TRIVIAL PURSUITS
By The Mumbler, 19 January 2001

She's probably blissfully unaware, but RT's Alison Graham's one of those people whose enthusiasm for genuine (and by this we mean unadulterated) trivia knows no bounds. The sort of individual who would deem that the worst thing about terminal cancer would be the inconvenience of wearing one of those awful wigs. And, Alison would say, "it would be even worse for the rest of us because we'd have to keep any clever comments to ourselves, and we'd have to resort to making faces of the wallpaper textures instead"... Etc. Such is Alison's World.

Scribbling about the 70s back in the summer, shortly before the debut of I Love The 70s (BBC2, 22 July - 23 September 2000), Alison delightedly twittered about deafening clothes and oh, yellow hair or something like that. What simply crazy times! The only real thorny problem came about when she had to comment on the "poison" of the ITV sitcom Love Thy Neighbour. Happily, having seen a few inflammatory excerpts on some clip show, she didn't have to think of any of her own opinions, and having dismissed it, she could now sit back, safe in the knowledge that she had done her bit for the state of race relations across Britain, and - well, why not? - the world.

But the 80s. Uh-oh - a different matter. Alison, you see, doesn't quite know what to do now. Forget party politics - Alison isn't interested in such things. But the 80s are regarded as the decade when style began to rule over content, and when the substantial was succeeded by the superficial. Ring any bells? The headline for her painfully inadequate "I Love The 80s" piece (Radio Times, 13-19 January 2001) sums up Alison's dilemma very fittingly: "Well, it was good for a time for stockbrokers and estate agents - oh, and television viewers". Clearly, Alison doesn't want to risk alienating RT's blushing predominantly New Labour readership, even though many of them probably couldn't wait to burn Callaghan in 1979, and would no doubt plump for Hague in the next election like a shot if only his party could devise a slightly better policy on how to get rid of those pesky asylum-seekers. The sentence "Alison Graham looks back on the decade in all its self-absorbed, shoulder-padded glory" is only ruined by the fact that presumably the word "its" should have been replaced by a mischevious sub-editor with the word "her". Otherwise, she is spot on.

"The eighties was a strange decade", Graham begins emptily, although this is hardly surprising, given that she hasn't decided yet whether or not to be honest about the way she felt about it all at the time - although we'd bet cold hard cash that she fucking adored the 80s. To postpone her decision, she twats on about the 70s being "naff and fun" (not if you lived in Cambodia they weren't), and the 90s being self-consciously cool, thoughtful and ironic. In what way, for Christ's sake? That doesn't actually mean anything at all. But suddenly, it dawns on you that what Alison is doing here is saying "I Love My 80s". She burbles soundbites like "greed is good" and "terrible patterned braces" even though she probably thinks to this day that Gordon Gekko was a goalkeeper. She appears to have got all her cultural references for this section not even from Wall Street, but inevitably perhaps, from that episode of Only Fools And Horses... where Delboy falls through the bar. She then manages to reduce the arrival of Aids to that bit in Fatal Attraction where the rabbit came to a sticky end. Trivial? But of course. We can only be relieved that she doesn't get started on the Miners' Strike ("those drab hats would have got them ejected from the average dinner party in seconds!"), or Lockerbie ("just how many patios would have been damaged as a result we can only guess at").

Never mind. Alison's got the serious bit done now, and so can tell us about all the great 80s icons and things. Sadly her copy is as vague as that last sentence. Alison, y'see, knows nothing about anything beyond the confines of TV soaps, and so she is able to fill up her 1000 word quota with a great deal of bluster, but (as usual) next to no insight. Essentially, though, it boils down to this: We may have been crap 20 years ago, but now we're aware, self-regarding, and able to recognise the flaws of the past. (Er, like racism, for example? The demise of Love Thy Neighbour and so on has meant that racism has all but died out across the world. What a relief!) At no point does she remind us that Channel 4 was born, that single plays were still an integral part of the primetime schedule, or even that people still dared to ever be sincere about their feelings or opinions. But hey. That would require thought - which is just so 90s, right? Right.

She doesn't even seem to realise that most of her argument is based around what she obviously never experienced in the first place. She only knows about Magnum because once you know it was set on a small-ish island, you can repeat the "How can that many crimes take place in such a small area" quip that you've remembered ever since someone else said it about Bergerac in about 1984. Then she returns to what she knows best - yes, trivia. Tom Selleck, she learns, had "a big moustache". Or that The A-Team offered us "big jewellery with the absurd Mr T". Or that Howard's Way's yachts are described as er..."big". Do you see a pattern emerging at all?

Alison can certainly mine her life about music, though. What can you say about "Pop was fun, and you could dance to it."? (Another non-opinion devoid of meaning - when has pop not been fun or danceable?) And what of "the terrifying power ballads of the likes of Jennifer Rush" (her view in 2001), "whose Power Of Love provided the soundtrack for many a midlife crisis"? (Indeed, Alison's own vinyl copy is so worn out and tear-stained, she had to buy a CD of it recently.)

As her final paragraph begins, Alison suddenly realises that she's spent most of her 80s piece writing about soaps, appropriate as that's all she can relate to. Mindful of the quality TV brigade who still pick up Radio Times because it is supposedly still better than the competition, she reminds us that it wasn't all "rhinestones and glitter" on the box, highlighting ITV's dramatisation of Brideshead Revisited, which "made stars of Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews and Castle Howard" (who was, presumably, OK, but not as impressive as his dad Trevor in Brief Encounter), and BBC1's Boys From The Blackstuff. In self-satisfied mode, she is keen to point out that "Yosser Hughes's 'gissa job' was more than a handy catchphrase", but as she doesn't really elaborate, she has fallen arse-over-tit into the same trap. If only she hadn't spent so many words on Dallas and Dynasty and EastEnders... But then, Alison could write for Britain on EastEnders. Heartbreakingly, she does. Every week. With fail.

So Alison finishes her look back at the 80s, and she is none the wiser about her feelings towards that "strange decade". Read as a whole, her piece could be a statement about the vacuity of popular culture, and the trivialisation of Britain during the 80s. How reassuring that she's left all of that behind, eh?