The 1970s were “failure time for Britain”. The words are those of an astute adman who devised the Austin Metro launch of 1980, a brouhaha of flag-waving, commercialised nationalism that caught the hankering to end the defeats, discomforts and grievances of the tawdry, stop-go 1970s. Andy Beckett’s new book – studded with revealing interviews and thoughtful profiles from the early 1980s – evokes and explains the Austin Metro moment in 20th-century history. Politicians, capitalists, socialists, film-makers, peace activists, royalists and rioters were groping their way towards a new version of England; the truth is that Scotland does not matter much in Beckett’s account and Northern Ireland was a different story. He shows how an exasperated population itched for institutional change.
In addition to the Austin Metro publicity, there was the upbeat revivalism of Diana Spencer’s wedding to Prince Charles, England’s trouncing of Australia in the Headingley Test match of 1981, and the nostalgic, heart-stopping thrills of Chariots of Fire. This film about rival Olympic runners, exploring the sacrifices and self-fulfilment involved in competitive striving, and celebrating national pride in individual achievement, would have been scorned by previous generations of cinema-goers, its producer, Lord Puttnam, tells Beckett. But early 1980s audiences were sick of the drab, failed communitarianism of previous years and greeted the flm with tears and cheers to this epoch-defining film.
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