Return of the Cockney

Although the smart consensus now is that 'the Sixties' in Britain was really 'Swinging London', outside of the art/fashion/music scene it was really a northern decade. Starting with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning then the Beatles, The Making of the English Working Class, Coronation Street, Z Cars, Manchester United, the New Universities (none of them in London), Harold Wilson (Huddersfield) vs George Brown (Lambeth) it was the north that made the running. The stereotype of 'the northern scientist' - ex-grammar school, then onto British Steel - was much more representative than, say, Michael Caine.

In many ways, as The London that Nobody Knows suggests, much of London's popular culture, architecture etc was looking rather archaic by the '60s. Blow Up is a strangely silent and empty film, as a small group of hipsters run round a Victorian playground. And for good reason: London was already in its then alarming decline, in which it would lose a million of its population. Get Carter is a great cinematic revenge on Londoners, in which Caine has to head to where the real money and power is. And never returns.

The real London decade was the 1980s. There's no need on here it rehearse the economics and politics of why that was so. But it’s worth noting that it was the decade when working class Londoners (including the Essex/Kent/Surrey diasporas) finally decided to take themselves seriously and catch up with modernity. No more Steptoe and Son.

Most striking was the big invasion of cockney voices, writing and faces into the media. Obviously Only Fools and Horses, Eastenders, Minder, The Bill, Grange Hill. Cockney was down-on-the-street 'real'. Maybe more importantly cockney accents were finally allowed on factual television, the medium's great test of authority:

Always going to be too pronounced for some those accents, but they properly reflect the desire to force yourself onto the medium without apology and without fluffing your lines. Also note there's no censoriousness or 'anthropology of the workers' in those films, but no cheap exploitation either. Instead it’s relaxed, democratic, in-the-moment. It has a 'this is what my friends do at the weekend: why shouldn't it have 15 mins of airtime?' feel.

The Robert Elms/Spandau Ballet/Paul Weller wing of this minor movement began to take themselves rather too seriously, of course ('From half-spoken shadows emerges a canvas. A kiss of light breaks to reveal a moment when all mirrors are redundant. Listen to the portrait of the dance of perfection: the Spandau Ballet'.) The northern suspicion of 'cockney wankers' grew in this period: either they were too brash or too slick. Definitely too materialistic.

Billy Bragg, Paul Weller or Ken Livingstone might feel rather aggrieved at being labelled this way. They were after all rather more explicitly anti-Thatcher than New Order or Tony Wilson ever were. The Style Council were incredibly earnest, and their clumsiness in crafting a modernist-socialist-soul sound stands in contrast to the cool post-modernism of Factory.

The brief hegemony of cockney was its undoing. The tabloids and commercial TV embraced it and distorted it for their own ends. The path to London Fields and Parklife began here. 'Cockney' was also very male, always with a hint of aggression to it, and apolitical. Red Ken is very rarely called 'a cockney' although he is one. Admitting that 'the most successful working class socialist politician' really was a man of the people would have been too much for The Sun.

The likes of Class War did attempt to give the 'Loadsamoney' style a leftish twist:

It doesn't quite convince, mainly because Ian Bone is actually from Bristol. But the clip nicely brings out some of the contradictions of the 80s cockney. Ross, whilst hinting he agrees with some of the politics, isn't going to drop the American-style slickness he's hard won, even as his brother is denounced as a class traitor.

It was the actors, where voice matters most, who really suffered in the 90s fall out. Kathy Burke has now effectively given up acting, Ray Winstone reduced to betting ads. Nil By Mouth showed what they really could give to British culture. But we've ended up with Nick Love and Notting Hill instead.

"After Helena Bonham Carter, the great-granddaughter of Herbert Asquith, complained that for all her advantages and beauty directors would not hire her because she was not "trendily working class", an exasperated Kathy Burke found the effort of keeping a civil tongue in her head too much to bear. "As a lifelong member of the non-pretty working classes," she told Time Out, "I would like to say to Helena Bonham Carter: shut up you stupid cunt."