Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #70 (Pt 3): 17.4.86 – The Rishi Sunak Of TOTP

Episode Date: April 16, 2023

Sarah Bee, Neil Kulkarni and Al Needham plunge deeper into the 17.4.86 episode as we hit the Breakers section. Suzanne Vega slaps it about with assorted extras from Bonfire Of The Vanities, and then we get hit with REAL KIDS ISSUES as Grange Hill become child conscripts in the War On Drugs…Video Playlist | Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter | The Chart Music Wiki | Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This will certainly have an adult theme and might well contain strong scenes of sex or violence, which could be quite graphic. It may also contain some very explicit language, which will frequently mean sexual swear words. What do you like to listen to? Um... Chart music. Chart music. Hey, up, you pop-craze youngsters, and welcome back to part three of episode 70 of Chart Music.

I'm Al Needham, they're Sarah B and Neil Kulcone, and we are plunging the fist of analysis into the cow's ring piece of an episode of Top of the Pops from April the 17th, 1986. We've only gone wrist deep so far, but in this part, we're going right up to the elbow, so please step back a bit because it's

gonna get proper messy from here on in they're about to start on their first world tour Australia next month and also we'll see him here in this country in December. Right now, here's some closer look at the charts. It's the top 40 breakers. And up 13 places to number 27, it's Suzanne Vega and Marlena on the wall. David, on a stage with an applauding hand in the bottom corner, which is the nearest we've seen of an actual audience member so far,

tells us that our horror are off to Australia and we've got to wait six months to see them. He then pivots to the breakers section and first up is Marlena on the Wall by Suzanne Vega. Born in Santa Monica in 1959, Suzanne Vega was the daughter of a Swedish-German computer analyst mother and an English dad who divorced soon after she was born. Two years later, after her man married the Puerto Rican teacher and novelist Eduardo Vega, she was relocated to york and eventually studied dance at the high

school of performing arts the actual kids from fame school while studying english lit at bernard college in the event is she got properly stuck into the music scene of greenwich village putting herself about at assorted folk venues and in 1984 she landed a deal with A&M was linked up with Lenny K the Nuggets compiler and guitarist for Patti Smith and her debut LP Suzanne Vega was put out in May of 1985 it led to rapturous reviews in the American music press and a live review in the New York Times

which called her the Joni Mitchell of the 80s. This single from her debut LP was put out over here last year, but only got to number 83 in November of 1985. It's the follow up of sorts to Small Blue Thing, which got to number 65 in january it was re-released last month enter the charts at number 92 then soared 31 places to number 61 and then took three weeks to nimbly scale the ladder to number 40 this week it soared another 13 places to number 27. And here she is on top of the pops for the first time ever in a minute and a half of video. More non-English people. What's going on?

Well, here's a turn up, chaps. Here's a lady singer-songwriter strumming away on an acoustic guitar in 1986. And in 1986, singer-songwriter means hippies and flares and peace man the thing is what's going on here i think when you're this good it doesn't actually matter what else is going on in the culture at the time god i fucking love suzanne vegas she's so new york and she's such an intelligent and emotionally intelligent and exacting songwriter and a really beautiful singer. And I mean, there are songs of hers that I can't think about without welling up, you know. But it's precisely that it is 86 that necessitates this kind of thing.

I mean, you can say, you know, what's a singer songwriter doing in this period? But that's why, you know, I don't think Suzanne Vega is part of any folk revival, by the by. But, you know, a folk revival is a constant threat in a way. Because it always means the same thing. It always means a retreat into something small and intimate and personal, rather than the big and the universal and the stadium-sized. It's this desire not to be larger than life, but to be as small as life. And I think that's what Vega is appealing to in a big, big way.

So no matter how big and brash the era, there will always be people who come to success precisely because they offer an alternative to that. She was a pretty big deal round about this time, wasn't she? Oh, yeah. I mean, five months from now, I'm going to be at a better college doing a drama and English course. And Suzanne Vega was fucking massive amongst all

the women on my course oh yeah i mean she was right up there with sylvia plath if suzanne vega had done a song called fuck off ted huger it would have been a fucking anthem at my college and if you wanted to be around these girls and you did uh you better be prepared to listen to a shitload of small blue thing and undertow well no it's just that vega is one of the first artists that taught me that taste doesn't matter and i don't mean that in a critical way of suzanne vega what i mean is when i first met my missus she was a huge suzanne vega head and you know you realize at that point look shared taste isn't what compatibility is about and actually i got into suzanne vega because my wife played her a lot and i just wanted to pick up on one thing sarah said

about the new yorkness i think that's hugely important um yes there's a real seinfeld thing to vega's appeal you know every single character in friends listen to suzanne vega before they actually moved to new york yeah and she's definitively a new york artist with all the attendance sort of references that go along with that you know coffee shops and diners and restaurants and bohemianism but you know in interviews she's a fuck site sharper than these sort of characterizations if a way she was she was smart enough not to let her fame and it was big fame derail her and she's still doing great is suzanne vega who's buying this in 86 is i'd say it's kind of janice long listeners a bit and andy kershaw listeners perhaps but those

pop listeners ultimately who want a bit more substance i guess not necessarily disgusted with modern pop but they're not fully committed to going entirely underground and actually when you dig into the songs on those first couple of albums by susan baker she's a remarkable songwriter this is one of my favorites of hers because i'm i'm just that basic but i mean i know that she thinks of it as like sort of juvenilia now but um right she's a songwriter who sort of writes about emotional truth and will draw on her own life experience without necessarily literally translating it into her songs you know some of them are like i mean tom's diner i think is really about a moment that really happened but um this she said

is more broadly it's about like coping with loneliness and she did actually have a poster of marlena dietrich movie goddess activist and rampant bisexual badass on her wall she didn't necessarily have what sounds like a succession of one night stands under it but it's a pretty good way to illustrate the feeling of being deeply alone in yourself this kind of line of anonymous dicks you know it's like the loneliness of the long distance shagger it's quite a sort of studenty song in a way i mean it's in in the best way i mean for me it kind of it always sounded like she's sort of communing with this poster which is smirking down at her possibly for only doing

it with boys when there are so many hot girls that's a darling what are you doing she's drawing strength i'm not from the sex and not from the wall art but from you know the depths of herself and i think it's about being sort of young and ridiculous and not finding fulfillment in the usual young person shit. But seeing a way ahead beyond that, because not everybody suits being young either. Like I definitely didn't make the most of it because I was just like, it's like there's an awkwardness like this time my life doesn't fit and I kind of want to get past it. You know, so like just seeing a way ahead to like maturity and authenticity and a bigness of self that you don't get in a skinny student bed with a mattress like a slice of sunblast.

No. She's usually appealing to the awkward. When she's touring this year, when she plays in Manchester, she says to the audience it's really special for her to be in Manchester because it's Morrissey's town. And I think there is that appeal. And look, there's no point hiding it. I sort of quite fancied suzanne vega in

1986 the trouble was what i found when i used to read interviews with suzanne vega is that interviewers especially male interviewers they did the usual thing of not failing to mention her appearance you know they had to do that um but then they almost try and draw her into kind of criticizing female pop figures and and vega would do that well you know when vega's asked about madonna she's quite critical of madonna and things like that which is pretty ironic because she auditioned for madonna's part in desperately seeking susan yeah the other year in a way you know going to the to the famed school i mean it was called the famed school it's a very new york thing and those things are going to be hugely appealing yeah the new yorkness is hugely important and i think you know the tom

steiner is the actual you know it refers to the exact restaurant that they use in seinfeld so that's why i'll make that connection in my mind right to be fair to vega i think she was like everyone else is going to start getting sort of pigeonholed start getting put into a certain category she was always a little bit too smart for that i think and that's why she kept her sanity through this huge success because i mean this the album this is from it goes platinum you know it sells a fucking lot of records yeah there's a lot of people in the uk sipping mugs of gold blend wishing that they were flicking through the village voice in a brownstone him out the halifax advert showing off his new cash point card he's probably

got this on his cd player and he's converted where else when he's got the ladies around yeah but i mean she's great also at stepping into characters and kind of not not making it a a sort of whiny thing in any way she's observant and i think she's just a good writer um she knows she knows how to observe she also knows how to let other people speak in her songs and and consequently you know these things stick around a bit longer than it just being hey look if you don't like what's going on in modern pop this is different um that it sustains a bit longer than that it's not just a reaction to what's going on there's something unique about it in itself yeah it's just she's just so fucking beguiling i can hardly stand it so the video a and m have dragged her into the 80s by running a bit of synthiness through the song and uh dropping another regulation 80s

big jacket on her because this is the time when all pop stars had to look like a five-year-old who's just broken into the dad's wardrobe the shoulder pads had got out of control at this point oh god yeah and that's juxtaposed with her doing as much of a sex as she wants to which involves wearing a cocktail dress and adjusting her stockings and applying her lip hair and there's an extra in bonfire of the vanities trying it on with her she is being very much positioned as the anti-Madonna here, isn't she? Yeah, there is a bit of that. She looks great. She looks great. The trouble is with this video and it's not actually a problem with this video,

it's a problem with its context in this episode of Top of the Pops, is I was watching it and I was just thinking, when's Gary Davis going to interrupt? When's Gary Davis going to interrupt? How long is this going to last? Never mind that, here's my shopping list for tomorrow. And that sense of rushness

that they've actually got too much to actually fit into half an hour. So it's going to be a bit breakneck. Yeah, it just makes it not for a relaxing or even exciting experience in a sense, because you just think this is going to get spoiled. Much as a daytime DJ is going to talk over the best bit of a record,

something's going to happen here that's going to annoy me yeah but she's put over far better in this video than she would be on that neon step yeah i'm not entirely sure that would have worked at all no especially if the lights were in their full pelt kind of swirling around thing yeah and what would the crowd do i mean well we don't see them anyway so so who gives a fuck? She would definitely have looked out of place and it would have felt uncomfortable, even though she's got that very above-it cool that, you know, can cope with anything.

Yeah, and crucially, I don't think Vega ever came across, really, as perhaps what Andy Kershaw or somebody might have said about her. I mean, you mentioned, actually, the word, Sarah, authentic. There is an authenticity to Vega, but she's also... I'm not saying authentic about her inauthenticity, I mean, you mentioned actually the word, Sarah, authentic. There is an authenticity to Vega, but she's also, I'm not saying authentic about inauthenticity, but there's mystery there as well. It's not just, you know, here's my soul, here's everything uncovered.

There's something playful and poetic about what she does that keeps her interesting, I think, rather than just being, you know, here's something I forged in the smithy of my soul. It's a bit more thoughtful and playful than that. So, yeah, you know, her time in I forged in the smithy of my soul, it's a bit more thoughtful and playful than that. So, yeah, you know, a time in the chart was fleeting, but you could argue that she kicked the door back open for the likes of Tracy Chapman and Katie Lang and Tori Amos and all that lot. Oh, undoubtedly, because each one of them would be compared to her

almost immediately. I mean, it's the laziness as well. I mean, it's kind of what you said, you know, she's the 80s Joni Mitchell. She's not not she's absolutely not really no no one can be the joni mitchell of the 80s was joni mitchell well if there was a joni mitchell of the 80s it was probably actually prince but um you know yes this is the laziness of uh it's what we were talking about earlier in that you know in in that singles review page lump all the female singers together um under that title but um yeah i don't like that either however i i have to weakly defend it in the sense of like the fewer people there are to compare than the fewer people there are to compare you

know so it's kind of it's the sin was committed like earlier before it reaches that that level but also it's about stature isn't it it? It's not necessarily comparing musically, but once you get a bit of perspective on it and you go, okay, this person is up there with, you know, the greats. And I think it's very, at that point, it's fair enough to talk about her in, you know, the context of Joni Mitchell.

Oh, and it did the job. I mean, it got assigned. So, yeah. Yeah, so it has its uses. So the following week, Marlena on the wall jumped six places to number 21, its highest position. The follow-up, Left of Centre, which was part of the soundtrack of Pretty in Pink

and featured Joe Jackson on piano, got to number 32 in July, and she rounded off the year with Gypsie only getting to number 77 in November. She roared back, sort of, in June of 1986 when Luca spent two non-consecutive weeks at number 23 and then spent the rest of the 80s as a bit player in the lower reaches of the top 100. But her biggest hit was DNA's's remix of tom's diner her 1987 single which got to number 58 in july of that year and it spent three weeks at number two in august of 1990 held off number

one by the more hardcore turkle power by partners in crime and the uk underground banger itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini by bomb ballerina oh god 1990 what were you like yeah cheers for reminding us all of that tom steiner day is november the 18th 1981 that's when that's when it happened that's when that that devastating resonant moment that has been immortalised in song actually happened. So it's like it was a good day by Ice Cube. Someone worked out what day that was when the Lakers beat the Supersonics. Exactly.

In so many ways, it's exactly like that. Good old Suzanne Vega. She had a nice cup of coffee and she didn't have to use her ak this is the highest new entry on the chart this week The anti-drug song which is called Just Say No At number 26 The cast of Grange Hill Just say no Just say no Just say no

Just say no Just say no Just say no Just say no Just say no Just say no Just say no Just say no Just say no Act like a great big charm. You can be a hero. Be who you are. Say no, no.

Formed in Lower Mesopotamia in 3400 BC, opium began its career as a forage medicine for assorted ailments, which caught on throughout Asia and the Far East via imports from its label, the East India Company. ailments which caught on throughout asia and the far east via imports from its label the east india company in 1898 during a tour of germany morphine the front alkaloid of the group teamed up with a biopharmaceutical company in elberfeld to form an offshoot called heroin after starting its career as an over-the-counter morphine substitute cough remedy, which became very popular across Germany, Heroin crossed the Atlantic and started to collaborate with jazz musicians such Lennon, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin before falling out of favour in the mid-70s. In 1977 however Heroin supported Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers on their tour of the UK which introduced it to a string of punk acts and

underwent a revival which was boosted by a deluge of cheap imports from Iran and Afghanistan that flooded the British market. By early 1984 heroin by now in its imperial phase had become so popular throughout the UK there had been an estimated increase of addicts numbering 40% year on year with a Guardian report of the day quoting a government expert who said, LSD was a drug of the 60s. It was supposed to expand the mind to take in new horizons. Heroin is a drug of the 80s. It blocks out the pain and the hopelessness of unemployment and the bleakness of the future. Meanwhile, over in Stateside, USA, Nancy Reagan, the first lady,

who was looking for something to do when she wasn't telling a senile knob-end of her husband where to go and on what date according to what a personal astrologer said and allegedly giving Frank Sinatra a scene to when he was out doing those things, visited a school in Oakland where she was asked by one of the kids about what to do if someone offered them the drugs. Taking her cue from an advertising slogan that was floating around at the time, she just said, just say no. While she was spearheading the anti-drug message over there throughout 1985 appearing on episodes of different strokes punky brewster and flintstone babies as well as the music video stop the madness which featured new addition latoya jackson david hasselhoff herb alpert arnold schwarzenegger

casey casem boogaloo shrimp and stacyach, whose appearance was edited out at the last minute when he was buster for coke, the BBC decided to pitch in and in July of 1985 broadcast Drug Watch a two hour, ten minute melange of Crime Watch and That's Life, which combined Nick

Ross telling us what drugs were Esther Ransom having assorted interviews with parents of drug addicts, a panel of politicians and medical experts, and assorted celebrities. In one piece on Drug Watch, documenting how the Americans were dealing with the drug problem over there, they aired a clip of a music video, which was written by Al Gore Goner, who played guitar on Leader of the Pack, Brown Eyed Girl, The Sound of Silence, Walk Like a Man and Chapel of Love, and George McMahon, who was working at the time with Denise Williams.

The video was being aired non-stop on MTV and was entitled Just Say No. As part of the BBC's campaign against drug abuse, they enlisted the services of Grange Hill, which was formed in Northam, North London in 1978, and had immediately got into trouble with the BBC, parents, teachers and politicians for encouraging the youth to die in swimming pool accidents, put grasshoppers in roll and sandwich and say flipping heck, but was rightly lapped up by the youth for depicting real kids issues. Consequently, on January the 6th of this year, the ninth series of Grain Chill began with Zamo Maguire, played by Lee MacDonald, showing off his new motorbike and attempting to rig the weight of Mr. Kennedy's

moustache in order to win six quid. Then he went on to sell his bike and started to ponce money off everyone, including Roland Browning, who now worked part-time in an amusement arcade where Zamo had been knocking about with assorted wrong-uns. and on February the 21st, the mystery was resolved when Roland found Zamo on the floor with a bit of foil in his hand, having chased the dragon and receiving a smack on the nose. Just over a fortnight ago, directly after the final episode of the current series of Grange Hill, where Zamo's been busted after being found with a wrap of smack secreted in his pocket calculator, Drug Watch aligned with Newsround and Grange Hill in a triforce of televisual drug prevention in the programme It's Not Just Zamo, which culminated

with the world premiere of a cover of Just Say No, performed by the cast of the TV show, which was rushed out on BBC Records, with all proceeds going to the Standing Committee of Drug Abuse, otherwise known as SCODA. It came out last week and has immediately launched itself into the chart like a sausage on a fork, becoming this week's highest new entry at number 26 and here is a clip of the video and oh my god pop craze youngsters i hope you've had

a big tea because we've got a long day ahead of us talking about this one fucking hell indeed a lot to talk about here so heroin don't know what the fuss is all about i can handle it just got a touch of the flu today so yeah let's place herself back in 1986 i'm 17 neil's 12 sarah's seven or eight what did you know about drugs at the time well i mean like you say i was young um 12 going on 13 i hadn't really come across drugs i'd had friends who'd done drugs at that age yeah i mean not not sort of serious drugs and they're not silly drugs like paracetamol in a can of coke either um you know glue butane that sort of stuff um yeah but you know um but in contrast to the way i became as an adult i was kind of

cautious about drugs before getting to them not because i hasten to add of things like just say no but because of a cautionary experience that taught me that you know if i got out of my face i'd get caught just like i did with everything right i got um arrested by the british transport police um no yes oh my god well i was about 13 14 and um yeah and and i thought it was a bright idea to drink an entire bottle of gin at memorial park in coventry um right then went for some reason to the cafe at the station and woke up in a pile of vomit and the british transport, not proper coppers, but British Transport Police, they took me upstairs at the station

and put me in a cell and found me mum. And so the sight of that cell door swinging open and my mum stood there, silhouetted against the harsh light of Coventry Station, that kind of stuck with me. I mean, she didn't actually bollock me. I think she realized the shame was enough but um yeah that kind of put me off drugs a little bit so soap bar and red lab and

speed and acid and mushrooms they really only started becoming part of my life aged about 16 and and and at this point when just say no comes out beyond those few friends who did kind of glue and gas and stuff i wasn't really exposed to drugs but i do actually blame this record and the moral panic at the time and the inevitable way that getting back into 60s music makes you ever so curious about drugs you know what's this heroin this guy's singing about sounds moorish um i blame all of that for my subsequent drug use right but this did not help this record because it made straight made straight-edgeness so uncool. So not loads of drugs knocking about my life at the time,

but I blame this record for sending me that way. Sarah? Well, I mean, all the cool kids at my little West Yorkshire C of E village school were skagged up to the eyeballs at this time. We used to call them right bloody pricks, but as a compliment one time right they raided the brick house and rustic brass band practice room and found a kilo of primo afghani

brown with a street value of two grand stuffed into the euphonium of course we were too young so we just sniffed the pritt sticks and dreamed all that brasso line about those sarah well there was that that was like the gateway drug for everyone but um yeah i don't know i was no i was entirely innocent at the time i was like all through school really like i don't remember but i wasn't like one of the cool kids or even one of the uncool cool kids you know like people talk about oh yeah i was an outsider at school yeah so you were cool then actually i was neither of these, so I had no idea. I don't remember either. I'm drawing a complete blank as to what, like, we got told about it

or what we got taught about it. There must have been something. Oh, God, there was. But I just don't remember at all. I recall this period being, you know, there's a growing barrage of propaganda about drugs in this period, of which this was the culmination really this record i'm 17 at the time and i've got to admit i knew and had experienced precisely

fuck all like you neil it was all glue round our way but glue was on its way out by 1986 it's weird isn't it because when you when i think about walking around in the early 80s, the sight of glue bags was as common as kind of those gas canisters are now. Yeah. But yeah, you're right, it was on its way out. When I was 12, I had one sniff of me grandpa's tin of Bostick and spent the rest of the night in an absolute state thinking, well, am I going to die now? comprehensive school in 1984 and the only bit of drug education we ever got was when mr gallagher our science teacher spent an entire lesson telling us what happened to our bodies when we sniff glue and it was proper shit up and it was fucking brilliant and it's it's one of the two lessons that stuck with me throughout all these years so good on you mr gallagher but that was it at our

school the teachers might as well have said, you know, don't poke a fucking lion in the face with a stick on your way home tonight. Even now, in 1986, drugs are seen as something that only poshos and hippies did. Who can afford them? Around that way, it was just say what. Just say eh. I mean, round about this time, the nearest i got to drugs was going to rock city or the garage and seeing a group of lads in leather jackets who look like they could be the

support band uh passing a needle about at the bar and pretending to inject themselves but looking back now it's obvious that it was all a cod and they were showing off because they were injecting it through the sleeves of their leather jackets but But it was like, I was proper terrified, just got to the other end of the club. Yeah. There just weren't a thing around my way. I think this was probably, I didn't, I was like too young to watch Grange Hill,

but this was probably my first inkling that drugs were even a thing in the world, you know. And it was mysterious, and not in an alluring way, but in a sort of bemusing way. And I kind of got the message on some level because it's, you know, as I'm sure we'll get into, it's so incredibly simplistic. I mean, at school, yeah, I do remember a lot of people wanting to take sociology specifically so they could do stuff on youth culture because that's where all the drug information was and you were allowed to get the books that told you about acid and mushrooms and all that kind of stuff but yeah it was definitely seen as something that people

did in the past yeah yeah or just that people did elsewhere in gritty cop dramas and stuff like that yes it was never kind of yet on the street or in front of you no which makes the moral panic sort of like really quite odd um at this time and counterproductive obviously um yeah unlike you i did get some sort of drug education at school right we got the propaganda from the government basically that that before this campaign of drug watch there is that one-off never broadcast minder episode yes a little bit of give and take which is filmed and it's sent out it's half an hour long and it's actually the last time cole and waterman play those characters because oh really yeah the series

had actually ended by that point but they both decided to kind of do this because it's an important message and this this little mini episode of minder is filmed and it's sent out to schools by you know norman fowler at the dsl and i i recall it after that's disseminated to schools i seem to recall watching this far more than i than i recall um lenny henry also had a little video that he sent out to school called chasing the bandwagon which i doesn't i don't think i've watched it but a little bit of give and take the minder episode i didn't like minder so i think i turned off around about not turned off but mentally turned off and started looking out the window about 10 minutes in if it had been gideon says no to drugs you'd be a bit more interesting wouldn't you indeed different kettle of fish or

ludwig we've got to start with that episode of drug watch because we've seen it haven't we i mean fucking out i mean drug watch today sounds like bill oddie observing some spices having a fight in a shopping precinct in mansfield but fucking out it's a remarkable document of the age isn't it yeah it is i mean it's simultaneously sort of gogglingly odd because of the celebs involved oh yes but my god it's deeply bleak as well. It starts with Nick Ross standing next to a groaning table of drugs to show your man what she should be looking for in your pants drawer when you're out next door. You know, including a line of cocaine,

which apparently costs £15, next to some red and white striped straws like a dismembered Humphrey. And a chunk of ash that you could club an elephant to death with. It's a fucking 999 bar. I was just waiting for him to sneeze, you know. Just fluff it everywhere.

It does look like Sean Ryder's buffet table, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah. I love how he points out, he goes, this is marijuana the the leaves it's like mate that is dill you and the bbc have all been had but then we get some fucking horrific interviews with parents who have lost their kids to drugs or are losing their kids to drugs or are working out how to kill them if they ever come back in the house looking for something to nick to get drugs with i mean that's the that's life segment of it and that's fucking horrible oh god yeah when it steps outside

of the studio and actually talks to people affected by the issue fucking hell it's yeah this is the era of threads don't forget yes but it just is depressing it's that color palette isn't it that sort of yes dingy sort of depressing look that these things have. And it's just, you know, and then the sort of weirdly, like Esther Anson is such a strange presence. It's not that she's upbeat, but she's got this sort of light twittering voice. It's like, ah!

It was just really, really jingling my nerves. Yeah, what a shame Cyril Fletcher wasn't there either, or Doc Cox. Talking about some jobs worth drug dealer. Couldn't watch all of it i have to be honest it was so so unhappy it was awful um there was a woman who's talking about um her son who died yeah she's in the studio and esther anson goes and like there's an audience there and there's some guy who wants the mic and and the woman is like well i blame myself for my son's death and esther takes the mic over to some random who goes yeah i blame you too yeah and no one says same wasn't it no one says anything there's no murmuring there's no anything it's it's so eerie

it's like ambient jeremy kyle and isn't david meller really small you see him on this panel of politicians and he's fucking tiny. Well, that's probably not his fault unless, you know, maybe his mum did loads of drugs and that was her fault. How did a Tony DeSantia get his fucking Chelsea shirt on? Would have been a kid's size, I would have thought. Yeah. Mind you, you would want it just over your head

if you were being shagged by David Mellor. Well, yeah, I mean i mean look the thing is nick ross is a deeply antagonizing presence i find um him lecturing you you just don't want it it's simultaneously designed to do its job of saying the bbc are sort of like anti-drugs and it keeps on saying as well just in case you were wondering yeah we're going to give you the truth we're going to give you a balanced thing but it doesn't emerge like that it emerges as being lectured by a load of grown-ups yes and you know consequently it doesn't really work the celebs on it oh well the end bit is just fucking remarkable i mean they announced a special guest near the end to sign a wall with

just say no plastered across it and you think well this is obviously going to be nancy reagan because right about this time she would have pitched up on fucking murrenbush stanziger if she could have about drugs but no it's lady fucking die it is who signs the wall and then says nothing of worth to esther but but still fucking out i know it's a bit of a coup that yeah um and it provides a sort of a kind of counterpoint to who we then see oh yes around this yeah it's essentially a rounding up of the bbc bar isn't it it is basically it's incredible yeah i mean diana kind of gets the pass from me forever because of what she did to break down the stigma of aids you know yes it is quite surreal to see her just kind of wander onto the set well of course i thought this was a a tremendously important subject and i just had to come and put my name to it yes um

she's a fucking angel well there is this reverence isn't there from everyone yes she's got star quality in terms of the kind of little hushed reverent silence that happens i understand why she would do it i understand why they'd want to get her you know like it is this whole thing much as it isn't relevant to to most people i think the you can feel the idea behind it is that they just want to hammer down on this to put the fear of god into the kids before they even start to really think about what drugs even might be at all it is quite bbc apocalypse isn't it like she does draw on the fact that she's a mother and she's worried about her kids taking drugs yeah we know how they turned out and i don't think drugs was what she needed to worry about yeah so yeah but the people like spotting the because there's

just there's a crowd just milling about people just never ends that you have to watch it about five or six times to get everyone after diana has signed the big drug watch wall everyone else just gets a sharpie and adds their signature i've got a list yeah me too with my chant music head on the first person i spotted of course was simon bates yeah he's accompanied by noel edmonds john peel terry wogan suie Quatro, with a proper man came back from Greenham Common and dad started sleeping in the spare bedroom haircut. Des Lynham, Lenny Enre, Sebastian Coe. He's so oily.

I hate Sebastian Coe. He's an oily man. Yeah, he does look proper captain of the cricket team, David Watts style, doesn't he there yeah adamant yeah chatting to christopher ryan mike the cool person i'm so confused now but he's there to say i don't want to say anything negative but no rolf harris who of course does a massive role for Roo. He does hog quite a large bit of that board, doesn't he? Surely a smackaroo would have had more impact.

A horrifying human-marsupial hybrid lying in a pool of its own vomit with a needle sticking out of its weird little arm. We also have Alison Moyet, Mick Tolbert, Colleen Nolan Sarah Green Floella Benjamin Out of a dustbin Wendy Craig Ernie Wise Barbara Dixon

Sandra Dickinson Anna Carteret Joanna Lumley Pete Townsend I think Emlyn Hughes, Bob Monkhouse, and of course, Jingle Nance OBE. And Nigel Havers, did you mention him? No. Oh, he's there.

But there's also signatures as well from people who obviously were passing through the bbc and wanted to you know register their displeasure with drugs they include ian jure sue cook leslie crowther sting paul weller shelly and mike from books fizz spike milligan barry crier wendy richard rule alenska john craven samantha fox and jonathan king fucking hell i imagine if i was at home in a fucking bed sit taking smack if i had known that barry crier was against it i mean god love barry crier but fucking hell yeah it's an odd mix isn't it and it's extremely odd mix and the thing is like all of these celebs they're stood around because once they've signed the wall like there's not a lot for them to do there's no refreshments like let them at the buffet table that we saw earlier yes i think that's what brought half of

them there you know right are they giving out party bags afterwards? The thing is, to be totally fair, most of these people will be on the level and won't have done drugs. They'll have done worse things than much worse things, but a lot of them won't have done. But Ian Jury, eh. I know that sex and drugs and rock and roll is not meant to be taken literally. Yes. But he liked to spliff, as I understand it. He was a pothead, you know. See my dealer, he's called Simon.

Yeah, it was kind of disappointing seeing his name on there, actually. Yeah, but the thing was, you could say, oh, well, I'm just talking about heroin here. Yeah, really specifically. No one's going to say, well, you know, I do heroin. It's fucking me. What's the problem? It's interesting as well to kind of see the pre-ecstasy landscape of drugs as well, because obviously ecstasy is on its way over in Mark Armand at this point.

So, you know, this is going to hit soon. There was a really good moment, by the way, in that it's not just Zamo Newsround special, where John Craven, I don't know whether it was scripted or not, but he adds to all these warnings you know that you shouldn't do it and it's dangerous you don't know what you're getting and all this sort of stuff but he flips back into an almost

sort of Victorian thing he goes it will bring disgrace upon you it's just these messages are destined to fail because no matter how they tart it up and hide it as kind of we're going to take an even handed look at these things it is just being hectored by grown-ups it's all very catholic i think there's this drilling down to the sense of shame that they feel is what is going to ultimately

motivate people shame and terror not even about the criminal aspect but like the moral notion of like your sinful desires and the pollution of the body you know it's like only the corrupt would soil their person with these you know vile substances it's like really there's some really like seriously grim shit so there we go there there's celebrities sorting out the problems of the world once again but now the big guns have been dragged out grange hill chaps did you partake i did i loved grange hill oh yeah early grange hill was great not because it was sort of what it set out to be and what it got complaints about i mean i went to school with people who were banned from watching grange hill by their parents fucking hell but it really wasn't this gritty portrayal of real school life but it felt like school

yes by which i mean the kind of laughs that you have to grab at school to fend off the misery and and the corridors and the staircases and and the beating zones and everything else it did capture that kind of on the edge feel of school where you've got these preposterous rules and this mix of teachers the bastards and the and the soft touches in the tucker what a cynic you are mr culcone speaking as a teacher but yeah well which one are you um definitely a soft touch soft but it did capture all of that in the in the in the tucker benny pogo years of seasons one to eight it captured all of that but of course by now um in 86 a lot of the founding characters are gone the whole tucker doily dynamic has been replaced by the gonch uh danny kendall dynamic and it's got a bit preachy with zamo is this central christ-like figure who's gone through this kind of druggy redemption.

Where we find Graeme Gill here, it always freaked me out at this point. It's kind of shedding its past. But Susan Tully still seems to hang around at school. Yes. Looking like Robert Smith, you know, running up against Bridget the Midget. She turned up dressed up like Boy George, didn't she?

That's right, yeah. But she just keeps saying to Bridget the Midget, you know, I don't go here now, I can wear what I want. But fundamentally... Yeah, I'm in the EastEnders now, fuck you. But fundamentally, at this point, the old guard have gone, and my watching of Grange Hill is going to taper off from here on in, really.

Yeah, I find that the older you get, as you progress through the comprehensive system, the less of a hold Grange Hill has on you, as you progress through the comprehensive system, the less of a hold Grangell has on you because you've seen that it's a sham. Yeah, yeah, yeah, completely. And what we see in series eight and nine, which straddle 85 and 86, I mean, we've got a new script editor, Anthony Minghella, who'd later make the English patient.

He brings more comedy in via Gonch and Hollow and another whole set of characters who we see here the first real change of the guard since season 5 in 83 when zamo and faye lucas who takes lead vocal on the track by the way and roland etc were introduced so we do have all these these new characters in at the moment sarah did you partake or were you banned i i dabbled i guess um i never really got into it. I suppose I was too young at this time and then I sort of missed it. I would sort of watch it out of one eye occasionally. I didn't have the best time at school

and so I don't really want to be reminded of it when I was not at school, I suppose. But it definitely gives you that atmosphere of like, it's a bit, you know, the lawless zones of the stairwells and things. When it first started, I was still at junior school. And it was around about that time where it was like, oh, you're going to big school soon. Kids shove your head down the toilet every day.

And people were making it sound really grim. And you look at Grange Hill and go, oh, actually, it's not that bad. But when you do get to school, it's like, oh, God, school's shit. I got swung around by my ponytail once by another girl and that was that was so i mean you you wouldn't if you saw that on grange hill you go nah it can't be but yeah that was uh i was even as i was going around in a circle and passing out i was i was impressed so you gotta be strong yeah i mean ultimately grange hill for the first kind of few years it's like um it's like scum for kids you know it's all about fear and and yeah which is a big component of school but

yeah we're slightly overstressed in those early series yeah yeah i mean it is it's it's phil redmond sir phil redmond if you please who you know, an important writer who gave us, obviously, the first on-screen pre-Watershed lesbian kiss in Brookside and also crashed a fucking plane into Emmerdale. So, like, you know, that was him. So he definitely had a yen for disaster in that way. It was a bit of an imitation Edmonds. Because in the Grain Chill annuals, he always banged on about his helicopter. And it's like, oh yeah, I have to go,

you know, I work in Liverpool, and so when I have to go for filming for Grange Hill, I'll get into my helicopter. My helicopter's brilliant. I mean, obviously he's just saying, well, you know, loads of lads are reading this, what they're interested in. Oh yeah, helicopters.

I'll talk about that all the time. But yeah, he used to fucking bang on about his helicopter. All right, mate, we know you've got an helicopter yeah I think he's loosening his grip if you like on Grange Hill at this point yeah

I think his last kind of concrete act here is putting Ziggy in the yes the Scouse character yeah always seemed like

a really unlikely pupil at Grange Hill it prepares us for the moving of the whole fucking school to Liverpool oh god yeah at the end which is mental that's on a par with Bobby in Dallas yeah Grange Hill. It prepares us for the moving of the whole fucking school to Liverpool. Oh, God, yeah. At the end,

which is mental. That's on a par with Bobby in Dallas. Yeah. Coming to and realising it was all a dream. Oh, we're actually all in Liverpool now, are we? Okay.

So, yeah, I mean, this is a period. It's in transition. Loads of new characters. Vince Savage, this kind of gormless troglodyte.

Robbie Wright, Trevor Cleaver. Mr. Bronson makes his first appearance in this series god like mr bronson yeah and you've got you've got sort of a new set of girls in the grain show callie donnington and her mate ronnie burtles and laura reagan they're the ones by the way who do the don't listen to anyone else bit in the song and jones he's kind of got a really big bouffant haircut and jones yeah he's undoubtedly a reflection of george michael i think yeah oh he's definitely there as the as the heartthrob of grain chill yeah and he delivers the new stew pot and he delivers the line all you got to do is be yourself oh in the song he's so serious about it let's talk about the video then because it starts with

zammo in an extremely old school gym while some youth attempts to sell the drugs to a very young john alford so you know an intervention's made and then immediately we whip to the past because we see tucker jenkins the fucking don of grange Hill, DJing a youth club disco, which Danny Kendall's being dragged to, with shots of youths walking up corridors with their arms around each other trying to make it feel like the Breakfast Club. And then Faye Lucas, who appears to have come as someone's nan

in a pink cardigan, starts emoting at the mic in a studio with Kendall, Imelda Davis, who was the gripperette of the current series and of course roland and his helpful nemesis janet yeah but the thing is they're all getting along right yes and i recall one of the things i immediately didn't like about this video at the time is that all the dynamics of the actual show just kind of esconded completely in the video everyone's friends and everyone joins

in we're seeing the cast not the characters yeah i know but i it's the way that they pick up danny kendall on the stairs and he's just part of the fun i hated danny kendall he was one of the nastiest most hateful characters i thought he was brilliant character it was surprising that it was uh zamo who got into smack and not danny yeah Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. That's partly why this is such a profoundly, I think there are many reasons why this is a profoundly uncomfortable watch, but it's partly because even not having the deep knowledge of Grange Hill, it's like, are they in character or are they out of character?

It's like this sort of no man's land between the two and they don't know. I mean, they're actors, you know, I think they're kind of going going i'm not really sure what we're supposed to be doing here and they're doing their best exactly and because zamo's like that you know he's just gone through this drug ordeal he's still going through it yeah i mean him warding off this kid at the beginning yeah and telling him to just say no with real earnestness the kid kind of looks guilty in a sense whereas you know any kid having zamo lecturing them would you say fuck off zammo hypocrite he does sell it though to be fair just say no like he really gives it and and everyone else that you know just say no is repeated i didn't count but i don't know 30 times in the following three minutes and no one else looks like they mean it

i mean the thing is it does look like it's in a school right it's got that typical grange hill staircase yeah which always reminds me you know you know expulsion legends at school where you'd hear that a kid had been expelled and you didn't know why and then you found out there was a kid called billy woodhead in my school i went i remember going to his house once and he had a massive knife collection he was a bit of a badden um but i remember hearing a legend because he just suddenly disappeared from school and everyone was wondering where he was and why he got kicked out and it turned out he chucked our headmaster who was called taff he chucked him down the stairs it was a legend oh wait and there were stairs very very much like the ones that we see here

so yeah no but sarah's completely correct it doesn't quite know yes it's the cast of grange hill yes i know we've been told that but it's kind of uncomfortably on the edge yeah so yeah you know danny danny kendall he would be dealing he'd be chopping out roland's first line of code it annoyed me because it kind of perpetuated that school disco fiction that everyone gets along on the last day of school that's bollocks isn't it it's bollocks although the school disco parts of the video are fairly realistic i mean i don't recall the light show at our school disco being quite so spectacular it was more like my sister's game of disco lights but what happens next the gym bits we cut back to the youth club with annette Furman, I think. Is it Annette Furman? Because she left at the end of the last series.

I think it is, though. Right. Well, that makes no sense. And Ant Jones, who's clearly been pitched as a heartthrob of the programme. When he sings, all you've got to do is be yourself. It's the most self-conscious bit of singing since Morrissey was accidentally booked onto Soul Train. He's just, yeah, the sort of gently soul train he's just yeah the sort of gently

half closed eyes and the sort of the gentle tipping of the head to and fro like he's really really getting into it and into the idea he's lining himself up for that career isn't he i'd have been a few years younger and watching greg i would have fucking hated him oh yeah yeah but obviously being popular with girls it was direct george michael influence i think on his entire look and his presence in that show and then they show us all the fun things that we could be doing instead of taking drugs including dancing in leotards if you're a girl or gawping at girls dancing in leotards if you're a boy or shaking your ass in front of a big mirror or being in a gym the musk

of the kids from fame still lingers over the music scene in 1986, doesn't it? I think that's really directly taken from the American version as well. Like, the whole kind of aesthetic and the whole, like, kids from fame, which obviously the American version does better. This is like... They've got better gyms, haven't they, for a kick-off?

Well, yeah, but there's like the little, you know, advert version from the States and they're all out in the street liking fame in fame and it's much more diverse you know like basically everything about the uk version is sort of it's a really close analog but about 70 percent whiter yes setting up like physical exercise and expression as like the antidote really that's what you do instead of drugs yeah we know that you're like you've got an urge to do something why don't you do aerobics in the disco and there is like a little dance routine within the school disco which like you said is

more realistic apart from that because everyone's just like shuffling about yeah in that way that you do before you understand how to move your limbs at all, you know. The pinnacle of the discomfort of this video, I think, is seated within the little hand gesture, which would have got you beaten to some sort of jelly if you ever used it yourself to just say no. And you can see them kind of... Well, I'm glad you brought that up, Sarah, because, you know, up until this morning,

I would have just sat there and sneered at you, more or less, and said, Oh, well, obviously, Sarah, they're doing sign language. Oh, no. You know, because deaf kids need to be warned about drugs as well. I mean, they do this series of hand gestures where they ball their fists up and cross them over really quickly before sweeping the right hand away. And, yeah, for nearly 35 years, I've assumed that they're doing sign language in order to get the hearing impaired youth up to speed but i checked on the internet to see how accurate it was because i'm that thorough and it's all bollocks it's all absolute bollocks according to the british

sign language diction rare okay we can all do this at home now. If you want to say no to a drug dealer but can't be bothered to talk to them, here's how you go about it. So, just is bringing up the left hand in a pincer movement like you were picking a pear from a tree. Say is pointing to your chin with your left index finger and then throwing it

out to the person you're talking to. And no is shaking your head and bringing the flat of your palms out like tommy cooper right so we can safely say that the cast of grange hill are not doing that at all are they no that would have been much better because i'm extra thorough i thought oh hang on a minute this is american song and they're ripping off an american video so i went over and checked the american sign Language Dictionary because they have a different way

of going about with sign language because they're awkward cunts who think the summer. Which means that if you're British and deaf and you bump into

a deaf American person, you can't talk to each other. No. That's fucking mental. Such a silly country. But anyway, so I checked their

Sign Language Dictionary and it's even less like what we use a Grangella doing. That's fucking mental. Such a silly country. But anyway, so I checked their sign language dictionary, and it's even less like what we use a Grangella doing. So that raises the question, why? Why are they doing that? And who told them to do that? Yeah, yeah. Somebody's devised that. Yeah.

The shittest illegal paper, rock, scissors move ever. Somebody has devised that. Paper, scissors, rock. No. paper scissors rock no like you can see that they're all like giggling in this quite way because it was either that or cringe themselves literally inside out because they all get it wrong some of them do with the left hand some of it doing with the right hand some of them you can see them bashing their fists together and laughing about it so yeah it's it's fucking stupid so if there are any pop crazy youngsters out there who are conversant in sign language i'm begging you please look at the video

available on the video playlist and tell us what they're actually signing if anything because for all i know someone on the film crew could have got them to sign Hail Lord Satan or Heroin is Skilled just for the laugh. Very strange. Oh my God, that's like four weddings where she learned sign language so she can flirt with the deaf guy. And it's like, would you like to dance? That would be mice. It doesn't help that the gym bits, I mean, they happen over perhaps

one of the most sort of objectionable 80s sax solos this side of kenny loggins the danger zone really it's and i think sarah's right undoubtedly this is a nod back to kids from fame a little bit yes because it's kids in their pants pretty much in a gym it can't help coming across like the opening of that thermal cock sex ed video which i still can't erase from my mind but i mean crucially you know if you're a young adult who this video is presumably trying to reach this model of health and efficiency provided by the cast it's vile and unsexy and unexciting and nothing you really want to get involved in and then because it's the mid-80s we get the sole british contribution to the song some rap performed by a mulky christa and i've said that wrong and i do apologize to him

who played kevin balan mainly because he's the one black male yeah in grange is this season's benny isn't it so what was it made you do it you had had no need. First a taste, then a craving, then it turned to greed. Calling me your main man, you didn't really understand. After all you did to me, expecting me to shake your hand. No! There we go. I love how it's that sort of proto-John Barnes flow. You know, catch me if you can, because I'm the heroin man.

Three lines on my desk, I know we can't go wrong. Get round here for some crack. That bridge, the... Yes. It's been in my head for weeks. My brain just keeps defaulting to it. I'll be there just trying to, like, you know, make a cup of tea. Darla's, Darla's.

I have to hand it to them. It's not a very good song, but that is a very catchy hook. You're right, Sarah, it is catchy. And, yeah, we end back at the youth club with the girls doing some proper kids from Feming with a stop-motion jump and kick. They missed a trick in this video because what they

should have put in to really drive the message home is mr bronson dressed up as a hippie in a fucking jethro tull t-shirt with a spliff on giving the peace sign and playing a guitar solo through it yeah that would have been me how could they have done this better like because it seems neither one thing nor another it's kind of not in, it's not in the real world either. Like, how could they... I mean, they would have had to either go comedy, like, go full-on kind of slapstick silliness, or go much darker.

Oh, there's nothing funny about drugs there. Well, yeah, so they couldn't ever have done that. But this is the thing, I feel like this is a compromise born of just the sheer awkwardness of, like, well, how do you fit this into that? And how does this go with it? And you just kind of, it seems like it should be logical, but once you start, and I've done so many, like,

little kind of copywriting jobs like this, where they go, we want this idea in there, but you want it through this prism. And it's like, ah, no, that isn't. And we want it to go viral as well. Oh, God, yeah. Oh, I fucking hate that. Oh, yeah, we want to do this thing, but we we want it to go viral as well. Oh, God, yeah. Oh, I used to fucking hate that. Oh, yeah, we want to do this thing,

and we really want it to go viral. Can you make a viral video? And so I'd think, well, yeah, okay, then. Get your managing director to stand outside a school with no trousers or pants on, doing Hitler salutes, and then eating his own shit out of an ice cream tub. That'll go viral.

That'll do it. It won't cost you much either, apart from bail. What's really weird as well, you know, in researching this for CMP, I did the thing immediately at Google the Lyric. Yes. And I couldn't find any. I know.

The shame is so deep around this record that, you know, it can't even be rehabilitated in any way. It also needs saying that the actual central lyrical conceit here just say no right how rude yeah just say no thank you no thank you you know very rude yeah and the idea that all you gotta do is be yourself so a 14 year old whose fucking hormones are going berserk the last thing they can do is be themselves and they're turning into this fucking beast with the hair where there wasn't before well i mean what if being yourself is taking shit loads of drugs i mean or conversely you know what if being yourself

is living in a tiny shit old town with no friends and nothing to do you know it's a weird message be yourself for kids because it reminds you as a kid as sarah hinted you know yourself is precisely sometimes who you don't want to be and it's this recurrent bloody message that you take drugs to fit in like everyone's a junkie zombie out there yeah peer pressure well you do drugs precisely not to fit in you know with a true zombification of capitalism or whatever you're thinking about at that time and i remember very soon after this there was one of those smith and jones talking heads and mel smith goes it's a great campaign you know it just means that if a copper asks you if you've got any drugs you just say no i mean really in this case just say no it's no different to marieoinette saying, just eat cake, or that mad woman in the cabinet saying, just eat turnips.

I mean, yeah, it is. I mean, this is all stuff I could rant about all the live long day, drugs or no drugs, but it is going to be more complicated than that. Just say no. I mean, yeah, like you said, if it's about peer pressure and the delicate sort of social ecosystem of school, just barking a refusal at someone who might be trying to bring you into their group, you know, in the way that friends might do. It's not necessarily like, ha ha, I've got drugs, I'm going to corrupt you with them. You know, it's like, well, mate, maybe we want you to be our mate. We think you're sound. It's like, no, this is not going to be good for you. However bad drugs are for you, that's like well mate maybe we want you to be our mate it just we think you're sound it's like no this is not going to be good for you however bad drugs are for you that's not good either no oh god i'm doing it now no thank you i mean also the weird slippage that you get with this with the message and the song and the video is like yeah most of the lyrics that you can hear are just really vaguely about like i said that kind of social ecosystem of school and about the kind of dynamic between people i think they

obviously kind of swerved being really explicit about it but you just end up nowhere and it's like well are you talking about being yourself which you might not want to be you might want to go jesus christ well i a i don't know what that means yeah b ah no i mean don't listen don't listen to anyone else all you got to do is be suffer for all we know god might have said that to peter sudcliffe in that graveyard in polish yeah it's so vague isn't it that's not necessarily a good thing no i'm not saying british people shouldn't do american stuff that is true a lot of the time though it is but i mean it's still a mawkish pile of shit this record in its american iteration but it would have been a professional sounding mawkish pile of shit probably with a fabulously

appointed video i mean because it's british and because it's the living version of you know the front cover of the come and praise him book i.e the grange hill cast it's this weird thing of this rub between this attempted professionalism but just this endless amateurishness that as a kid you would just find i mean i guess what you'd say now is totally cringe and i showed this to sophia oh and she literally cringed herself inside out so the cringe factor in this just hasn't gone away and this is why it failed you did see like the american version didn't you whatever yeah there was a little bit on drug watch it was much tighter and you know it still had the kind of slightly unpleasant sax not that i'm completely

anti-sax but it was you know it's not the best it's not the best use of the controversial instrument you practice safe sax don't't you sarah absolutely always but yeah it was it wasn't funky but it was funkier there was a whiff of funk about it at least you know it's a whiff of the street yes there is no whiff of the street here whatsoever it is the damp indoor air of a comprehensive school obviously chaps lee mcdonald uh zamo is the centerpiece of the entire operation i mean zamo's got another series in him uh the next one focuses on his rehabilitation his reunion with jackie wright but lee the actor has an eye on the future as a daily mirror article at the end of the year spells out headline next to him posing with frank bruno frank and fearless i'm

ready to be a champion says tv's junkie kid pocket-sized tv star zammo is a knockout with grange hill fans and lee mcdonald who plays the drug-taking sixth former in the hit BBC series, is aiming to pull no punches in real life. The 18-year-old Lee is a brilliant amateur boxer with his sights set on a place in the British team for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. Lee has no fears about combining acting and boxing. I'm going to keep boxing until I'm 21. Then, if I'm good enough, I'll turn professional. I love boxing and I love acting and I want to keep both going for as long as possible. That's why I've also applied for a place at drama school. My ambition is to get a part in EastEnders. But Lee still finds time to enjoy himself.

I go out with my mates from Grange Hill every Friday and Saturday night, says the chirpy cocknair. We're all VIP members of the Hippodrome, Stringfellows and the Limelight, so we're there almost every weekend. Oh, absolutely no chance of coming across anybody with any drugs in those places, is there? I mean, before we go any further, chubs,

because we've only just scratched the surface of this, we have to absolve the cast of Grangell for any responsibility for this shit. Because, you know, it's pretty obvious that they weren't allowed to say no when it came to the recording of this. I mean, people fucking bought it. That's what I can't quite fathom out.

If you're a certain age and you hear the cast of Grangella making a record, you're going to buy it, aren't you? I guess so. And you know the BBC are shoving it up every child's arse on the telly at the moment. Incessantly, yeah. Incessantly. Perhaps why it fails. But, I mean, why it fails

is because, I mean, the whole campaign fails, Drug Watch and also that it's not just Zama Newsround Special. Yeah, we do need to talk about why it failed. But before that, why are Grain Chill and the government and all the advertising campaigns just focusing on heroin? Because there's other drugs

about. I think it's possibly something to do with, you know, it being a drug of deprived areas and stuff weird because then that's a nice neat way to kind of put the personal responsibility on you to uh pull yourself up by your bootstraps you know because then you don't actually have to do anything like build good houses or anything like that yeah yeah that's really important also i think it's that heroin because we don't we've never had like meth in this country in a big way and heroin was always that i i think it was just like the the ultimate drugs you know it's like the the worst the the boss level of drugs yeah it's the end of level boss of drugs you know i mean it's just got that i don't know if where

that came from but i think it's just sort of got this mythos around it i've got to say i don't know if where that came from but i think it's just sort of got this mythos around it i've got to say i don't know anyone in my entire life who's done heroin that's been the one drug that everyone's just kept away from oh god it's not a party drug is it no no it isn't no i i mean i know a couple of people who have tried it once in order to because you can actually do that you know contrary to a lot don't listen to sarah pop craigslist she's right she's completely right don't listen don't listen to it is um as i understand it okay i feel like i should do a caveat which is that you know we are we are sticking our asses way out of a remit for this this podcast in some ways um and you know none of us are drug or drug policy experts

just people who've done done some and lived um but well that was the problem sarah because the way they were going on about drugs not so much in this video but on the advertising you know the heroin screws you up it's like you take this you die eventually yeah yeah yeah you you will that was the problem because a few years later you know my mates and eventually me started doubling it's like oh shit i'm still alive they were all talking bollocks well that's absolutely yeah yeah i had a sort of similar similar thing when i was uh you know i mean later even than you know slow coach kulkarni who didn't do any drugs until he was 16. oh my god that's so lame but um yeah i was you know 18 or something and then when i was at university and the whole leah betts thing

happened and that was i think i've spoken about it before and those big posters with her her smiling face and the black the black and the white kind of grainy thing and it's like sorted just one ecstasy tablet took Leah Betts. And I had the fear of God put into me about this. And then when I actually did it, and I had two kind of failed attempts, because I was, I wanted to try the thing, but I was terrified.

And that actually, because it is quite sensitive to your moods, and I think I probably had bad stuff to start with anyway. So I had a pill, and then just spent several hours just going, I'm going to die, I'm going to die, gonna die i'm gonna die and i did not die and then i didn't die the second time i didn't have a nice time either and the third time i did it i had an amazing time which is the whole point yeah and then the next day i wake up you pat yourself down

and go yeah i didn't die ah yeah it's quite a cliche really but you do then start to question what you've been told in the larger sense like yeah okay why has there been money spent to terrify me and stop me and and make me think make me fear that i'm gonna die yeah to stop me from doing this and obviously it's like that's your personal experience that that it's a hugely complex um large thing but your personal experience is to go huh well what else am i being liked about and it's that's where it goes and so that's why you start to understand it's not just about the drugs yeah it's not just about how much they care about whether you live or die it's about bigger stuff than that yeah yeah i mean look up until you have your first drug experience or up until you have you experience drugs for yourself

these kind of campaigns they do work in a sense because they they put this terror in you yeah the nature of a moral panic is as sarah's hinted that it completely ignores obviously this entire campaign the sort of systemic complex reasons why there's a lot of drug use in this country it tries to instill this almost pavlovian response to drugs that like you know you just you see the word heroin and it's terrifying and you know once i ended up i mean look i didn't end up in the shooting gallery or anything all i mean is once i ended up sat in a room and somebody was doing some heroin yes i thought god that looks really squalid and i didn't want to do it what made you want to do it you had

no need but you know i mean it? You had no need. But, you know, I mean, it's something I think about a lot because I have to have these conversations in a sense, not only with kids that I teach, but also my own kids. But crucially, it's a conversation, you know? Because no one wants teenage kids to be doing anything adulterated. Do you know what I mean? Well, no, no. I mean, look, what Drug watch is doing what just say you

know is trying to do is yeah it's like a pavlovian dog it's this it's like when you go to get hypnotized to stop smoking or something they just kind of repeat this phrase until it's so in your head yeah that that would ward you away but out of the moral panics of the 80s i guess the americans had satanic panic and we have this. Yes. But both of them just ignore the really complex reasons because that's messy and difficult and, you know, takes time. They'd rather just kind of, it's almost like this kind of idiot training. Just say no, just say no. Let's just keep saying that until kids don't do it.

Yeah. It's behavioral conditioning is what it is. That's it. And it's perfect in its way in the sense that it's a total abdication of any greater responsibility. And because it puts it completely on the individual. It's so, you know, it's so simple. Just say no. And then if you don't do that and you get yourself into some trouble with the law or with your health, you should have just said no.

I mean, yeah. Expecting me to shake your hand. Just saying no is essentially government saying, look, we're getting our arses kicked in the war on drugs and there are things we could do to deal with it, like, you know, legalising some drugs or making their use as safe as possible and, you know, taxing the shit out of it

to keep the NHS going. But we're not going to do that. So if you actually take drugs and it all goes wrong it's all your fault mate well yeah i mean it's it's kind of i i hesitate to draw this parallel with recent events but the same kind of personal responsibility absolutism uh has that has given us some of the highest drug death numbers in europe also gave us some of the highest drug death numbers in Europe, also gave us some of the highest COVID death numbers in the world. Because for me personally, like I've risked my health outside the law for a good time. And I've risked my health inside the law for a good time. And guess which one had the life-altering consequences?

In each case, it's like it's all on the individual to do the best risk assessment that they can with really scant information. This is the thing as well as the kind of withholding of information, which still happens now. Like there's been some progress on this with with kind of drug testing at festivals and things like that. And I mean, the Talk to Frank website, which is kind of better than nothing just about. Although I'm not sure how often it's being updated now. But basically, you don't have, you know, you were saying earlier about like, oh, you could, how often it's being updated now, but basically you don't have, you know, you were saying earlier about like, oh, you could, you know, if you studied this,

you were allowed access to the book with all the stuff in it about drugs. It's like, well, why is that restricted in the first place? You know, it's well, because just saying that, why would you need any of that when you could just say no? Like, the thing is, it has been proven as a policy which came from Americaica and then we adopted it ourselves in in a kind of vague but persistent way it's been proven not to work what works is you know actual education actual information yeah and talking more about it and in a more nuanced and non-judgmental way that's what actually works but that's more expensive so it doesn't work but it works because people want it to because people believe in it at some really like primal level and so it's never going to go away i don't think because it's too like i said it's just too perfect well just just say no but it doesn't work but but

it has to but just just say no i mean if i tried saying to like my daughters just say no i mean i mean starters that's not a conversation you know that, that's just me telling them to do that. Yeah. When you're talking about drugs with kids, you know, you have to realise that drugs are a part of their life, even if they don't take them. Because their friends will be taking them. I mean, you know, kids at secondary school now are doing things at the weekend, right, that their adult parents are doing. And it's pointless me saying to my daughter, say no just don't do anything i have to say the sense of i mean perhaps this isn't the sensible thing but what i've said to my daughters is you

know never pay for anything apart from weed and look just be fucking careful you cannot destroy that impulse to get out of your head no or to or to get out of your face you cannot destroy that impulse to get out of your head no or to or to get out of your face you cannot destroy that simply by saying you don't need that in your life you know go to the gym instead yes um so it has to be crucially get some proper steroids there mate it's human growth hormone it is very telling isn't it that the boxing gym and the gym always seems to be the solution but yeah i mean these are these instead of damaging your brain damage someone else It is very telling, isn't it, that the boxing gym and the gym always seems to be the solution. But yeah, I mean, these are... Instead of damaging your brain, damage someone else's. But crucially, none of this campaign, either in the States or over here, is a conversation.

It's not a conversation. It's hectoring. Yeah. It's abstinence, isn't it? It's abstinence only, which doesn't work any better for drugs than it does for sex. Because these are natural urges no the terrible thing about just say no is that of course it's going to work for some people yeah some people would have been like me and they would have seen that leah betts um poster and gone no no no thank you or some some variation on that and just not not tried it ever at all but you know i had the urge and i was not a kid then i was you know a young adult and i was extremely sensible and i was very cautious and you know and it wasn't about

peer pressure it wasn't about any of these other things it was just like i want to know and that's something that is really difficult for people and societies to deal with but it is not going away and a lot of great things can come out of that indeed i don't want to come on here going yeah drugs because you know i'm not a dickhead like i understand that this is a huge issue and it can really destroy people's lives i mean there are at least three artists in this episode of top of the pops alone whose lives have been blighted by drugs you know including sammo who survived but you know um it's scary really to think that this is like, this is still, really, this is nearly 40 years later,

and we haven't significantly moved on from this. No. No. Good God, no. The message is still the same, isn't it? The only thing that's moved on is the drugs. Yeah. If Granger was still going today, and they did an anti-drug song,

the first question would be, well, okay, what drugs should we focus on? The crappy ones like the nitrous oxide, crocodile or something like that we should say actually as we're recording at this time the government has announced that as part of a crackdown on antisocial behavior yeah they're criminalizing the possession of nitrous oxide or laughing gas which was already illegal to uh or supply under the Psychoactive Substances Act of 2016, which I remember laughing about grimly when it happened. It's one of those impossible pieces of legislation that doesn't make a lick of sense.

Because it's like, okay, any novel substance that, you know, because they were trying to deal with legal highs, which obviously were a huge problem. They had to do something, but not this. Because you could say scented candles if they give you a nice sense memory of when you were 12 and you went to the beach. Like anything that makes you feel a feeling at all. No, just say no. And all political parties have to do that. They have to talk tough constantly about this issue um i mean labor last week we're talking about oh yeah these poor families who smell a bit of weed in their back or whatever as if it's the end of the world and and yeah this this talking tough rhetoric it's never going to go you know and this is why every now and then you'll get a politician asked whether

they've done weed and i was all of them seemingly, you know, didn't enjoy it. Yeah. You know, and it's just the maintenance of that tone constantly means we're not going to go anywhere with this issue. You're not crediting the kids with anything. You're not crediting the kids with their own reconnaissance.

In a sense, the only way to really find out about drugs is to, yeah, to live ultimately to live into your 20s where these things become part of your life um not part of your life on a daily basis i just mean you get exposed to the realities of drugs rather than this nonsense yeah um that governments have to shoot out the thing is one of the many many insulting and patronizing ideas that persists is the kind of casual user to addict pipeline which yeah yeah it's a different thing

it's that's insulting to both people who struggle with addiction and to casual users because these are yeah of course one can like you know you you don't become an addict without first being a casual user but being a casual user does not necessarily mean that you're going to end up you know dribbling in an alley behind a bin with a needle in your arm that's not how it works i mean i was going to say like i said not being an expert but i do understand that heroin specifically it does it's legendarily addictive and it is very addictive but it's not like you have one go and you're like oh that's that's me that's my life it takes a while to get physically addicted to it i think if you like it then you're going to feel addicted to it sooner than your body starts

to need it but there's a reason for that drugs are a solution before they are a problem they're a solution to a larger problem where people have pain or grief or just they're lost in some way and that's often why you know there will be reasons there'll be psychological reasons why people yeah end up in that you know like i said it's very complicated the psychological and hereditary and social reasons for drug use just they're not a part of any of these campaigns at all but going back to the mid 80s i mean about a year after this episode zammo became the absolute byword for a custard gannet or anyone you knew who did drugs i mean by the end of this year i'd start going to another college and i started to mix with kids from the posh end of town all on the hash and everything and you know my working class background just prevented me from tucking

into the drugs because it was just like no we don't do this shit they'd be there having a spliff and pass it over to me and i'd immediately say no thanks mate i saw what it did to zamo i get high on life yes yeah and around about that time some of the dancers in my year at college did a show somewhere in town and they were supported by a nearby comprehensive school who'd done a musical about the drug problem set in a school where even the dinner ladies were dealing hash on the side and i wish i could remember every second of it but the only thing i can remember is near the middle where um the female central character just appears under a spotlight and sings a song which sounded not dissimilar to a little piece by Nicole. And the opening lines were, I'm so depressed and I don't know why.

I'm hooked on drugs and I'm going to die. And my entire class just sliding off their chairs, pissing themselves laughing. Oh, I wish I could remember more about it. I wish there was someone out there who was in that musical to tell us all about it. So I can apologise to them for just laughing so derisively at them. By the time I got to university

and was living with a load of custard gannets, we did have in the window of our shared house a picture of Zamo which had been ripped out of the Grand Geohannion and someone had cut his eyes out and done a bit of a spirograph of them. I mean, that's

the thing. This isn't even a song or anything that sort of like took time to pass into joke folklore no it was a joke as soon as it appeared the people it was trying to reach just laughed at it and of course top of the pulse feeling very pleased with itself and lecturing the kids you know just a couple of years before they play they call it assy ease are good he's ebony yes i was in an office i was doing a like a social copywriting job a few years ago and radio one was on in the office and everyone there was much younger than me and ebony's a good came on and it's like is this real yeah they couldn't believe it's like

what this was a real record that someone out of the people bought it and it was in the charts i was like yeah yeah yeah they were just like what? Why didn't anybody do a fucking crappy rave version of this? Yeah I would have sold a fucking shit load In that period

where 70s stuff was getting parodied and stuff in rave chains Yeah Yeah it would have been big And someone else should have done

a cover of the Firms tune Arthur Daylair Ease All Right Opportunity missed Oh yeah yeah yeah Imagine what's going on in the universe where that happened so

the following week just say no soar 21 places to number 5 where it stayed for 2 weeks it ended up selling a quarter of a million copies in the UK and the cast were congratulated in the House of Parliament

for covering their sorry arses in the fight against drugs and they appeared outside the Adelphi Theatre in October forming a big no good morning Britain opening credit style article in the Guardian members of the cast of TV's Grinch Hill spell out their view of drugs no they will be joining show business stars in the just say no gala evening at the adelphi theatre to raise cash for drug counselling centres others who have agreed to appear include sasha distel wayne sleep alvin stardust kids you must be out of your tiny minds john inman don mclean and members of the cast of Emmerdale Farm and Coronation Street. Well, that's going to put some sense into the kids, isn't it?

Sasha Distel, just say no. The kids from Grange Hill, I think some of them turn up in Ferry Aid in a couple of years. So this isn't the last time, you know. And emboldened by the chart success of just say no phil redmond creator of the show hustled his cast back into the studio to record grange hill the album a mixture of medleys and original material are you ready for the track list oh yes please you know the teacher, open brackets, smash head, close brackets. Girls like to do it too.

That ain't right. The It turns out to be bullying. Yes. Led by Imelda Davis. There's a few. Do you collect stamps? Yes. No.

Just say no. We also have school love no supervision at break biology this sounds like a fucking gary glitter or jonathan king album doesn't it i wonder if school love is a cover of the anvil tune that would be amazing and i now need to hear that, because that's a tune, man. Just Say No, of course. Don't Stop, a lads medley, which includes My Generation, The Walk of Life, The Wanderer, and Rocking All Over the World. And Jones performing I Don't Like Mondays. Oh, what?

Do they know what that's about? Then there's a girls medley, which includes What a Wonderful World, Oh, what? Do they know what that's about? Then there's a girls medley, which includes What a Wonderful World, Sweet Nothings, Why Do Fools Fall in Love and Do Do Ron Ron, and a medley of The Greatest Love of All and That's What Friends Are For. I hope Roland and Janet sang them too. Oh, my God.

But it, and the single taken from it, You Know The Teacher, Smash Head, failed to chart. But later this year, the cast of Granger were whipped over to Washington DC to appear with Nancy Reagan at the White House for a special Just Say No day, with Zamo sat next to the First Lady, and Faye Lucas presenting her with a 12 inch of just say no which according to lee mcdonald she lobbed under the sofa forgot about at the end and just walked off presumably to have it off with frank sinatra again 10 weeks after this episode

was broadcast the tabloids announced that heroin was back and collaborating with Boy George. Yeah, Junkie George has six weeks to live. And after falling out of favour and being superseded by ecstasy in the late 80s, Heroin made a comeback when it teamed up with a sort of grunge and Brit pop-axe in the early 90s before working with the Libertines and is still going today and by recording this single

the cast of grange hill slapped a target on their back in 1999 john olford failed to heed sammo's instructions in the gym and was convicted of supplying drugs to the fake sheikh mazir mamoud of the news of the world and jailed for six weeks. Round about the same time, Erkan Mustafa, who played Roland Browning, was caught in another sting by the Sunday Mirror when he offered to get them heroin, cocaine and ecstasy, claimed he was making £900 a night selling drugs in his club,

and bragged that he and the cast smuggled drugs into America and he was ripped to the tits in the white house which he later said was all bollocks and he bit him fiercely in the arse he also claimed in that sunday mirror interview that he went to top of the pops off his face to mime the song which is absolute bollocks because the two appearances of this single were the screening of the video and in the the mid-90s, the journalist Taylor Parks, who's in the green room of the word for a Melody Maker article, when he chanced upon that week's guests,

members of the cast of Grange Hill, running round animatedly, singing Just Say Yes. Yeah. Just say yes. No. Oh, man. Tell me we didn't just bang on about just say no for nearly an hour and a quarter. Fucking hell. Anyway, we're all off to the gym now to shake our arses in front of a mirror for a bit

and do some completely wrong hand gestures at some kids. But we shall return tomorrow for the final part of this episode of Chart Music. Oh, and by the way, do not sleep on the video playlist for this episode, Podcraze Youngsters. Everything we've talked about is there in visual form, including that astonishing display of BBC star power at the end of Drug Watch. Anyway, on behalf of Neil Kulcani and Sarah B, this is Al Needham advising you very strongly to stay pop crazed.