The decade of Delia

Proof that someone has really made it as a TV historian comes, I would suggest, when they join the likes of David Starkey and Simon Schama by getting their name into the programme’s title. So it is that Dominic Sandbrook’s The 70s, from 2012, has now been followed by The 80s with Dominic Sandbrook (BBC2, Thursday), a series that confirms his ability to put across moderately big ideas in a light easy style — and in a parka. Sometimes when watching television, you might be in the mood for a serious history documentary, and sometimes for a show that’ll just wash over you pleasantly. With Sandbrook — and I’m pretty sure I mean this as a compliment — you can have both.

His moderately big idea here is that, while Mrs Thatcher embodied the Eighties ideals of aspiration and individualism, she didn’t create them. Instead that was done by us — with, as Sandbrook somewhat dubiously insisted in last week’s opening episode, a lot of help from the true queen of the decade, Delia Smith.

On Thursday, he continued to prize social history over the political kind, beginning the programme with the game Space Invaders, which caused such alarm among MPs that a parliamentary debate was held on what one called ‘the growing menace of the video arcade’. For my money, this only went to show that almost nothing can become popular among British youngsters without being seen as a terrible threat. (Cf, needless to say, Pokémon Go.) For Sandbrook, though, it was clear evidence of the ‘deep anxiety running through the heart of the decade’.

Such anxiety, much-mentioned throughout the rest of the programme, did provide a useful peg for whatever Sandbrook wanted to tell us about. But it also drew attention to the series’ main weakness: his determination to claim more or less any social trend of the time — including the fear of change and the love of American culture — as something unique to the 1980s, rather than say, part of British life for as long as anyone can remember.