plenty of musty bookshop and hangovers from the past, like Bunjie’s Coffee House & Folk Cellar (off Charing Cross Road) or the New Piccadilly Café, where the waiters wore epaulettes and you could get a cup of tea for 50p. Yet rent rises were about to snuff them out, as they would with so many of those gloriously tatty repertory cinemas each area seemed to have – to which, for under a fiver, you could slip out any afternoon for a double-bill of Jean Luc Goddard, Kubrick or Kieslowski.
It was perhaps the last decade which really valued the arts. Programmes like Omnibus, Arena, the South Bank Show – which had inspired and educated generations – were enjoying an Indian summer before being pushed callously to the margins. Painters and novelists were still front page news, and the Commonwealth-based Booker Prize, before its catastrophic opening up to all comers in 2013, still meant something. We may have been politically inert but Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’, needless to say, were left to bloom in peace.
Yet it was all going kaput, and this was true of many people too. The actor Sir Robert Stephens – a great thunderstorm of a man – was giving peerless performances of Falstaff and King Lear at the RSC, but he’d be dead by 1995. The same year would claim the comedian Peter Cook – a man who’d laugh any folly out of countenance, and whose wry take on life seemed indispensable. Cantankerous writers like John Osborne and The Spectator’s columnist Jeffrey Bernard were leaving us too, in 1994 and 1997 respectively.
Slowly we were turning into something duller, more intolerant of human frailty, something else. As we became less empathic and less kind, we began to use the words ‘empathy’ and ‘kindness’ more often. The Dianafication of the UK – the creeping supremacy of feelings and emotions, all played out in public – was now underway. It became more important to be seen to feel, than actually to do so.
We appeared, in so many ways, to be pointing in the wrong direction. In 1994, in one of the cultural highlights of that decade, TV writer Dennis Potter, dying of stomach cancer, gave his famous final interview to Melvin Bragg. We were, he warned, heading into a cultural, moral desert, and for a conformity almost total. TV, which no longer cared about our emancipation, was being taken over by the moneymen. The welfare state his generation had fought for and were so proud of was now being ‘callously dismantled’. Tabloid culture had polluted the political process and, he said, by not making simple statements about what mattered in life and how we should treat one another, we were ‘destroying ourselves’.
The interview was hugely affecting, almost seismic, but like so many things it encouraged you to look back rather than forward and do anything but live in the here and now. It had, though, the ring of truth. For all the guffaws of TFI Fridays and the Girlie Show, the party was essentially over.
It’s a sad irony that we now look back on that decade as one of plenty. It’s only amidst the strictures and shibboleths of 2024 – as we watch our Ps and Qs and worry what we’ve said, written, even worn – that the UK of the 90s looks like a paradise lost. Had we been told then that we were living through a great renaissance – Britpop, Britart, Phony Tony and all – we would have given the most ironic of 90s sniggers. The culture seemed about as lively as one of Damian Hirst’s pickled cows.
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