As promised, the news from 27 years ago Our newsreader is TV's Mr
Charisma,
Philip Hayton, played by a waxwork of Sir
Martyn Lewis, our opening titles are the dramatic
Nazi/
RKO hybrid by
Martin Lambie-Nairn, and our stories are:
-
The riot at
Risley, one of the more squalid pits of despair at the time. The full-fledged prison on the site wouldn't open for over a year; at this
point it's still a remand centre, where hundreds of angry felons and accused felons were being held indefinitely awaiting trial. A bit like being a refugee in
Australia. Naturally they got a bit upset.
- The
Monkseaton shootings! There's a lingering look at some rather alarming wounds caused by
Robert Sartin, who isn't as well-remembered as
Michael Ryan because he only managed to kill one person.
Wounded a over a dozen others though. He also neglected to turn the gun on himself, as is traditional, which is why he lives to this day in a maximum secure mental facility, having been judged untriably insane.
-
May Day!
It's celebrated in
Eastern Europe as well, you know.
The Iron Curtain is in the process of rusting away to nothing. By the end of the year, almost every country in
Europe under communist rule won't be anymore, including
Czechoslovakia. They just had a bit of a riot, which involved a
BBC journalist getting thumped and then interrogated.
-
Meanwhile, the spring
parade in
Moscow went off without a hitch, even if from here it looks unmistakably like a tap-dance on the
Titanic.
Martin Sixsmith singles out an unknown
Boris Yeltsin as a radical with the potential to loom large in the
Soviet Union's future. Which it turned out he did, of course, if only to teach this man how to pronounce his name.
Gorbachev's adorable granddaughter is the cue for Sixsmith to ruminate on who could be running the
USSR when she grows up - because surely it'll still be there. Even as revolution burned across Eastern Europe, we still couldn't quite conceive of the Soviet Union just disappearing.
-
David Webster was quite a nice
South African, and that's why they've shot him.
-
Lord Mackay, the
Lord Chancellor, apparently wants to effectively nationalise the legal profession. Said profession has banded together to explain why this is a bad idea.
- A by-election is happening in the
Vale of Glamorgan!
Labour are the favourites and the
Tories are doomed; being a bunch of
English bastards who like closing minds, they're not terribly popular in
Wales, although the
Vale is on the wishy-washy side; this by-election notwithstanding they've voted for whoever wins the
General - hence being
Tory again now, the bastards. An unfeasibly young and lantern-jawed
Huw Edwards reports.
-
Sport! And as the title race reaches squeaky bum time,
Arsenal open up a six-point lead, but only because
Liverpool have six points in hand.
Michael Thomas' goal on the last minute of the last game of the season wins the title on goal
difference.
Be prepared to be made very dizzy by the second division table.
- Oh, and that's a bad miss. The interesting
Steve Davis (even the BBC reporter makes a joke about it) wins the championship for a sixth time, beating the shit out of
John Parrott in the final. I got into snooker once, the same way I got into tennis: by slumping in front of the screen too depressed to move, and absorbing the rules and narrative by osmosis. While tennis managed to stuck with me, snooker didn't; the significance of all the little balls and the order in which they're potted dribbled right out of the other side of my head. It was fun while it lasted, I expect.
And then Hayton bids us farewell and the lights dim to that insanely huge theme tune.
- published: 19 Mar 2016
- views: 22