Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Our golden age
2012 Games ceremony showcased Britain at its very best
ACERTAIN summer night in London’s East End felt like the highlight of the century not just the decade.
It was July 27, 2012, at the new London Stadium when Danny Boyle’s jawdropping Olympics opening ceremony ditched Britain’s usual jingoistic flaunting of our Empire-ruling history. Instead it told of our humour, ingenuity, resistance, generosity and openness.
We saw NHS nurses, suffragettes, punks, CND protesters, Jarrow marchers and the first wave of Commonwealth immigrants from the Caribbean behind a model of their ship, the Empire Windrush.
In that pre-brexit world it made most of us feel good about living in a successful multi-cultural country.
Something underlined the following Saturday when half-jamaican Jessica Ennis, Somalian-born Mo Farah and Milton Keynes’ Greg Rutherford, won golds to give British sport its proudestever night. Andy Murray took gold in tennis, a feat he repeated in 2016. In 2013 he became the first British man since Fred Perry in 1936 to win Wimbledon. He was singles champ again in 2016. England’s footballers finally won a World Cup penalty shoot-out and made the semis in 2018, the under-20s and under-17s won world titles and Wales made Euro 2016’s semi-finals. In an astonishing sporting decade our cyclists had six Tour de France wins, Lewis Hamilton drove to a sixth F1 championship and England’s rugby union and league teams both reached World Cup finals. This summer England finally won the Cricket World Cup in a heart-pounding finale which made Ben Stokes a national hero. The decade was a golden age of TV as the likes of Netflix, Sky and Amazon invested in drama and traditional channels upped their game to compete. Netflix spent £12billion on content
this year alone, a figure which will rise considerably in the coming years.
There’s been some excellent series, with a strong British input, such as Line of Duty, Peaky Blinders, The Crown, Downton Abbey, Chernobyl and Game of Thrones.
It’s been a very rewarding time for actress Phoebe Waller-bridge who wrote the brilliant Killing Eve and won three Emmys for the series Fleabag.
Reality TV had a second wind with Love Island and the Great British Bake
Off but the cinema has been pretty dire. Most of the hits are about comic strip superheroes, although Joaquin Phoenix’s mesmeric performance in this year’s Joker was a minor classic.
Hollywood did produce one of the decade’s funniest moments when, at the 2017 Oscars, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway mistakenly announced La La Land instead of Moonlight had won Best Picture.
Britain’s great contribution to music was grime, its angry political voice summed up by Stormzy who became the first black solo British artist to headline Glastonbury. Globally music was mostly bland and forgettable.
Sadly, the best time to hear decent tunes was after the death of legends such as David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and Prince. They passed away in 2016, along with Muhammad Ali, Carrie Fisher, George Michael, Victoria Wood, Alan Rickman, Caroline Aherne, Gene Wilder, Debbie Reynolds, Frank Finlay, Terry Wogan and Ronnie Corbett. It was the worst year for celebrity deaths in memory.
Women wrote the best-selling seven books: EL James’ Fifty Shades trilogy, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Paula Hawkins’ The Girl On The Train, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games and Kathryn Stockett’s The Help.
What, where and how we eat and drink has changed in the past decade.
Pretentious restaurateurs had some sucking over-priced fusion cuisine off a piece of slate to take them back to “cavemen roots”. And a trip to your local could mean getting stuck behind a wannabe hipster demanding to sample every craft ale before buying. Vegetarianism became mainstream with avocado on toast and Greggs’ vegan sausage roll food hits. Fitbit summed up our obsession with tracking our fitness and losing weight.
We put it on again through firms such as Deliveroo letting us order food from our couch rather than walking to a takeaway. And it was a decade when families for the first time saw a parent or grandparent struck down with dementia and had to put them in a care home, then squabble with skint councils about how much of their house they would have to sell to pay the costs.
Uber revolutionised how we took taxis, Spotify and Airpods killed CDS, Amazon decimated the high streets, gender identity became a huge issue and smart phones – hand-held selfie machines effectively took over our brains. Social media flourished on phones with the likes of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter dominating many lives. Trolls were given a free pass to spread poison. Reputations were made and, quite often, ruined when a phrase, sometimes unnoticed for years, went viral.
Social media linked people like never before but it also spread fake news for political ends and for foreign governments to influence elections. It upped our anxiety levels to a critical scale helping to fuel what seemed like a permanent mental health epidemic.
It is only the start of the tech revolution which will see artificial intelligence do most of our thinking and take most of our jobs. In most homes it has already begun. If you own an Amazon Echo go and ask Alexa what the next decade has in store for us.