The Rest Is History - 23. The 90s

Episode Date: February 15, 2021

Ecstasy, emails and economic stability. Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland discuss the 1990s, a decade which brought us Oasis, Tony Blair, Monica Lewinsky and Mr Blobby. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello, welcome to The Rest Is History. Where does history start and end? Are the 1990s too recent to count as history? Well, this is our podcast, so we make the rules. Welcome to The Rest Is History, the podcast that refuses to be bound by convention. And today we're looking back at the decade that gave us Oasis and Blur, Boris Yeltsin, the death of Yugoslavia, Monica Lewinsky and Mr Blobby. Tom Holland, do you remember the 1990s? I mean, you must have been, what, 40, 45?

The banter keeps playing. I was in my 20s in the 1990s so i remember bits of it yeah and i think the best way to get into this dominic since uh yes this is very much your field um is to uh is to start with a tweet from thomas jones who asked who says my history teacher said that 50 years ago is history anything less is politics whatever the number there must be a cut off and that's exciting because it might suggest that actually yeah my career is over you're not legitimate your entire career is over well i mean a lot of people have been saying that for years to be fair but i want to leave that that exciting possibility hanging because before we come to the 90s and that question um just a quick

reprise to our last episode which was uh we gave our list of top 10 weird wars and we've had quite um quite a response to that um we have yeah giving giving us um some suggestions uh so we have uh three from steven clark so we have the flagstaff war a scrap about a flagpole in which the maori beat the british empire i assume you know all about that, Dominic. I know nothing about that. But you must know about the football war. This is Stephen's second suggestion. Yeah. So I didn't, a lot of people said to us,

why didn't you pick the football war? El Salvador and Honduras fighting in 1969 after a World Cup qualifier. I mean, I think it's A, quite well known, and we had quite a lot of South American, sort of Latin American wars. But it is a good, weird war. If you're going to do weird wars, the Football War is a good one. What's Clarke's third one? The Star Wars. So that's not the film's, it's a series of main conflicts between 562 and 781. You must know that. Yeah,

you know that really well, do you Tom? That's your period. Right in the back of my hand. Again, I've never heard of that. um we got one from dave waters who offers this priceless suggestion the war of the stray dog in 1925 caused by the shooting of a border guard chasing a stray dog greece bulgaria lasted 11 days and then he has a great podcast as per usual so we very much like that suggestion uh jim ju has an even shorter one the anglo zanzibar war he says too short to make the list is it still a war if hostilities lasted the length of half a football match before stoppage time so yes this was a war that lasted about 45 minutes and i think um the british wanted to get rid of the ruler of zanzibar i can't remember the exact details but basically

yes it lasted less than a half of football and And I think British one sailor was injured. And we won, as we often won these sort of gunboat diplomacy dust-ups. Back in those days, yeah. And then we've got two Irish ones. We've got one from Dominic. No, I am Dominic. Yeah. I'm not sending – I should start doing that, actually,

start sending questions to our podcast. Yes, a Dominic sandbrook has written in with a ludicrous question what nonsense is this it's not you dominic it's ian winterton who drew our attention to uh the 1866 irish invasion of canada i don't know anything about that i'm going to look that one up um and emin mcginty the Battle of Cwlldremni, I hope I pronounced that right, in around 555 AD in Ireland was started over a prayer book. St Finian and St Columba began the war after both claimed ownership of the Psalter. I mean, that's an excellent reason. There was a famous prayer book war, wasn't there, in Scotland? 1638, 1640 or whatever it is,

prayer book war then. And there's one from Sparkling Wine Charlie. He says he's slightly disappointed, well, she's slightly disappointed, that the Turbot War wasn't mentioned. Tom, I know you know all about the Turbot War. It's not Cod Wars, is it? No, I don't know what it is. You don't know either.

I know about the Cod Wars, but I, I mean, we lost the Cod Wars, so I've kind of tried to blank it out, but the turbo war is a mystery to me. So basically if anyone listened to this podcast for the first time, which it's a session of tweets in which we show that we know nothing at all about anything. So not promising. I think, I think that we should cut to the chase and go back to something that you at

any rate do know about which is um uh how you write contemporary history yeah so the 90s just yeah yeah so just to remind we're talking about the 90s and this tweet from thomas jones um the history teacher who says that 50 years ago's history anything less is politics are you a fraud dominic sandbrook well we talked about mr blobby the in the So Mr. Blobby definitely isn't politics. You always get this when you're doing quite recent history. People say, is it really history? I mean, I got this when I started my sort of series about post-war Britain, writing about the 50s. And people would say, oh, the 50s, how in the 60s, how can that be history?

AJP Taylor wrote his history of britain between the wars which he called english history great title so he published that in 1965 and he was right going up to the end of the second world war so you're talking and that was in the oxford history of england i think so that's sort of 20 year gap and 20 to 30 years is i would say probably the norm it's the point at which people start looking back so when litton straight he wrote his eminent victorians what's that 1920s so again about 20 to 30 years after i think you then get a bit of a sense of perspective most of the actors have left the stage um it feels like the day before yesterday. And so there's a sense of looking back rather than looking around. I don't know, what do you think? I mean, all this must be utter

nonsense to you as somebody who writes about the Romans and stuff. No, not at all. Because to the Romans and to the Greeks, essentially, only people who had lived through the events that they were describing were qualified to be historians. So Thucydides is the classic example of that, that he was a general in the Peloponnesian War. So he felt that that was very much what qualified him to write about it. And basically, if you were writing about anything that you hadn't lived through, you were a bit of a fraud. So what about Plutarch or somebody? Surely he's writing about... Yeah, he's not really rated. Right, okay.

I mean, he's writing his biograph's he's he's not really rated he's right okay i mean he's writing his biographies and things yeah to be cutting edge it's essentially history for the for the greeks and the romans was what you do is contemporary history so you are absolutely the co-evil with lucidities as i've always maintained yeah but but i i mean what i've noticed with with your books but you begin in the 50s and you've gone right the way up to 1983 was the last, 1982 really, isn't it? Yeah, it's two. It's the last one. Is that the space of time that are covered in your books get shorter and shorter.

Yeah, I know. It's ridiculous. So it's almost like the closer you get, the more there is to write about. Is that the feeling? Is that how you? No, I think actually what it's almost like the closer you get, the more there is to write about. Is that the feeling? Is that how you? No, I think actually what it is, is the closer you get there, if I can be sort of self-flagellating for a moment, I think the closer you get, the harder it is to get a perspective about what matters. But also the temptation becomes greater to just immerse yourself in detail

that the reader will recognise. So, you know, imagine writing the same sort of books about the Victorian age. I mean, most of it would just be meaningless to readers. They'd say this is a lot of sort of trivial and insignificant fluff. You know, what was on at the music halls, the big debate about some celebrities that we've never heard of. I think you can get away with that with very recent history because so many people pick up on all the references. You know, the sort of stuff in my last book,

which was about the early 80s, the references to, you know, I don't know, sitcoms or to cricket matches or to, you know, football hooliganism outbreaks or whatever. Those mean something to readers now in a way that they will be utterly meaningless in the 25th century and nobody will care right so it's interesting for me reading um your most recent one which is about the kind of the first

government was that i kind of vaguely remembered the the broad outlines of the politics because i was i was um what was i was 13 in 1981 so I was kind of starting to read newspapers and watch the news but but you have whole sections on neuromantics and smash hits and so of course absolutely I remember all that and the sitcoms and stuff so it was very fresh but if we go back to the the topic we're meant to be covering. The 90s. One of the issues surely must be with covering like that is that because you've kind of lived through it, the temptation is to assume that your experiences are somehow universal. And they're not, are they? And your perspective somehow is privileged because you've lived through it, so therefore you feel fresher to it. But perhaps in

a sense, it becomes an impediment. I think it's a total impediment, actually, Tom. I think I notice this all the time giving talks about contemporary history is that people will say, well, actually I was there, and I know that the 70s were not all grim, that they were wonderful. And then there'll be somebody else in the audience who will then pipe up and say, I worked for British Leyland in the 70s and it was bloody awful.

And basically they just have an argument where they're brandishing their own individual experience and assuming that that's the norm. And I think that's exactly right. I think the 90s is an interesting one because I think that our memories of the 90s are not very conflicted as they are of the 80s or indeed the 60s and 70s.

So because it was a time of you know economic stability economic growth because there was the end cold war had ended was there was a sort of feel-good factor in the 90s so i guess if you got a hundred people and asked them you know their memories of the 90s certainly in britain and probably in america as well um they would tell a relatively similar story don't you think i think we don't argue about the meaning of the 90s so i was in my in my 20s during the 90s and it was a great time to be in your 20s because there were lots of enjoyable things to do um and and so you know ecstasy and brit pop and everything has a massively salient place in my memories and so therefore when i think about the 90s that's tends to be what what i think about

you think about ecstasy that's not the tom holland that people uh i i think about all the fun things there were to do right you were in your early 20s in the 90s i will go no further but it was it was you know it was it was fun so that's chiefly you know if i had a kind of synesthetic sense of the past i think of the 80s as kind of slightly gray and grim and dire and i think of the 90s as you know big smiley yeah big smiley icon and sun and you know crop circles and just great um but of course you know that's is that accurate um well i think we forget that certainly in britain the 1990s you can divide into the sort of there are two governments aren't they the major governments and then the black government the major government was exceedingly unpopular for most of its tenure um there was a

sense of sleaze and incompetence and whatnot. And I think actually what's happened is the 90s, as these things as often happen, the 90s have been taken over by a particular moment. Our memory of the 1990s is coloured by a particular moment, which is sort of 1996-97. For lots of people, it's interesting in the tweets, a lot of people mention Euro 96 and the coming of Tony Blair and Cool Britannia. And that has sort of seeped out and become the meaning of the whole decade, certainly in Britain. And I think now people look back. I mean, it's interesting how sort of meanings of periods sort of change, because now

when people talk about the 1990s, I think there are two ways they talk about it one is lost golden age pre-crash pre-covid pre-populism and trump and blah blah um or they see it as that's the moment where everything went wrong where we were complacent and hubristic and we sowed the seeds of all these sort of disasters to come don't you think i think those are the two ways that people i think i mean i it's interesting because decades never exactly map onto the no the precise numbers do they um so so the 80s begin in 1979 if you're british begin in 79 and and end um with with the fall of thatcher or the end of the cold war i mean so the 80s do work as a as a moment the the 90s i think begin with the fall of the cult of the berlin war yeah so begin in 1989 and i think that they end in on 9 11 2001 yeah i'd buy that and i think that the memory is that

this is a period where you're not haunted by the shadow of nuclear war and you're not haunted by the shadow of terrorism and wars on terror and all that kind of stuff. And so you look and so for me, I look back on it as a kind of period of golden youth. Yes. But of course, that's then coloured by your own youth, isn't it? Absolutely. Absolutely. So then that would be a problem for me, I think, if I was trying to write about it, because I think that that sense would completely colour it. But your great talent, I mean, is always to pick up on the countervailing trends within society that go against the kind of the stereotype of a decade or a period. So, you know, be contrarian, be contrarian about the 90s. It was terrible,

whatever. If you were going to take a worldwide view of the 1990s, you know, be contrarian, be contrarian about the 90s. It was terrible, whatever. If you were going to take a worldwide view of the 1990s, you could easily tell an incredibly bleak story. So it's the decade of Rwanda. It's the decade of the death of Yugoslavia, which I think actually for people of our generation was a very salutary and sobering tale. So you had a European country tearing itself apart. I mean, we did a podcast very early on in this series about civil wars. And that, for me, is always the civil war that I think of, you know, a country that I had taken for granted as a child, you know, Torval and Dean had won their gold medal there, ripping itself apart in the 1990s. And also, I think, a massive geopolitical story in Russia, which we don't think about as much as we should in the West. So the end of the Soviet Union, and a country, a power, a really sort of a linchpin of the world

system going into meltdown, you know, Russian men, their life expectancy dropped by the best part of 10 years, in the early years of the 1990s, you know, an economy in complete meltdown. So you could tell quite a bleak story about the 90s. And you could also tell us, you know, an economy in complete meltdown. So you could tell quite a bleak story about the 90s. And you could also tell us, I mean, going back to the hubris point, you could argue that the defining book of the 90s, in some ways, is Francis Fukuyama's The End of History, which perhaps unfairly has been seen as this sort of blast of Cold War triumphalism. You know, we've won liberal democracies, the wave of the future, and the history as the clash of systems and as a clash of ideologies

is going to come to a halt. It's over. I mean, that's to really bastardize his argument. But that seemed to capture some of the sort of complacency of the 90s. Do you think it's a complacent period, the 90s? Well, I've talked about this before, but I remember going to Paris for the bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989, summer of 1989. And there was this great kind of parade.

And the opening sequence of it were Chinese dissidents on bicycles cycling through the streets of Paris, kind of making clenched fist signs against the backdrop of what had happened at Tiananmen Square. And I guess looking back, that's probably the most significant event, is the sense that actually what, you know, far more important really than what's happening in Russia or indeed in America or anything is what's happening in China. And I wasn't really alert to that.

I wasn't really alert to that. Much more important than the seeming tensions between Islam and the Western world, which was also clearly brewing in the 90s. Bin Laden is starting to kind of surface around that time. But really, it's China, isn't it? And I suppose the other thing, the other thing, of course, that also I remember absolutely beginning, I was at oxford and uh my wife-to-be was um away for a year at stanford so you know deep trauma writing letters hilarious writing letters yeah and there was an american friend who had a kind of little um one of those early um maps yeah um and he told me about this thing called email. And I remember sending my first email on his little Mac. And then gradually over the course of the decade, the Internet became more and more of a sequence. central 90s guy he was he'd been in um he'd been in the cia he'd come over to oxford he'd uh done a degree he'd become very involved in making corn circles so i made my only corn circle with him uh that was a kind of that was a great thing anyway he was staying with us and and he helped

us to set up our first internet connection um and i remember the first thing he typed in was cheerleader. Oh, God. That was the very first thing that we ever looked up on. And that's all so kind of 90s. But against the back, I also remember a lot of my reading was in kind of William Gibson and all that kind of stuff. And the way that what was happening had been prophesied. Yeah, there was a real sense, I think, of technological change, wasn't there, cultural change. I mean, I have basically exactly the same story.

I had an American friend who was on a years exchange from Stanford and he had a computer in a box, which amazed me. It was the first laptop I'd ever seen. He opened this device and he said, when I go back to stanford at the end of the year we can send each other messages and i said that's that's just that's just some sort of obscure perversion i'm not going to go to the college computer room and sit on my own in the dark typing in messages you know i'll write you a letter once every three years maybe

if you're lucky but it, and it came very, I think it was a very specific moment, let's say 95 to 97, when people went from having no email address to being on email and having internet connections. And obviously that, when people write the history of the 1990s, obviously they'll look at the end of the Cold War,

they'll look at the opening up of China, they'll look at what happened in Russia, probably the end of the Cold War. They'll look at the opening up of China. They'll look at what happened in Russia, probably the development of the EU. But I think actually dwarfing all those things is something as big as the printing press, which is the development of this digital economy and this digital culture. I had a look the other day at my Amazon account

to look for my first purchase. So that was 1999. I bought some of my Christmas presents for my family on Amazon in 1999. And I thought, God, how much money have I given to Jeff Bezos since then? And obviously that's a 1990s story that has had incalculable, far greater effect than any British general election result or anything of that kind. Yeah, so in a sense actually the idea of the 90s as a kind of firebreak between the grimness of the 80s and then the grimness of everything that follows on from 2001 is illusory then you would argue it's actually it's the seedbed for a lot of the changes

that have happened in the 20s and in fact could say, has anything really changed in the 21st century that wasn't implicit in the 1990s? That's true. That's a good way of putting it. I think you could argue in some ways, couldn't you, that the following two decades were the playing out of forces that were already underway. I mean, if you went back to the mid-1990s,

you'd find British politics dominated by arguments about Europe. You know, Americans were arguing about impeachment of a president and culture war. I mean, the idea of culture wars is a late 80s, early 90s American thing, the backlash against political correctness, sort of the Republicans' hatred of Bill Clinton and kind of conspiracy theories about Bill Clinton. I mean, all those things feel like there's a real resonance

between what was happening then and what's happening now. And obviously Russia, Putin, China, rising Islam and the West. I mean, all those things are there in embryo, really. Right. One thing, of course, that famously happens in the 90s is this huge issue around who's going to become number one. Oasis or Blur. And this is the thing that... That's getting important. That's getting important stuff. But playing Dominic Sandbrook here,

it is actually quite significant, isn't it? Because it's a national moment that revolves around the charts. The last one. It's the last one, because from that point on, the charts and the streaming of music and everything, it all becomes so fragmented that the idea of a national moment around, you know, which band is going to be number one becomes inconceivable. So in a sense, the 90s is not just a beginning. It's also an end for that kind of distinctive culture that had existed since, what, 1955 or something? Yeah, the death of a collective national culture.

And that's a story, not just a British story, but you see that story playing out in societies all over the world, don't you? So that Oasis Blur battle, which is actually a self-conscious attempt to replay the Beatles versus the Rolling Stones, isn't it? It is, and it's all very postmodern. It is itself, yeah, absolutely. It's completely self-conscious and there's a sort of there are levels of upon levels of kind of irony and self-knowledge um but it is it does feel now like you know that couldn't have happened in 2005

because by that point the charts had already fallen from you know from national prominence it was no longer part of the story um the other moment i think which is a shared national moment for british listeners which everyone will remember is the death of princess diana but maybe we should take a break first and then get into that um you know it's such a big topic um yes okay okay we'll come back after the break and we will talk death of diana i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes

and early access to live tickets head to the rest of entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History, and a reminder that we're operating on double shifts at the moment during lockdown, so two episodes a week. And on Thursday, we have a rather more salacious offering, as Tom and I are joined by Hallie Rubenhold to talk about sex in the 18th and 19th centuries. Very not safe for work, that one, at least I hope. Now that Tom's wiped the steam from his glasses, we can get back to the 1990s.

So Tom, we were going to talk about the death of Diana. Do you remember the death of... It's one of those moments, isn't it, where you remember where you were and what you were doing? I do. I remember it very well because we were moving house. Right. And we wanted some kind of cheery music to you know peppers up as we were shoveling chairs and things and kind of in the wind just wall-to-wall somber funerary music um yeah the whole thing was yes very peculiar and do you think the kind of thing that would i mean again like like the the blow is a shared moment i suppose it probably would wouldn't it actually but it would be kind of bubbles of shared

experience in a way that yes i mean imagine the tweets and imagine the yes i mean i think the death of diana is such a sort of relief of maficking kind of moment i mean british britain specializes in these sort of outpourings of Dickensian sentimentality, doesn't it? So did you do anything that you now feel embarrassed about? Do you know what? I was actually, I was in Bulgaria. I was backpacking in Bulgaria and a man at our youth hostel told us that Prince Stenner died. We watched it on TV. And then, extraordinary thing, we were in this tiny village in the Balkan mountains.

And people in the village all got out these wooden chairs from their houses. And they all gathered in the center in this square in front of this battered old kind of communist era telly. And they were all watching something on the telly. And we were backpackers, so we didn't. You know, this is pre-internet. And they were watching the funeral they were watching elton john and george carey and john major and tony blair uh in english and they were it was absolutely bizarre and i remember thinking at the time why who do they really care and they did so it was an international event oh it clearly was in the mountains of bul. Yeah. So I think it was actually. I think, obviously, would that happen now? Does the British royalty have this?

I mean, probably it does because of the crown. Yeah, maybe. Well, I mean, on the topic of people actually gathering around a television, I mean, how retro is that? Comment from P. O'Connell. I look back now to my own life in the 90s he says and i think it would have been entirely different with access to a smartphone so that kind of follows up really what we're talking about that technology yeah perhaps is the greatest agent of transformation

of anything yes i mean the elimination of distance i suppose suppose. London, for example, again, this is a very sort of Anglo-Central way to think of it maybe, but London in the early 1990s feels like a very different city from what it is today, much less multicultural, much less international, I would say. And I think things like technology and international travel and the sort of sense of, just the sense of flux and the sense of possibility is so much greater now than it was in the 90s. I mean, I don't know. I wasn't from London. And I remember even going to London, you know, having to get a map and all this kind of carry on. That sort of sense of having the world in your pocket embodied in your smartphone was utterly absent. I think it was last, maybe last year the year before um and it was um a program about jeremy della the great artist yeah um taking a series of films about kind of rave culture and

about the convoys going around england uh and showing it to a class of schoolchildren in London. And all of them watching it in absolute incomprehension. It was a completely alien world to them. Partly because everybody in the films that Della was showing were white. Whereas that wasn't the case in the classroom in London. And that was a kind of indication of the kind of demographic change, I guess, that has happened since the 90s. So that is another aspect of what's happened.

On which point, Mac Matthew Mather, I don't know how you pronounce that, I apologise to him or her. Why does the cultural gap between now and 1990 not feel as great as that of 1960 to 1990 is it the cold war is it just me the author born in the 90s i mean i think that is an interesting really interesting point and you would push it kind of to the 19 maybe even 97 with perhaps um i mean the cultural gap i suppose i mean does it feel like there's a cultural gap between now and the 1990s? Not a massive cultural gap, is there?

I mean, whereas you're right, Mac or he or she is absolutely right that the gap between 1960 and 1993 feels colossal. And I guess it felt colossal at the time, didn't it? Which sort of just explodes the entire thesis of my series of books, which is that nothing changed in the entire thesis of my series of books which is that um nothing changed in the 60s and 70s but of course something did i guess something did change particularly in the i think 70s and 80s as um social change accelerated but you're right i mean we are you can do all these sort of we are you know the sex pistols are closer to

george formby than they are to us or something. You can do all these sort of little quirks to show how periods and some periods in history are closer together or further apart than you think. And the 1990s do feel quite close to us in a way that they didn't feel close to the 50s or to the 60s. I mean, I suppose the two massive, massive changes between 1990 and, so the world before 1990 and the world after 1990 is the technological one and the end of the Cold War. So the end of the Cold War completely recalibrates the geopolitical circumstances. Yeah. It transfigures the way in which people understand how the world relates.

It opens the door for the rise of China. It affects the evolution of the European Union. It changes, you know, America becomes a kind of hyperpower and then kind of plummets. So all these kind of changes are implicit in that, but they're recognizably bred of the kind of the collapse of the Cold War. Although that's a very anomalous moment, Tom. I think that's a very anomalous moment, the collapse of the the cold war because actually the world we're in now is arguably more similar

to the pre-1990 world geopolitically than to the so you've got two powers now um america's no longer a hyper power they've changed yeah they've changed china has eclipsed russia i mean but russia and so for europeans we're no longer central in the cold Cold War, we were the battleground. I mean, it wasn't a very pleasant position to be, but we mattered. Whereas now it's America and China and Europe's a bit of a backwater. So that is a kind of sobering change. Yes, although Europe probably mattered. Well, it was, as you say, a battleground. I mean, we're a battleground over which others fought rather than a one with a great deal of agency in ourselves i mean that's one reason why people wanted to set up the european union in the first place was they felt that britain that europe had become europe they didn't

want to just be this sort of passive arena over which rival superpowers fought but that's kind of our europe's position now i think it's a sort of slightly passive arena i mean when you know the europe is no not necessarily weaker now than it was in the 50s and 60s because i don't think it was actually particularly strong about them anyway anyway well whatever and then uh technology so we which we've already discussed but that really is a kind of huge change yeah nicholas rogers says was it was the 90s a time when things felt just right, technology exciting rather than a ubiquitous grind, loads of originality and culture, sensible politics, end of the Cold War? Well, we've sort of alluded to this. I mean, you can tell that story and say, yes, technology was terribly exciting.

Yes, everything felt right and rosy. But you can equally tell that story and say, actually, it's not the seeds of future problems were sowed in the 1990s and you couldn't have... You know, sometimes people say of a particular period, well, is that when things went wrong, when we got things wrong? But the idea that we could get things right and fix it is an illusion.

Things were always going to go wrong because that's the nature of history. Well, on which topic again, question from William Ritchie. is it reasonable to see blair and 97 as the resolution of the uk's 20th century the end of hereditary peers hong kong return devolution good friday agreement or was it papering over the cracks papering over the cracks um i wouldn't go with papering over the cracks because i think that's sort of that the implication of that question is there are deep problems that then became apparent.

But I mean, all societies have problems. That's the nature of being a society. I think I think clearly the Blair government was able to resolve things, partly because a lot of the heavy lifting. I mean, I would argue had been sort of done already in a lot of sort of economic battles seem to be settled. So they could then put their energies into Northern Ireland and all this sort of done already and a lot of sort of economic battles seem to be settled so they could then put their energies into northern ireland and all this sort of stuff um but were they papering over the cracks i mean i don't believe the uk is actually more cracked than other nations do you tom um well i i i loved blair that's a great that's a great admission i know i i was so happy uh when he was elected and i i'm sure you know the there was a kind of feeling that politics wasn't something to worry about and everything was going great and i just kind of put put my um my kind of uh political gear stick

into neutral and coasted along and thought about other things. But of course, all kinds of things were creeping up through the undergrowth. Isn't it an interesting thing with Blair, though, Tom, that, you know, he left office in 2007 and people applauded him out of the House of Commons. He had a standing ovation from both sides of the House. I can still see David Cameron kind of encouraging all his Tory MPs to stand and applaud Blair. Blair left at the height of his powers. And now it is Blair who sort of struggles to show his face in public because people will shout at him. Whereas John Major, his much lampooned predecessor, if people see John Major

in the street, they say, oh, it's John Major, nice to see him. He wasn't so bad, you know. Isn't that extraordinary, the reversal in fortunes? Except people never hated Major, did they? No, they didn't. There was the sense of division. You never had that. No.

I mean, people kind of mildly contemptuous of him. He would cut his shirt into his underpants and cone hotlines and things. Yeah. But nobody hated him. No, not at all. And actually, the great thing for him is that the more that Tony Blair has sort of remained in the public eye, the more John Major's stock has risen. So they're sort of yoked together. Well, yeah, I feel like kind of Odysseus listening to the sirens.

I know it's bad, but whenever I hear Tony Blair, I always go, yeah, he's so right. Yes, absolutely. You need to be chained to the mast. Stuartie Mook, great name. Yeah. What effect has the 90s drug culture had on today? Now, Dominic, I know you're a great one for saying that drug culture

has had no effect on anything. Well, I think people had a slightly different attitude to drugs in the 90s, didn't they? The 90s, I would say, felt a little little bit like a certainly among people of sort of our generation that drugs were they were you know purely recreational cool um almost harmless actually that was the sort of assumption i think among people in their 20s and i don't think people talked about drugs with with the i mean think people talked about drugs with the, I mean, now people talk about drugs with much greater,

I would say, foreboding than the, though it'd be interesting to compare that then with the stats and to see how popular they are and also how the class base has changed with drugs. I mean, I think the way in which suddenly you had football hooligans hugging each other on the floor of the Hacienda and all that kind of thing. As a kind of folk myth, it's up there with the Summer of Love of 1967. Yeah.

That it, as a myth, perhaps, it continues to have an impact, I think. Because I think the whole idea of the XC culture, you know, we can all just love one another. And so many people did experience that, even if it was kind of chemically induced, that actually all you need is love. And I think that people of our generation still bear the stamp of that, I think. I think that there is a kind of slight, why can't we all just love each other and be friends, that ironically breeds all kinds of vituperation and kind of moral righteousness.

But I think, you know, be kind is, I mean, it's always a terrifying, menacing kind of thing when you see it on a Twitter thread or something. Why can't people just be kind? When people say that, they mean it in the most, they mean it in the most vitriolic way, usually. Yes, but I think the ideal of kindness, of love, of everyone just hugging each other and not kicking each other in or whatever,

as a myth, it does kind of have a kind of enduring resonance. Maybe not, I don't know. My son does something at school that he refers to as kindness studies. And it's surely only a matter of time before that becomes a degree anyway um that's all the influence of of rave culture okay this is a great question from nicholas again i hope i've pronounced this right juan juan juan um were the 1990s the last decade of uncritical americanism on screen and indeed perhaps beyond screen films like independence like Independence Day, The Patriot, Armageddon, or even Saving Private Ryan seem unthinkable

in the way they picture the US nowadays. I totally agree with that. That's just a really good observation. I think that is true. I think there was a... America, you know, it had its issues, but clearly there was a sense that Hollywood projected that they had, in inverted commas, won the Cold War.

It was always presented that way. It wasn't presented as a matter of Gorbachev's reforms going wrong and the Soviet Union falling apart. And there was this quite uncritical sense. I saw Saving Private Ryan in a cinema in America, and I can remember the scene. They've got a colossal American flag flying at one point, the shot is of this American flag. And, I mean, there were people sobbing in the auditorium around me. And I just sat there.

I've never felt so British in my life. Just this. I just wanted to leave. I just wanted to leave the cinema, to be honest. I'm just so churlish and nasty as a person. Well, the Saving Private Ryan famously featured the British war effort, didn't it? Yeah, well, of course.

I think, yes. And I think that's actually a really interesting story. The last few years is the collapse of America as this sort of idealistic model. In their own minds, actually, as well as in ours. You know, you see American politicians breastfeeding about the fact that they're being mocked elsewhere in the world or they're being seen as a sort of a model of what to avoid. And I think that would have been unthinkable back in the 1990s well i mean it's interesting that both of us talking about you know remembering how we got connected to the internet both of us have a link to stanford both of us had american

friends who helped to set it up i mean but essentially we we felt like kind of primitives absolutely america was america was was the future whereas now i think you go to america often it's it certainly in terms of its infrastructure and even in terms of the phones and things, it seems... Yeah, I completely agree, Tom. I totally agree. I think that's a bit... I first went to America in the 90s and was struck by the modernity of it. I mean, they had things that we didn't have.

And even just tiny, piffling little things that were somehow symbolic so i can remember going and they're having films that i had that had not come out in europe but i'd never even heard of you know they're because their film schedule was always ahead of ours yeah um yeah and then going back home and saying to people oh there's a new arnold schwarzenegger film or whatever you won't have heard of it but but I've seen it in America. And that sense of them literally being ahead, technologically, culturally, that has gone, hasn't it? The internet has destroyed that,

but also there's a sense that America has failed to kick on after 1989, 1990. Also, I think my favourite series of the 90s was The X-Files, which I loved because it was kind of engagingly paranoid. You could watch it and enjoy it and it was clearly nonsense. But the kind of the vague hint that perhaps there were aliens in Roswell or whatever. Whereas now all of that has become completely terrifying. I mean, essentially, The X-Files has become QAnon and it's not fun. It's not fun at all.

On the topic of weird stuff that people believe, a question from Steve HP, wonderful man. The history of the 1990s was affected in important ways by Pope St. John Paul II, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Osama bin Laden, the destruction of the Aja Mosque and the soft power of the Dalai Lama. Are Western historians, you, Dominic, equipped with a conceptual framework to explain this? I've got a great conceptual framework. Actually, you don't need to worry about my conceptual framework, Tom. So this is, I guess, I'm guessing a question about religion, really. It's a question about...

Yes, I think it's... And specifically institutional religion. So not the kind of alien X-Files kind of spiritual, but not religious stuff that you get in the 90s, but organised. So it's an interesting thing, isn't it? Because the 1990s felt like a kind of death of God period. The sort of Fukuyama book and the idea that sort of humanistic

liberal democracy was the future. And that I definitely remember sort of putting my purely sort of personal memory hat back on. The way that people talked about iran and the ayatollah and the rushd fatwa and whatnot that these were relics these were soon to be forgotten kind of relics people would often say it's medieval sort of behavior and they talk about iran as a medieval regime and people did that a lot actually after 9 11 as well and it's clear now that people particularly in the sort of secular west underestimated the resilience of religion

and the way in which religious identity and religious loyalty would play a part particularly in the post-cold war world and i actually hate this question because it's such a gift to you it is um because i i had i had no interest in this question at all in the 90s. I mean, it was nothing to me. I barely read it on my radar. Whereas now, of course, I have realised that that was completely wrong. And I've written a book about it called Dominion, which is available from all good bookshops.

And on that... Shame on us. On that... good bookshops and on that shameless on that I only agreed to this topic because I could see that that question would come up I think we should draw a line I don't see how we can top that okay well I think you should give me one is the one moment from the

1990s that you think we don't talk about that we should talk about more that you think historians will't talk about that we should talk about more that you think historians will look at is there anything unexpected you can't ask me that question i i i feel too tired after great whatever it is but clearly you do so tell me what is the moment what you clearly have an answer to this question um i think actually probably britain not joining the euro from a british oh very good yes very good um i think not joining the euro was so we did brexit before and uh i think we've both we've both read the book by robert toombs about um he's a big brexiteer professor robert toombs about brexit he makes the argument that brexit would not have been possible had we joined the

euro i think he's right because the economic damage of crushing out of the euro would just be so great and that was actually gordon i mean that will probably go down as gordon brown's apart from as he would himself put it saving the world in 2008 after the crash gordon brown's great contribution to british history i mean great as in as in important rather than as a term of approval uh by not joining the Euro, that made Brexit possible in a way that... Or would you say inevitable? Well, Tumors would say inevitable. But that's a massive question. It was Brexit, inevitable.

Surely there's a podcast in that. Yes, we must get Helen Thompson. Yeah. She's brilliant on this topic. We're now sharing our backstage conversations with the audience and we should stop. Yes, so I think that's it. I think we declare the 90s over.

Please join us next time as we head back and take a good look at sex in the 18th and 19th centuries. Goodbye. Goodbye.