There's this memory I have, of my childhood. It's October 1990, and it's cold. Cold enough that I have to put on a jacket when I go outside to play with the other kids in my street after watching that night's episode of Doctor Who. The serial that month was, you'll recall, 'Lungbarrow', the first six-part serial since 'The Armageddon Factor' and a historic milestone in the programme's history. I'm still thinking of the first episode cliffhanger when I notice that our street sign has been damaged, probably by a car, and absentmindedly kick it.
In my head I am recreating a frame from Frank Miller and David Mazuchelli's Batman: Year One, which I had recently received as a birthday present due to my absolute obsession with Tim Burton's 1989 Batman adaptation. In the eyes of an elderly woman passing by, however, I am clearly engaged in a wanton act of vandalism against a sign which, before I set about it with my Bruce Lee tactics, was completely intact. I am harangued for my alleged crime until I decide I have had enough and go back inside. It's a small, inconsequential memory, but it looms larger in my mind as the last memory I have of things during my teens being normal.
The memory cheats, of course, to use John Nathan-Turner's favourite expression. It's not as if everything went mad the next day: Geoffrey Howe didn't resign, and read the details of what Thatcher knew about what Jimmy Savile had done into the Parliamentary record, until a week later. But I daresay things probably happened to all those wistful Edwardians between their Sunday afternoons in the park and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Like those memories, my image of myself being hectored by a censorious old woman who has no idea what's really going on is what Eliot would call an objective correlative for the years that would follow, and the attitudes that those years would displace.
Similarly freighted images were already forming in front of the cameras on the night that Howe made his speech. Angry mobs in Scarborough and Leeds rioted, spurred to attack Savile's local associates, or animated by rumours that he himself had been sighted somewhere in town. The sight of riot police beating people back from approaching Savile's Roundhay Park flat stayed with many: an image of the establishment protecting its own.
I guess they must have stayed in the memories of the soldiers stationed in Saudi Arabia to fight Saddam, who started mutinying. The fragging didn't start until April the following year, but the number of troops going AWOL or being disciplined for insubordination began almost immediately. Of course we now know how much Savile's own attitudes had - well, there is no other word for it - penetrated the military at that point, though it shouldn't have surprised us. He was always keen to be photographed with squaddies.
And royalty. Prince Dai pointed out the links between Savile and the Windsors in a Christmas interview with the Daily Express, but was careful, then, to stick to what was public knowledge - the close friendship between Charles Windsor, Savile and Louis Mountbatten, for example. More would follow next year after he left Charles, began transitioning, and started dating Freddie Mercury. But I don't think I would have even been very aware of this that Christmas, though I did notice the BBC pulled almost all new light entertainment programming from its festive schedules that year, replacing them with repeats - including, to my delight, a few classic Who serials.
We learned about Cliff Richard's suicide on the Christmas night news. Well, I suppose I should say overdose. There are those who still genuinely believe it was accidental, that Clean-livin' Cliff had a genuine medical need to have a lethal quantity of barbiturates around the house, and that he simply screwed up and clumsily took all the pills at once instead of the one or two he'd presumably been prescribed.
The arrests began around New Year. Hall, Travis, Davidson, Harris, Glitter, Greer, and so on through the early months of '91. Along with the Birmingham Six being freed and the Hillsborough inquiry recording an open verdict it all added to a steady erosion of authority. 'What right do these people have to govern us?' was the question more and more people were asking. And that question got a lot louder when Prime Minister Heseltine announced that British troops would be withdrawn from the Gulf at the request of French and US forces who were sick of having to deal with disorder among British units, then promptly resigned.
We were on our third Prime Minister in less than a year, and the open grumbling about whether or not the Tories could be said to have a mandate turned into full rebellion in the summer of 1991 as riots broke out in cities throughout Britain and the Sun offices were firebombed. Perhaps hoping to ease the pressure by introducing an electoral safety valve, John Major announced an election to be held in April 1992, as well as an official inquiry into the breakdown of order among British troops during the Gulf War.
A year after I watched the first episode of 'Lungbarrow', the country had changed significantly, but it was still recognisable as the same place I had grown up in, even if I now knew that many of the people I had been told to admire as a child were the vilest kind of criminal, and people in authority had known and done nothing or, worse, colluded in their crimes. That was a lot to deal with, especially on top of First Puberty. But it was nothing compared to what was going to happen.
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