a much comfier seat but the handlebars were a bit weird.
Then a roller disco opened and that felt pretty edgy – a daytime nightclub and sexy women skating round in miniskirts and legwarmers. One was a steward named Hayley, with long, blonde hair and a pneumatic body. She had a red pleated miniskirt like the women in Bucks Fizz wore in ‘Making Your Mind Up’ and she was the prettiest girl in the rink. Ask any boy from Bournemouth what he likes best about his hometown and he’ll tell you it’s the girls.
But mostly I remember Top of the Pops, and me and my friend Lizzie religiously learning all the words to the songs like they were lines in a play. I would record the Top 40 on Sunday night on a cassette tape so I could go through it all the next week copying the lyrics down into an exercise book – ‘Hey Mickey’ by Tony Basil, Howard Jones, the Thompson Twins. I had a picture of Wham! on my wall – my party trick then (and now) was to recite all the words to the ‘Wham Rap’. I properly fancied Andrew Ridgeley. He was my first crush. Smash Hits did a pullout centrespread of him and George that I tacked on to my Laura Ashley wallpaper. Then Mum had another baby and we got an au pair who had this really weird short haircut with a side parting and she loved the Human League. And so began my fascination with cool: something remote I didn’t quite understand but absolutely wanted to be part of.
This was a world with no internet, no mobile phones and just three TV stations. Everyone sat down together and watched Saturday Swap Shop and Tiswas, shows that would foreshadow The Big Breakfast and The Word. You couldn’t stream Dallas and Dynasty in bulk episodes, you had to wait until Saturday night, and watch them episodically week by week. They depicted Reagan’s America, an off-the-wall land of excess, where ranchers drank whisky and drilled for oil, women inhaled champagne and sported massive shoulder pads, and everyone was a total bitch to each other. The whole thing looked incredible. My parents wouldn’t let my brother and me watch either of them to begin with, but they were quite often out on a Saturday night, so we used to pour the babysitter enormous gin and tonics (my dad thought it was very important we knew how to pour a gin and tonic; it made us useful around the house) then sneak downstairs and watch them over her shoulder through the crack in the door.
The nation’s station was Radio 1: Bruno Brookes, Dave Lee Travis, Mike Reid and Simon Bates’s Our Tune. We did things together as a nation, communally, and we went places to meet each other face to face. Girlfriends would phone in the evening to chat on the phone and my dad would be furious to discover me still on the line 40 minutes later – not only was he footing the bill but he was also on-call to the hospital and there was no other way for emergency care to get hold of him. No Skype or mobiles back then.
Eventually I was allowed to take the bus into town on my own and watch the high street change around me. Bournemouth was a town that had been known as God’s Waiting Room when we arrived. It was full of retirement flats and blue rinses, but it started to thrive under Thatcher’s economy, and the average age of the population plummeted. I began to rebel against my mum’s choice of wardrobe for me – she loved all those Eighties bright colours. There was a big C&A at the top of the town that peddled this stuff, along with a Chelsea Girl, an Etam, Tammy Girl and Dorothy Perkins. The high street was not cool back then, not by a long way. It was cheap clothes in nasty fabrics with lairy designs.
Mum eventually relented and gave me a clothes allowance, and I got a pair of pixie boots and a trilby hat on a trip to London to Kensington Market. Then the Body Shop opened in Bournemouth and every Saturday I’d go there to buy peppermint foot lotion and cocoa butter. The Body Shop felt cool: it had all these messages about not being tested on animals, and there was talk of the tribal heartlands where the ingredients were sourced.
Social consciousness began to register. Sting brought an Amazonian warrior onto Wogan, Greenpeace set up shop on the high street, and my mum and I used to cry over the whaling footage on the six o’ clock news. We both signed up to Greenpeace and would cheer on the Rainbow Warrior. As the TV presenter and entrepreneur Richard Reed says: ‘Greenpeace were the great disruptors and agitators. They were really high profile when we were growing up – they approached everything in a way you couldn’t help have empathy with.’
Reed, who went on to make millions out of his company Innocent Smoothies when he sold it to Coca-Cola, still supports Greenpeace as publicly as he can. ‘It’s a charity that gets up people’s noses and creates problems and difficulties. And I say Yes, that is exactly its role. I went on a trip with them to the Amazon to look at the light they shine on deforestation. Multinational companies that ship the world’s grains and seeds, actively involved in illegal deforestation – how can they get away with that?’
The environmental movement was just being born: suddenly everyone was talking about the ozone layer, the CFC scandal kickstarting a boom in roll-on deodorants. Environmental protests against road-building at Newbury, Twyford Down and Fairmile, Devon – which made a hero of the hapless ‘Swampy’ – saw protestors tie themselves to trees and digging tunnels.
Nelson Mandela was also still in jail and, against a backdrop of sanctions and anti-apartheid campaigning, racism seemed the most illogical injustice the human race was capable of committing. I was old enough to go to Wembley for the Free Nelson Mandela concert, and lap up all the books and films – from Cry Freedom to Disgrace – that dominated our cultural youth. Over in the States NWA were fighting prejudice on different fronts, and rap and hip hop culture, threaded with political protest, was booming. The Rodney King riots were to burn all that home to me.
And then came the graphic pictures of starving Africans crawling across their drought-ridden plains, their bellies swollen, flies feasting on their saucer-shaped, tear-filled eyes. It was a new frontier in television reporting, prompting a scruffy rock star to leap onto news studio sofas and catalyse the rescue package. Band Aid, Live Aid: we were very aware as we were growing up that there was plenty to fix in the world, and it was going to be up to us to fix it.
Spiritually, questions were beginning to come up. I went to church a bit as a girl, and opted to get confirmed when I was around 13. Ironically, it was this process – even if I did in the end take my confirmation, and still do receive communion when I take my kids to church – that prompted me to question a faith that until then I had accepted readily at the hands of teachers and my parents. Slowly, I became aware of other faiths that were beginning to blossom around me. A trip to India several years later, during which I volunteered at a Christian orphanage, finally put paid to my sense of belonging to the Anglican Church. The orphans were brought in to the orphanage from a wide area in and around northern India: Buddhists from Tibet and Ladakh, Muslims from Kashmir and Hindus from Himachal Pradesh. All were whitewashed with Christianity. There was no tolerance or liberalism towards their native faiths. Spiritually dislocated, I eventually ended up doing what many of my generation did – turned to yoga and healers.
Meanwhile my girlfriends and I were reading Jilly Cooper novels. Our parents didn’t really talk to us about sex – why should they? It wasn’t in their culture to do so – no one had ever talked to them about it. My mum muttered something to me about getting myself down to the ‘FPC’ (I think she meant the Family Planning Clinic) when I left home and that was that. School gave us a clinical biology lesson but no one, no one talked about it honestly. For that, we had Jilly.
We – I – owe a lot to Jilly Cooper. Books passed around like contraband at schools were so much more informative than biology. And since when did the facts of sexual reproduction prepare you for the world of dating, dumping, mating and marriage? Romping in haystacks, undignified rolls in the back of horse vans and jodhpur-clad bottom-slapping removed much of the glamour around bedroom antics and allowed us to experience a more realistic view of life between the sheets. As Jilly herself said:
‘I remember my editor saying: “Darling, do you think you should have this bit about sperm trickling down the thigh?” I mean, it’s not nice. But we were in this little pocket – from the Sixties to the mid-Eighties – where people weren’t worried about sex. We had contraception, it was before AIDS; it was joyful and exploratory.’
For glamour, we had Rupert Campbell-Black (‘Greek nose, high cheekbones and long, denim-blue