Eighty something

The 1980s are strangely in vogue this summer in London. Shortly after the BBC adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker-winning novel The Line Of Beauty, for which I was lucky enough to review the subtitles for the DVD release, comes the National Theatre’s production of Market Boy, a new play about a market trader apprentice in mid ‘80s Thatcherite Romford. It’s a fairly meaningless play but a visually rich production, with a cringingly familiar soundtrack and great attention to detail to the fashions and crazes of the time, from smiley faces to fluorescent cardboard. The BBC production of The Line Of Beauty failed in this regard as its characters looked far too much out of the current era. Not one of them wore pastel polka dots, shoulder pads, Fergie bows, chunky plastic beads and bracelets, long dangly earrings, big bouffon hair or big eyebrows. Obviously the characters in The Line Of Beauty are far removed from a working-class Essex market but as I’m currently creating subtitles for the third series of Howards' Way from circa 1987, I can confirm that characters aspiring to the upper classes - and those allegedly working in the fashion industry - sported all of this finery. Market Boy does however contain its own inaccuracies – many of the songs played in the first half hadn’t been released in 1985, the year it is set. And Zammo from Grange Hill’s drug problem, amusingly referred to when the lead character is offered an ecstasy tablet, was surely later on than that. And who was taking ecstasy in 1985? (According to The Line Of Beauty, it was cocaine that was our drug of choice) Or have the years gone by quicker than I care to imagine?

As Michael Billington’s Guardian review points out, Mrs Thatcher gets off lightly in Market Boy. She is portrayed as an icon, a Britannic goddess, and gets cheers and wild applause from the audience – all of which grate a little when you can remember all too clearly what happened to your country under her rule. She wasn’t an angel, she was a harpy. For starters, she made 12 million people actually want to watch Howards' Way on a Sunday night and actually be interested in crushingly dull scenes of board meetings talking rubbish about consortiums and bankers drafts. People forget all too quickly about how bad things really were – go out and buy those DVDs of Howards' Way when they are released and think about what you might become if you vote David Cameron into power at the next election.

REBECCA