loadsamoney

Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing: Life, Death and the Thrill of the Catch
by Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse
Published 29 May 2019

He was doing Stavros on Friday Night Live and it had become really popular so Harry wanted another character. Fortunately, Charlie and I had one up our sleeve: Loadsamoney. Friday Night Live (and later, Saturday Live) gave us the golden opportunity to do that new character on TV for three minutes, and as soon as that first one had gone out – after just one go, just three minutes of it! – Loadsamoney was everywhere. Wherever you went, there’d be someone shouting, ‘Shut your mouth and look at my wad!’ Writing it was an absolute guilty pleasure. The prevailing mood in comedy at that time was politically right-on, and Loadsamoney’s the furthest thing from that you could imagine. I mean, of course he was wrong, but there was something gloriously liberating about writing him.

…

My favourite line we ever did was, ‘That Mrs Thatcher, she’s done a lot of good for this country.’ Of course, the crowd would boo. ‘Shut your mouth!’ More booing. ‘Mind you – I wouldn’t shag it.’ That single line tells you everything you need to know about Loadsamoney. Bob always says the best stand-up gig he ever saw was Harry in those early days – just as he was getting famous, when it was three characters in a row, Stavros, Loadsamoney and Buggerallmoney, gag gag gag, bang bang bang! Bob’s always been very complimentary about Harry. When I first went to see the Big Night Out at the Albany in about 1989, Charlie and I were quite well established as writers.

The Flat White Economy
by Douglas McWilliams
Published 15 Feb 2015

Stories abounded of supporters of London football clubs waving their wage packets at visiting Liverpool supporters, chanting “Bet you’re on the dole!”. Shops, bars, restaurants and other service providers in London benefitted financially but suffered morally from the mega-bonus culture that infiltrated London in those days. People think of the heyday of the “loadsamoney” culture being the 1980s. But the financial merry-go-round in the city didn’t actually come to a shuddering halt until the great financial crisis of 2007/08. Bonuses continued to rise and London’s economy, driven by financial services, grew much faster than the rest of the UK. Culturally, the noise of “spend, spend, spend” grew quieter – the wealth had started to age and a degree of discretion had emerged – but London’s disproportionate wealth continued to accumulate.

…

The bicycle has replaced the Porsche, skinny jeans have replaced suits and, of course, flat white coffee has replaced champagne. Champagne sales are down a quarter since their peak in 2007. Now there are 3.2 million cups of coffee sold in London every day, an increase of more than 50% since 2007. Twenty years ago the tone for London living was set by the ‘Loadsamoney’ style of the rich bankers of the 1980s and 1990s. But it was extravagant, elitist and generally failed the test of good taste. Those working in financial services earned much more than they knew how to spend and had a very boyish nouveau riche view of how to spend their money. Although they set a tone, driven by their massive spending power, the lifestyle itself was expensive and not easily copied.

…

The Boxpark on Bethnal Green Road in Shoreditch, for example, is according to the Daily Mail the world’s first ‘pop-up mall’, featuring fashionable stores and bars with a design picking up on the unique atmosphere of urban lifestyle, fashion, art and design in this now trendy area. And it is much easier to copy the trends set by the Flat Whiters than the ‘Loadsamoney’ types from financial services in the 1980s and 1990s – their spending patterns are affordable. The only difficulty is in keeping up with the trends. Flat Whiters know that they can’t price their styles out of the market so to keep ahead their styles have to keep changing. Coffee Shops And of course the most characteristic service businesses in the Flat White Economy are the coffee shops.

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy
by David Sawyer
Published 17 Aug 2018

[78] “mundane, and laborious”: “The Compound Effect: Amazon.co.uk: Perseus: 9781593157241: Books.” toreset.me/78, p. 63. [79] “to choose one’s own way”: “Man’s Search For Meaning: The classic tribute to hope... – Amazon UK.” toreset.me/79, p. 75. [80] “loadsamoney!”: “Loadsamoney – Wikipedia.” toreset.me/80. Loadsamoney was a character created my English comedian Harry Enfield. I remember him on Ben Elton’s Friday Night Live show. The idea was that Loadsamoney had loads of money, and wasn’t shy telling you about it. Enfield’s alter ego came to symbolise the excesses of 1980s Britain. [81] “small daily increments”: “Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get...” toreset.me/81, p. xvi

…

That’s enough money to live off forever, so if someone asks me to do something I don’t want to do, you guessed it, I can say: “Fuck you.” (F.U. Money is nothing to do with a man wearing a tracksuit top and snow wash jeans plucking a wodge of bank notes from his back pocket, waving them in your face, and shouting “loadsamoney[80]!”) But that vision, though vivid, is not strong enough. My true vision is my wife, Rachel, and me, sitting in one of those white towns in Andalusia, in the hills. It’s an Airbnb: we’ve been there for two months now. We’re in comfy chairs on the roof terrace, reading; her David Nicholls’s latest novel, me Crime and Punishment.

No Such Thing as Society
by Andy McSmith
Published 19 Nov 2010

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-84901-009-2 Printed and bound in the EU 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 To Nick who was twelve weeks and five days old when the 1980s ended CONTENTS Acknowledgements Introduction: The Decade of Greed and Live Aid Chapter 1: A Lady Not for Turning Chapter 2: Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves Chapter 3: Protest and Survive Chapter 4: Diana and the New Romantics Chapter 5: Inglan is a Bitch Chapter 6: Islands in the Fog Chapter 7: Darling, We’re the Young Ones Chapter 8: We Work the Black Seam Chapter 9: Feed the World Chapter 10: Loadsamoney Chapter 11: Fleet Street is Unwell Chapter 12: The Bomb and the Ballot Chapter 13: Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? Chapter 14: Like a Ghost Town Chapter 15: Heralds of Free Enterprise Chapter 16: The Hand of God Chapter 17: Stand Down, Margaret Epilogue ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are numerous people I should thank for help and information, including Sue Dearie, Nigel Farage, Andy Grice, Adrian Hamilton, Lucy Hodges, Richards Ingrams, James Manning, Amol Rajan, Simon Redfern, John Rentoul, Steve Richards, Belinda Salt, Kim Sengupta, Ben Summerskill, Peter Tatchell, Francis Wheen, the compilers of the excellent Margaret Thatcher Foundation website, my agent Andrew Gordon and publisher Andreas Campomar.

…

In the USA, the 1980s is known as the ‘decade of greed’ because of the way light regulation and tax changes allowed money to pour into the bank accounts of those who were already wealthy, creating a culture in which the corrupt investor Ivan Boesky told an audience in California that ‘you can be greedy and still feel good about yourself’.7 There was a similar phenomenon in 1980s Britain, though the phrase used to sum it up was not coined by an investor but by a satirical stand-up comic, Harry Enfield. It was the ‘loadsamoney’ culture. Salaries were rising, and the higher tax rates had fallen and fallen for those who were paid enough to be affected; the generous cuts came at the start of the decade, but the biggest of all was in 1988, when the top rate went down from 60p to 40p, which put up the disposable income of the well-off by up to one-fifth overnight.

…

Its trade union legislation, the tax reforms, the selling-off of nationalized industries and the attacks on local government spending all provoked ferocious opposition, but the opposition never really had public opinion behind it until Mrs Thatcher overreached herself in 1989 by introducing the poll tax. In the circumstances, it might be expected that right-wing opinion would also carry the day on other issues, such as sexual morality or race relations. Perhaps surprisingly, this did not happen. People who were basking in the experience of having ‘loadsamoney’ may have been selfish, but they were not trying to force everyone else to be like them. Race and sexuality were the greatest social issues of the 1980s, and on both counts society was more liberal at the end of the decade than at the start. In the final years of Nelson Mandela’s long imprisonment an increasing number of white Britons saw him as a prisoner of conscience, despite the prime minister’s unchanging belief that he was the head of a terrorist organization.

The Bank That Lived a Little: Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market
by Philip Augar
Published 4 Jul 2018

Lord Camoys (Rex Shutterstock) 3. 54 Lombard Street, 1906 (Historic England) 4. 54 Lombard Street, 1980s (Associated Newspapers/Rex Shutterstock) 5. 54 Lombard Street, 2000 (John Sturrock/Alamy) 6. 1 Churchill Place (Jacob Carter/Rex Shutterstock) 7. 41–43 Brook Street (Openoffices.com) 8. Sir Timothy Bevan (The Times/News Licensing/Tim Bishop) 9. John Quinton (Trevor Humphries/Rex Shuttestock) 10. BZW Trading Floor (Mike Abrahams/Alamy) 11. Harry Enfield as Loadsamoney (ITV/Rex Shutterstock) 12. Andrew Buxton and Martin Taylor (UPP/TopFoto) 13. Matthew Barrett and Sir Peter Middleton (Sean Dempsey/PA Images) 14. New York Racquet and Tennis Club (BeyondMyKen/Wikimedia Commons) 15. Bob Diamond playing golf (Getty Images) 16. Carol Vorderman advertises FirstPlus (The Advertising Archives) 17.

…

In pre-Thatcher, pre-Big Bang Britain, it was poor form to speak openly about money; after Big Bang, it was exactly what everyone was talking about. In 1988 the comedian Harry Enfield’s first words as a plasterer on the topical satire show Friday Night Live were: ‘Look at that! Look at my wad! I’ve got loadsamoney.’ The phrase promptly entered the national lexicon.7 It was exciting, racy and looked very glamorous. But after a promising first year, Big Bang stopped working for the firms that were trying to take advantage of it. Lower charges encouraged investors to deal more but the increase in trading volume was not enough to compensate for the reduction in commission on each share traded, nor was market making the profitable business the new firms hoped it would be.

…

Last of the old school: Sir Timothy Bevan, chairman 1981–7. 9. The first non-family chairman of modern times: Sir John Quinton, chairman 1987–92. 10. The BZW dealing room, Ebgate House, c. 1990. Bob Diamond called it the worst environment for a trading floor he had ever seen. 11. Harry Enfield, Friday Night Live, 1988: the Loadsamoney ethic of late 1980s Britain. 12. Country cheese and metropolitan chalk: Andrew Buxton, chief executive 1992–3, chairman 1993–9, and Martin Taylor, chief executive 1994–8. 13. Charisma and guile, formidably combined: Matt Barrett, chief executive 1999–2004, chairman 2004–6, and Sir Peter Middleton, chief executive 1998–9, chairman 1999–2004. 14.

Are Chief Executives Overpaid?
by Deborah Hargreaves
Published 29 Nov 2018

Then an influential article by Chicago economists in the Harvard Business Review in the early 1990s stated that executive pay should be used to align chief executives’ interests with what shareholders really cared about – i.e. share prices. This is when the idea of paying executives in company stock or in instruments that could be cashed in for shares began to be developed. Money-making becomes sexy This academic work was being done against the backdrop of the ‘loadsamoney’ culture of the 1980s, which heralded an era of self-gratification and the pursuit of material goods. This happened on both sides of the Atlantic with the economic boom ushered in by the Margaret Thatcher–Ronald Reagan reforms. Blatant money-making became culturally acceptable – even desirable – and the new mindset started to colonize the business world.

The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography
by Stephen Fry
Published 27 Sep 2010

, became the catchphrase of the show until Harry and Paul, tiring of the very successful Stavros, devised a new character for Harry to play. They came up with a loud-mouthed Sarf London plasterer who fanned his wad of dosh at the audience and shouted ‘Loadsamoney!’ with gleeful, exultant braggadocio. He seemed to symbolize the second act of the Thatcher play, an era of materialism, greed and contempt for those left behind. As with Johnny Speight and Warren Mitchell’s Alf Garnett, much of the audience seemed either to be deaf to or chose to disregard Paul and Harry’s satirical intent, raising Loadsamoney to almost folk-heroic status. Ben, Harry, Hugh and I fell into the habit of winding down, after the recordings, in a Covent Garden club called the Zanzibar, usually bringing with us the guest comedians or musicians of the week.

A History of Modern Britain
by Andrew Marr
Published 2 Jul 2009

Both set templates for what followed. But even these two counter-examples are not completely clear. Post-war Labour ran out of popularity and momentum within a couple of years, while Mrs Thatcher’s vision of a remoralized, hard-working nation of savers and strong families was hardly what the partying, divided, ‘loadsamoney’, easy credit, big-hair eighties delivered. What follows is a story of the failure of political elites. Often the famous political names, those faces familiar from a thousand cartoons and newsreels, seem to me like buzzing flywheels with broken teeth, failing to move the huge and complex structures of daily life.

…

For politics, the freeing of the City gave Margaret Thatcher and her ministers an entirely loyal and secure base of rich, articulate supporters who helped see her through some rough times. Rothschilds and other banks would spread the get-rich-quick prospect to millions of people in Britain through the privatization issues and the country would, for a time, come closer to the share-owning democracy Thatcher dreamed of. But all this came at a price – the crude and swaggering ‘loadsamoney’ years satirized by the comedian Harry Enfield and the culture of excess and conspicuous display that would percolate from the City through London, then the Home Counties, then much of southern England. For one generally sympathetic observer of the City in the mid-eighties it was worryingly infected with hype: ‘Febrile, driven by greed, pushing back the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, this was a brief, intense phase that in some ways was a rerun of the late 1920s, this time with added attitude.’14 Sid Gets Lucky: the Privatization Years There is a popular belief that the Thatcher governments never really intended to privatize very much, and that they stumbled upon an easy way of raising cash by selling off assets almost by accident.

…

Culturally, the country was as fixated by imported American television as it would continue to be: Baywatch and The Simpsons were popular new imports. And the national self-mocking strand of comedy which would be such a mark of the next fifteen years was well established, with Harry Enfield’s Wayne and Waynetta Slob joining his ‘Loadsamoney’ attacks on the big-bucks Thatcher years, Spitting Image puppetry at its most gleefully venomous, and the arrival of a new quiz show, Have I Got News For You. This heralded a time when interest in ideology and serious policy issues was being replaced by politics as entertainment, a stage on which humorists and hacks could prove themselves wittier than elected parliamentarians.

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain
by William Davies
Published 28 Sep 2020

You don’t owe anything to anyone, and have no obligation to invest anything more for the future. It’s your money, because of the time that elapsed while it was accumulating. The extreme manifestation of this nostalgic nihilism is Arron Banks, who is the decaying face of Harry Enfield’s Thatcherite ‘loadsamoney’ character, now living off the proceeds of his previous investments, while continuing to troll people about how little he cares about society. The financial troll uses his money to smash things up, as a type of conspicuous consumption: a way, as Thorstein Veblen argued, of showing how much money you can afford to waste, and how insulated you are from the consequences of your actions.7 For men such as Tim Martin, boss of Wetherspoons, backing ‘no deal’ is a way of signalling that you’re rich enough to take a haircut of a few million off your assets.

And Away...
by Bob Mortimer
Published 15 Sep 2021

On the same flight were Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, who had been upgraded to first class and were separated from our seating by a large curtain. Every half hour or so they would appear through the curtain smoking cigars and drinking champagne. Harry would berate everyone in our section by declaring that he had ‘loadsamoney’ and Paul would announce that each and every one of us was ‘an absolute shower’ and not even worthy of a ‘ding dong’. Our first night in Montreal we had to perform at a small comedy club so that the producers of the televised show could get a handle on our act. The centrepiece of our ten-minute turn was to present to the audience a 15ft roll of beige carpet that we believed to be a lucky charm.

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain
by Robert Verkaik
Published 14 Apr 2018

By 2012, four out of ten assisted-place pupils were earning £90,000 a year or more and even those who didn’t go to university were in solidly middle-class occupations with a good income. Tellingly, more than half went on to send their own children to public schools.30 But even in the supposedly classless ‘loadsamoney’ 1980s the scheme had its critics. John Rae, the Westminster headmaster and leading light of the public school movement, spoke out against it: ‘You do not deal with a famine by sending a few lucky children to lunch at the Ritz.’ Yet into the 1980s the pendulum had swung so far away from reform of public schools that Margaret Thatcher even countenanced outright privatisation of the state education system.

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back
by Guy Shrubsole
Published 1 May 2019

One aspect of the challenge with addressing offshore tax avoidance, the secrecy about who owns what, and the concentration of land and property ownership within an elite, is that so many politicians themselves are now in on the act. At some point between the appearance on TV screens of Harry Enfield’s ‘Loadsamoney’ character and Tony Blair’s embrace of ‘Cool Britannia’, certain members of the British political class grew intensely relaxed about hanging out with the filthy rich. Newly minted stars of Britpop and Young British Artists, from Alex James to Kate Moss and Damian Hirst, started buying up properties in the fashionable Cotswolds in the late 1990s.

England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country – and How to Set Them Straight
by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears
Published 24 Apr 2024

The economist Duncan Weldon recalls that ‘trading volumes soared from around 50 per cent of all listed stocks in 1985 to 90 per cent by 1990, with the value of companies listed on the exchange rising by around 25 per cent over the same period’.26 Thatcher also privatised industries that had first been brought into public control in the 1930s, transforming both their value and their ethos as she did so. In the case of British Telecom, the change was clear for all to see as it promptly abandoned the ‘British’ brand to go global and become ‘BT’. This greed-is-good culture was summed up by the comedian Harry Enfield’s Cockney ‘Loadsamoney’ and the Chelsea football fans who waved £20 notes when they went to away games in the North. Thatcher’s real genius, however, had been to cover all of this modernising in the most reassuringly English of wrappers. It was akin to a lavender-scented grandmother offering you a slice of sponge cake laced with amphetamine.

EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts
by Ashoka Mody
Published 7 May 2018

Speech, Society of Business Economists, London, September 25. http://​ www.federalreserve.gov/​BoardDocs/​Speeches/​2002/​200209252/​default. htm. Greif, Avner, and David Laitin. 2004. “A Theory of Endogenous Institutional Change.” American Political Science Review 98, no. 4: 633–​652. Grey, Stephen. 2000. “Loadsamoney: Once the Friendship of Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand Was the Symbol of All That Was Best about the New Europe.” Sunday Times, January 30. Grossman, Herschel I., and John B. Van Huyck. 1988. “Sovereign Debt As a Contingent Claim: Excusable Default, Repudiation.” American Economic Review 78, no. 5: 1088–​1097.