"The point about the Eighties is that they have never finished, really"

The beauty of the Sunday papers is that they last you all week. Here I am, technically it's Sunday and yet I'm still digesting last Sunday's Observer.

Plenty of interest in Observer Music Monthly as usual (including a good James Brown piece on Primal Scream which almost - almost - makes me eager to hear their new stuff), but the article that really caught the eye was Tim Adams's reflections on the 1980s, inspired by Andrew Davies's forthcoming TV adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst's Booker prize-winning novel 'The Line Of Beauty'.

It's a fascinating perspective on the decade, one which begins with the personal but which gradually progresses - through consideration of the ways in which it is reflected and refracted through Hollinghurst's book - towards a wonderfully pithy overview with which it certainly seems hard to disagree:

"After about 1983, it seemed, you no longer found a decent place to live, you invested in property. Ideas often seemed worthwhile only if they could be exploited commercially: politics became an extension of marketing, books became important if they were in the bestseller lists, and there was a general feeling that if someone had made a lot of money, he or she had to be taken seriously (cue Richard Branson, Madonna). The option, a refusal to go along with some or all of this, was increasingly a kind of redundancy, not quite an opting out, but a sense, somewhere along the line, that you were a sucker".

As Adams points out particularly emphatically, it was a time of lines in the sand. You had to take sides - and those sides were generally drawn along class lines. It was much more black and white. (Adams's article was accompanied by another shorter piece from Matthew Holehouse, who, born in 1987, declares "My generation misses the unabashed villainy in politics" - the absence of any larger-than-life Thatcher-esque bogeyman in British politics is surely a contributory factor to public apathy, though Blair seems to be doing his level best to audition for the role.)

In the course of his article Adams touches on other novelists to have immortalised / dissected the decade in print, including Martin Amis, author of the superb 'Money': "it was an irony too far to point out the fact that many of the writers savaging the Thatcherite economy were themselves splendid beneficiaries of it; Amis for one famously decided to ditch his publishing loyalties and offer his work to the highest bidder. 'This one time in my life,' he suggested, 'I wanted to see what I was worth....'". Strangely enough the name of Ben Elton springs to mind too...

Anyway, all of this has whetted my appetite for the TV adaptation, which begins on BBC2 on 17th May. Having heard many very good things about the novel (and from Mike in particular), I'm hoping that I might be able to coincide reading the copy that's been sat on my shelves for the past six months with the televised version. Whether it'll happen is another matter, of course.