Remembering the Penge Papers, 1985
The Penge Papers: on your marks, get set for the rat-race …Does anyone remember The Penge Papers (Souvenir Press, 1985)? The whimsical musings of author Brian Wright on lower-middle-class suburban life in south London achieved cult status with listeners when serialised on BBC Radio Three.
In one sense timeless in its description of human nature and metropolitan salaried slavery, The Penge Papers was in equal measure a perfect snapshot of mid-1980s Thatcherism, seen from the perspective of the class war and the greed, envy and social-climbing that characterised that period of our history.
Brian found himself buckling under the social and financial pressure that was imposed upon him in Thatcherite Britain when you were valued by what you owned and what you aspired to. The Penge Papers reminds us of the clarion call of the 1980s to own property; to move up the property ladder; to improve and extend. Brian’s letter-box overflowed with leaflets and brochures for aluminium windows, indoor or outdoor swimming pools, ornamental paving and patio-doors. Brian bemoaned the inevitable diminution of peace and quiet in his neighbourhood from April to September, because of the constant noise and drone of mains-clippers barbering the hedges and trimming the lawns, and masonry drills gouging into walls and concrete.
A low-income earner, Brian didn’t have the financial clout to compete. He knew that his destiny was to remain marooned in Penge with his family and never to progress beyond sardonic observations about his better-off neighbours. He came to accept that for many of its residents Penge was just a temporary staging-post on the great upwardly-mobile middle class route to one of the ‘lush territories beyond: Beckenham, Chislehurst or Orpington.’
Brian classed his house as ‘Festival of Britain Dilapidated’ and while unlatching and latching his front-garden gate on his way to work in the mornings he always took a furtive and worried whip-pan glance up at the eaves, probing for wood-warp and flaky paintwork.
Thatcher’s Britain is of course hailed, or reviled, as an era that brought a dramatic levelling up, or levelling down, in the social order. The author Brian Wright captured wonderfully in The Penge Papers the period flavour of middle-career and middle-management ambition and angst.
The Penge Papers: on your marks, get set for the rat-race …Does anyone remember The Penge Papers (Souvenir Press, 1985)? The whimsical musings of author Brian Wright on lower-middle-class suburban life in south London achieved cult status with listeners when serialised on BBC Radio Three.
In one sense timeless in its description of human nature and metropolitan salaried slavery, The Penge Papers was in equal measure a perfect snapshot of mid-1980s Thatcherism, seen from the perspective of the class war and the greed, envy and social-climbing that characterised that period of our history.
Brian found himself buckling under the social and financial pressure that was imposed upon him in Thatcherite Britain when you were valued by what you owned and what you aspired to. The Penge Papers reminds us of the clarion call of the 1980s to own property; to move up the property ladder; to improve and extend. Brian’s letter-box overflowed with leaflets and brochures for aluminium windows, indoor or outdoor swimming pools, ornamental paving and patio-doors. Brian bemoaned the inevitable diminution of peace and quiet in his neighbourhood from April to September, because of the constant noise and drone of mains-clippers barbering the hedges and trimming the lawns, and masonry drills gouging into walls and concrete.
A low-income earner, Brian didn’t have the financial clout to compete. He knew that his destiny was to remain marooned in Penge with his family and never to progress beyond sardonic observations about his better-off neighbours. He came to accept that for many of its residents Penge was just a temporary staging-post on the great upwardly-mobile middle class route to one of the ‘lush territories beyond: Beckenham, Chislehurst or Orpington.’
Brian classed his house as ‘Festival of Britain Dilapidated’ and while unlatching and latching his front-garden gate on his way to work in the mornings he always took a furtive and worried whip-pan glance up at the eaves, probing for wood-warp and flaky paintwork.
Thatcher’s Britain is of course hailed, or reviled, as an era that brought a dramatic levelling up, or levelling down, in the social order. The author Brian Wright captured wonderfully in The Penge Papers the period flavour of middle-career and middle-management ambition and angst.