were the ’80s as much fun as Jilly Cooper says?

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Absolutely. We blokes spent the whole time having sex with glamorous women in Concorde toilets, shooting pheasants and playing polo. Obviously, we were all amazing lovers; you should have heard the shrieks. It was like a Hammer Horror film even in economy. In fact, the new champagne-and-shagging TV series based on her book Rivals is less drama than cinéma vérité.

Well, when I say we, I can’t exactly remember doing any of that myself. I certainly don’t remember ever travelling on a Concorde, which suggests the other stuff may not have happened either. I’ve never played polo, mainly because I can barely sit on a horse, and, regrettably, I have concluded that I am not as buff as that bloke from Poldark. But, hey, that’s just me. Everyone else was absolutely doing all these things. You should have seen the queue for the lavs when you were flying supersonic.

And then there were all those naked tennis matches — again, not me personally, but everyone else. They had to show Wimbledon after the watershed; it was that filthy. There was no naked tennis on our street, mainly because people didn’t have tennis courts but perhaps there was a lot of naked table tennis instead, hence that famous ’80s catchphrase “ping pong; ding dong”. Also everyone had names which told you if they were wrong ’uns, like Tony Baddingham or Rupert Baddie-Black.

The televising of Jilly Cooper’s joyously racy novel (basically Footballers’ Wives for the better bred) is spurring talk of a wider ’80s revival, which is worrying because the fashions were terrible and there’s only so much Wham! you can listen to. I suppose it is the appeal of an uncomplicated time when women succumbed with a simper and political correctness was just a punchline.

Since I spent most of the decade in my twenties, I had a wonderful ’80s, even if my experiences were considerably less racy than in Rivals. There was definitely no country-house action. None of my friends owned a Brideshead or had a slightly younger drop-dead gorgeous sister just waiting to seduce me, in the way that absolutely all drop-dead gorgeous younger sisters were in the ’80s. I do remember a dinner party in a detached house near Guildford, though it was definitely clothed and there was definitely no sibling action.

Even so, after the dreariness of the late ’70s, a decade that seemed drawn in browns and greys, the ’80s seemed to be years of primary colours. The Thatcher revolution spawned an era of conspicuous consumption (remember “greed is good” and Harry Enfield’s “Loadsamoney”), when ordinary people suddenly found opportunities to have real money in their pockets. I particularly loved the extravagance of the New Romantics, although, never living at the front of a trend curve, my own concessions to the style of the times barely went beyond a pair of pixie boots and some waistcoats.

Naturally, everyone’s experiences were different. Those in industries at the wrong end of the Thatcher revolution remember the hardship. Minorities still felt the sting of open prejudice and the gay community was about to be hammered by Aids.

The one thing Rivals does offer is an antidote to all the hand-wringing dramas in which some middle-class ’80s oik is taken up by a family of toffs, whose father is always a conservative minister trying to sell off the NHS or an investment banker about to be convicted of fraud.

I do worry, however, that Rivals is putting my own ’80s memories to shame. I went to great parties, made life-long friends at college, fell in love, took my first career steps, danced and laughed, and ate way too much Chinese food. But now I realise this was pathetic. Bloody hell! Rivals was the ’80s I should have had. A few snogs in a Ford Fiesta does not compete with screams of ecstasy at Mach 2. And as for polo, my ’80s was entirely uncontaminated by pert buttocks in jodhpurs (not even my own).

Even my over-romanticised memory can’t keep up with this. These fictional ’80s weren’t most people’s fictional ’80s. They are upper-class fictional ’80s. And upper-class fictional shagfests are the same in every decade. Don’t believe me? Watch Bridgerton. 

So yes, the ’80s really were great. It’s just that apparently the best bits happened to someone else. 

Email Robert at [email protected]

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