Floyd and Mike

Author notes

Good Morning Britain

Cold

on May 3, 2007

Good God Bruce Gyngell was a fucking cunt

TV-am might actually be my favourite channel. Everything about it just screams “We are Britain in the Nineteen Eighties. Every contour, every inch of the parabola, every atom of the oxygen in the aerosol and smoke-clogged atmosphere can be found within these walls, beneath this roof, in the shade of these eggcups.

"We are Thatcher and Tebbit and Roland Rat. We are Greg Dyke, Anna Ford, the Beast of Bolsover and the Jungle God of Henley. We are Nicholas Witchell and Neil Kinnock. We are Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev and Reagan. We are the Ayatollah, we are Mitterand and we are Bob Hawke. We are pastels and mullets and A Flock of Seagulls. We are the Smiths, Sinitta, Duran Duran and Johnny Hates Jazz.

"We are the Great Storm, the Herald of Free Enterprise, Black Monday and Hungerford. We are Maradona, Ruud Gullit, Bjorn Borg. We are the heaven and hell. We are the eighties, wrapped with a ribbon of plastic in bright yellow and served to you. We are Britain, in legwarmers and spandex and a bright red plastic codpiece. We are everything you need to know about this time and place, the set text, the anthology. We are Britain in the Nineteen Eighties, love us.”

It does tend to take a while to say.