Tatler, December 1980

Grab your Barbour and don your wellies – it’s time for Tatler! Lucy is taking the Mag Hags back to Tina Brown’s formative career years and a festive issue of the high society bible.

Join the discussion HERE. And if you haven’t listened to the episode yet, you can do that HERE.

Lucy Douglas 00:00

Trying to get into modelling? Are you wearing a counterfeit Gucci moccasin? Have you remembered to settle up with the fishmonger? Well, thank goodness you found this podcast.

[Theme music]

Lucy Douglas 00:17

Hello and welcome to Mag Hags, the podcast revealing the latest status symbols. I'm Lucy Douglas. 

Franki Cookney 00:23

And I'm Franki Cookney. Together we're diving into the glossy archives of women's magazines to find out what's still hot. And what's definitely not. 

Lucy Douglas 00:32

Franki, hello! 

Franki Cookney 00:35

Hi Lucy! 

Lucy Douglas 00:36

What's new with you? Have you been inspired by Woman's Own to make any wicker stools this past fortnight?

Franki Cookney 00:43

Alas, I have not made a stool. Uh, I did make a butternut squash risotto this week, I'm not sure if that counts. Both my children ate it, which is about as good as it gets in terms of my domestic godliness. 

Lucy Douglas 00:54

That's definitely a win. That sounds, that sounds pretty great, actually, a butternut squash risotto. I would love that. Franki, I have a quick quiz question for you. 

Franki Cookney 01:02

Oh, okay.

Lucy Douglas 01:03

What do succulents, Antiques Roadshow, and unpeeled tomatoes have in common? 

Franki Cookney 01:10

I… I have no idea. 

Lucy Douglas 01:15

Well, these are all things that Nicky Haslam finds common according to the latest iteration of his Things Nicky Haslam Finds Common tea towel, which this year has been launched in collaboration with Selfridges.

Franki Cookney 01:29

Has it? 

Lucy Douglas 01:31

It has. Now, I don't know about you Franki, but I would say that flogging a joke until it gets a brand deal is quite common. 

Franki Cookney 01:39

Yeah. 

Lucy Douglas 01:41

Anyway, I bring this up because the magazine we talk about in today's episode is very concerned with what is and isn't common. And we do actually mention Nikki Haslam's tea towels as part of the conversation. So I thought it was apt to mention his new one. 

Franki Cookney 01:55

Yes, we do. This is perfect timing. 

Lucy Douglas 01:59

Exactly. So, yeah, so we'll be finding out what's considered high status and what might make you accidentally look common. Um, we've got a report on a shocking new social trend and I'm actually quite excited to talk to you about the writing in this week's mag because it's fabulous.

Franki Cookney 2:16

Oh, okay, I am so excited to get into it.

[Music break]

Lucy Douglas 02:21

Franki, it really had not occurred to me when we started this podcast how much we would be talking about the royal family. But here I am again, anchoring us in time with reference to Princess Diana. So we are 18 months into a new government. But the tabloids are distracted and they are quite frankly beside themselves, for it seems that the world's most eligible bachelor may be about to take himself off the market. 

Franki Cookney 02:50

Oh my goodness, this is the best segue that we absolutely didn't plan. 

Lucy Douglas 02:56

I know, I know. So, we have recently had a front page of The Sun, "Charlie's Girl: The bubbly blonde teenager tipped to be the next Queen of England, stepped regally into the limelight for the first time yesterday," and then followed a couple of months later with "Lady Diana, the Queen gives her blessing." So yeah, that's where we are in time. It is December 1980, and the courtship of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer is particularly poignant for the magazine that we are going to be discussing today, because, uh, Franki, we are talking about Tatler. 

Franki Cookney 03:36

Oh my goodness, yes. It's so funny that you said that about the royals because I've just been editing, you know, going over the last couple of episodes and I was thinking to myself, I did not anticipate talking about the royal family quite as much as we have. But as you pointed out, uh, in the last episode, they were the OG celebrities.

Lucy Douglas 03:57

Yeah. So Tatler is the, the, like the high society glossy mag. I guess it's slightly different from the other mags that we've talked about in this series, because I wouldn't say it's necessarily a women's lifestyle as such, but I really wanted to talk about it and I really wanted to discuss an issue from the Tina Brown years, the years when Tina Brown was the editor of Tatler.

Franki Cookney 04:20

Okay, yes. Um, tell me about Tina Brown because I feel like this is someone who is huge in magazine publishing and I don't know an awful lot about her. 

Lucy Douglas 04:28

Tina Brown is, she's like a legendary magazine editor. I'd say there's like There's like a handful of magazine editors ever who could legitimately claim to be like famous for being a magazine editor. Anna Wintour is probably the most well known. Um, maybe Helen Gurley Brown, who we've talked about before, but yeah, Tina Brown, I would say is like, she's a doyenne of magazine publishing. She's, she's most well known for editing Vanity Fair in the eighties, and then subsequently The New Yorker. But where we find her right now, so she's been this dynamic editorial ingénue in the 1970s. She, like, made a name for herself writing for Oxford's Literary Magazine, and then for Punch, which is like the big sort of satirical magazine in the middle of the 20th century, and for the New Statesman and lots of other places. And off the back of that, she was invited to come and edit Tatler, which at the time was like this really flailing title. It'd been going for years and years and years, but its readership had really dwindled to something like 10, 000 in the late seventies. I read it being described as "moribund" at the time when she took it over. 

Anyway, and Tina Brown was, she was like friendly with all these like young literary hot shots like Auberon Waugh, who's the son of Evelyn Waugh, and um, Martin Amis, and she kind of proved that she was really creative and really smart and really irreverent and was also not afraid of poking a bit of fun at people and making really bold decisions. So yeah, so she was tasked with turning Tatler around. She was really young. She was in her 20s at the time. 

Franki Cookney 06:10

Wow. Wow. What a responsibility. With no life experience.

Lucy Douglas 06:15

I know. Going back to the point about Princess Diana, this is one of the things that she says about the time that she took Tatler over: "So another windfall for Tatler's editorial fortunes and business prospects, Lady Diana Spencer's emergence, rise and conquest of Prince Charles and the British public was the 20th century's biggest social story since Edward VIII traded the throne for Mrs Simpson in 1936. Lady Di's world was Tatler's world." That's from her 2017 memoir, The Vanity Fair Diaries, which if you are like at all interested in the heyday of magazine publishing or like 20th century society or anything like that, like I cannot recommend enough, and just listening to her talk about this time and she was editing Tatler, you really kind of get a sense of how like creative and dynamic and sort of upstart y it was as a, as a place to work.

Franki Cookney 07:11

Amazing. And I think I would say that when we sort of first mooted doing an edition of Tatler, I definitely had a sense of like, Oh God, like, what the hell do I know about Tatler? Like, it really feels like a world I don't, I'm not part of, you know, um, I've never really read Tatler. I've never written for Tatler. It doesn't feel like it's for me. Um, but yeah, what you've just said and, you know, the way you explained it to me when we talked about it is like, it's such an interesting and exciting kind of window into this particular moment in culture and British history. 

Lucy Douglas 07:47

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, shall we take a look at what's on the cover?

 Franki Cookney 07:52

Yeah, I'm really excited. 

Lucy Douglas 07:54

"Dashing White Sergeants. Well, lieutenants actually", "The Beasts of Belgravia. Would you credit it?", "Status cymbals to blow your own trumpet." And cymbals is spelt like, like the musical instrument that you clash together. 

Franki Cookney 08:09

A clash, a clash thereof. 

Lucy Douglas 08:11

Yeah. And "Norman Parkinson's Lady Madonnas." And then the kind of main cover line at the bottom just says "winter riches," which is 

Franki Cookney 08:20

Describing the readership? 

Lucy Douglas 08:24

Possibly. It's definitely describing the sort of styling of the cover shoot is definitely meant to be a... that like the jewellery on this cover shoot is the big focus. 

Franki Cookney 08:36

And it's a December issue as well, isn't it? Which is our first Christmas issue. 

Lucy Douglas 08:41

It is a December issue. So it's a, it's a festive issue. 

Franki Cookney 08:44 

I'm going to find some sleigh bells to put in. I really enjoy how on the cover, just right below the title, it just says "tinsel time."

Lucy Douglas 08:54

Yeah. 

Franki Cookney 08:55

In a sort of vaguely threatening way. Before we, before we talk about anything else, I just want to say none of these cover lines make any sense to me? I'm reading these and I'm just thinking, what? What is in this magazine? And I don't know if this is me sort of, you know, maybe projecting some of my own prejudice a little bit about Tatler, but I just looked at this and I had the most intense feeling of imposter syndrome. Like, Oh, okay. I don't get this. This is not for the likes of me. 

Lucy Douglas 09:28

Yeah, I agree. And like the cover line about Norman Parkinson's Lady Madonna is like, clearly we're meant to know who Norman Parkinson is. And I just didn't have a clue. Although having, having re-listened to the Tatler chapter of Tina Brown's Vanity Fair Diaries, which I have on audiobook, she does talk about him, he's a photographer, and she does talk about him like a fair bit.

Franki Cookney 09:51

Now that you say that, I obviously am kind of like, okay, yeah, that makes total sense, he's a photographer. 

Lucy Douglas 09:56

Also, so the dashing white sergeant's line, I thought that was like, like a lesser known line from the Sound of Music song. You know, the few of our Favourite Things. 

Franki Cookney 10:08

[sings] Dashing white sergeants!

Lucy Douglas 10:10

I thought it was, but on, on a, a quick Google. I have just learned that it's a, it's a Scottish country dance. 

Franki Cookney 10:18

Oh, that actually makes a lot of sense. 

Lucy Douglas 10:21

Performed to a piece of similarly titled music. 

Franki Cookney 10:24

Yes. 

Franki Cookney 10:24

Also, uh, 'cause you were talking about the woman on the cover. She's got quite extraordinary hair, hasn't she? 

Lucy Douglas 10:31

So she's got a very, very kind of short cropped hair, but it's also permed. It's just the most dated hair look that I personally can fathom. 

Franki Cookney 10:44

But do you know what Lucy, that means it's on its way back in because I think if you, if you think of any of the sort of key haircuts from the 70s and 80s and 90s, they've all come back around, eventually. You know, at one point we could never have dreamed that mullets would come back into fashion and yet here we are.

Lucy Douglas 11:00

Yeah. 

Franki Cookney 11:01

So I reckon this haircut's going to come back in.

Lucy Douglas 11:03

I will say, having just like hammed up how excited I was to read a Tina Brown issue of Tatler. I will say it did take me a little while to get into this. When I, when it arrived and I had it, it was sort of every time I kind of picked it up, I'd flick through it and nothing was sort of jumping out at me, nothing was pulling me in. I think especially like off the back of reading New Woman and it was so, like everything, all the information was cut up in little chunks and there's loads of stuff. Everything was really accessible and there's loads of stuff to kind of hook you in and grab you in. This was much more like chunks of text.

Franki Cookney 11:46

I mean walls of text, I would say. It's really text heavy this magazine, isn't it? 

Lucy Douglas 11:51

Very copy heavy. However, all of that said, once I did actually sit down and start reading the features, I could not get enough. I loved it so much. They're so witty, like so funny. All of the tone was really irreverent and rich and satirical. And I just wanted to devour it. I like, I couldn't get enough. 

Franki Cookney 12:16

Oh my God, I'm excited. Should we get into it? 

[Sleigh bells break]

Lucy Douglas 12:21  

"Status. You show me yours and I'll show you mine. Since JFK said of Jackie that she was all status and not enough quo, the whole prestige game has got a lot more complicated. Why, for example, are the world's fashion editors now trying to look like suburban shoppers from Minnesota? Georgina Howell investigates." So basically, this feature is about how, like, where once the very wealthy might really kind of show off how rich they are. Now, the real status is in like, not showing off how wealthy you are, and actually like, showing it off is kind of vulgar. So our way into the feature is referencing a few characters.

"Lady Docker sailed through London in a gold plated Daimler with zebra upholstery." I did have to Google Lady Docker and, uh, sure enough, she was That's somebody who sailed through London in a 

Franki Cookney 13:24

That's a real thing. That's a real thing that happened. 

Lucy Douglas 13:27

It's a real thing that happened. "Cecil Rhodes and Barney Bernardo lit each other's cigars with five pound notes. And as a toddler, Christina Onassis played on board her father's yacht with dolls designed and dressed by Dior. But this is all before the advent of the vigilant taxman, alert for any sign of conspicuous consumption, before social guilt set in, and before the vogue for snubbing vulgar display. "

Franki Cookney 13:52

There is so much to unpack in this feature.

Lucy Douglas 13:56

So much to unpack. Today, the really successful status symbol has to be invulnerable, which means it has to be so subtle it runs the risk of being overlooked. So part of the like, clearly like the hook for this feature, which I thought was absolutely fascinating was the fact that at this period in history, or certainly up until very recently, certainly up until Thatcher who had only been in power for about 18 months by this point, the wealthy were being taxed like through the nose. Income tax was basically as high as 98% on some of the kind of top earners. In the mid 1970s, the top rate of tax on earned income was 83%, and then there was a 15% surcharge on income from investments. So basically, if you were making what we would now know as dividend income on stocks and shares that you owned on top of your income from your job or whatever, you would be charged like 98, like 98 percent of that was going on tax. So yeah, the idea is that like, if you show off your wealth, well then the tax man's going to come and give you a massive bill. So we need to be a little bit discreet about it. 

Franki Cookney 15:18

Yeah. Although I don't really understand that because as you say, Margaret Thatcher had been in power for about 18 months and income tax had just been cut. In fact, at this point in 1980, income tax was lower than it's ever been, or certainly that it's been in the entire seventies. So what I wondered is whether the lowering of taxes has led to a far more fervent debate around wealth and fairness and like an increasing sense of injustice kind of in, in society more broadly. And that is maybe what rich people are feeling jittery about. Not necessarily that they would be taxed, but that people would see them enjoying their, you know, under taxed assets and dividends and, and, and sort of be hostile. Cause she, she mentions as well, guilt, doesn't she? "Before social guilt set in and before the vogue for snubbing vulgar display." So I wonder, is there a sense here that suddenly the wealthy are aware that they are not paying as much tax as they might be? Some might say should be, I personally would say should be, but do you know what I mean? It's like, is that the sense? 

Lucy Douglas 16:31

It could be. It could also be the sense that, If everybody is paying less tax, then that means the middle classes, the upper middle classes will have more money to buy the status symbols that were previously only accessible to the upper classes and we don't want any new money.

Franki Cookney 16:56

So we need to create a new code of how to behave like a wealthy person, to gatekeep.

Lucy Douglas 17:01

Exactly, exactly. So one of my favourite lines in it is, "The raw brandishing of furs and jewels will get you nowhere here. The first foreigner to catch onto this and make capital out of it was that famous French exploiter of British goods, Coco Chanel. If you must wear fur, for goodness sake, keep it out of sight on the inside of a plain tweed coat." 

Franki Cookney 17:24

I really, really enjoyed the writing in this feature and throughout, actually. The sort of second part starts, "Watch the upper class dodge and feint, their language for a start is full of prevarications designed to gloss over incriminating and taxable evidence of wealth and status. A 'small place in the country' turns out to be a Queen Anne hunting box. 'A few neighbours in' means a bash for 60. And Charles, 'who turns a few bob in the city' is what used to be vulgarly known as a millionaire."

Lucy Douglas 17:58

I know, I love it. I also love, there's a section under the subhead "life status" and I really like "Having a job has become rather smart among girls who don't really need one."

Franki Cookney 18:11

Oh my God. Yes. I love this section. I was going to say to you, can we talk about the jobs that are the jobs which have status and which don't? 

Lucy Douglas 18:20

Yes. Yes. 

Franki Cookney 18:22

So modelling! Modelling was interesting to me because when we looked at Honey 1976, one of our sort of poshos in that feature was a model and they had this glamorous lifestyle where they went off to their Surrey home on weekends. And now in 1980, Tatler is saying modelling is considered rather dim. 

Lucy Douglas 18:43

So I actually, I think there's a little bit more nuance here because I think, I think the distinction is that being invited to be a model is correct and has status, but turning down the opportunity to be a model, that is, that is really, that's what you want to aspire to.

Franki Cookney 19:01

Presumably you definitely shouldn't be trying to be a model. 

Lucy Douglas 19:05

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Chasing after modelling work. Absolutely not. No, no, no, no, no. Um, "It's, it's all right to be an actress, a journalist, or to work for Amnesty, but it's no good being a painter or a novelist unless you're notably successful." 

Franki Cookney 19:20

I mean. I kind of feel that, honestly. 

Lucy Douglas 19:24

"Status jobs now are gardening and landscape design. Decorating is too frivolous." 

Franki Cookney 19:29

And then, "Writing cookery books is an acceptable sideline." 

Lucy Douglas 19:33

Yeah. 

Franki Cookney 19:33

 "Not to cook well is to lose status drastically." Which is also a nice juxtaposition with our New Woman, disaster free dinner party, which told us categorically that we just shouldn't worry too much about the cooking.

Lucy Douglas 19:48

No 

Franki Cookney 19:49

Nobody's gonna mind about the cooking. Not so for Tatler Readers in 1980. 

Lucy Douglas 19:54

We are in very different generations and very different demographics. I actually, when I was reading through this the first time, I did sort of think to myself, I feel like that kind of not being massively showy about how rich you are is like, I sort of felt like that was always the way that the British upper classes have been. Often like the poshest, like the real poshos, the real sort of have links to royalty, old money, like aristocratic families will be like traipsing around in their wellies and like ancient Barbour jacket and drive like,

Franki Cookney 20:34

I was going to say, like, their threadbare cashmere 

Lucy Douglas 20:36

Threadbare cashmere. Driving like the rustiest, smelliest old Volvo you've ever seen in your life. Um, yeah, like that's sort of what I think of as like the real, like real old money in the UK. 

Franki Cookney 20:51

Yeah. See, I did also think this, and then I wondered maybe that's because we were born in the 80s and so we've only ever known it this way. Like we were born after possibly this cultural shift.

Lucy Douglas 21:04

Maybe. 

Franki Cookney 21:05

I do think that when you, when you think of wealthy people in history, there's definitely a sense that they just sort of unapologetically lived their lives. Like, I do remember thinking when we were reading Honey that a few of the case studies were obviously very posh and there was no sort of apology about it. I don't know. It was just sort of like, Oh, these people are extremely wealthy and these ones are not, but we're just going to present them side by side. So yeah, I guess I'm wondering, like, is it possible that this was a cultural turning point? 

Lucy Douglas 21:27

Yeah. 

Franki Cookney 21:36

You said, uh, is it a quintessential sort of British old money thing? By coincidence, I was listening to an episode of one of my favourite podcasts, Were You Raised by Wolves, which is an etiquette podcast hosted by two Americans. And one of the hosts, Nick Leighton, was talking about this handbook called the How to Be Preppy Handbook, which was published in 1980, so the same year as Tatler and apparently it was a sort of pamphlet, which was supposedly satirical, but also kind of not. And they were discussing it in the context of monogramming, like, you know, what things are okay to get monogrammed, what items should you never get monogrammed, and if you are monogramming, where you should put the monogram, that kind of thing.

Lucy Douglas 22:20

How big the monogram should be. 

Franki Cookney 22:22

Exactly, exactly. 

Lucy Douglas 22:23

Who knew? Who knew there was so much to say about monogramming? 

Franki Cookney 22:27

I know. So the preppy thing, right, so the preppy thing is a take on the American waspy style, which is the upper middle class old money of the US. So in this preppy handbook, and it's a complete coincidence that I happened to listen to that episode this week, there's a whole thing on how if you are going to get your shirts monogrammed, it should be in a place that is covered up when you're wearing a jacket over the top. So there's very definitely this sense that like to be truly classy, it should also be a bit understated. Um, and there's actually a part where it says that if you want to be truly chic, you should get the monogram on the elbow where no one will see it.

Lucy Douglas 23:07

Ohhh 

Franki Cookney 23:08

So I do, I do also feel like it's, it seems very English, almost even tying in a bit with that, um, Good Housekeeping beauty feature we discussed about how English people sort of aren't too fussed about beauty and are just very down to earth and not vain. 

Lucy Douglas 23:27

Yeah, totally. I had the exact same thought actually when I was reading it. It felt really similar sort of, um, sensibility.

Franki Cookney 23:35

Definitely. 

Lucy Douglas 23:49

So I feel like there, there feels like there's a sort of obvious parallel between like this and the sort of current trends for like quiet luxury that we've been hearing so much about and you know, like The Row's, you know, $2,000 white shirts and things like that.

Franki Cookney 24:53

Oh my god, yeah 

Lucy Douglas 23:55

Did this feel kind of quiet luxury to you?

Franki Cookney 00:25:58

I think, I think it's interesting because I remember when the quiet luxury trend sort of was kicking off and I was thinking a bit like what we were just saying. I was like, well, isn't that always just how you are supposed to do luxury? My understanding has always been that it was a bit tacky to flash labels and brands and kind of go around with these very obvious markers of wealth. And, you know, like I didn't grow up wealthy, so I, you know, I never had any labels or brands to flash anyway, but I. That's still what I thought, that was still kind of what I aspired to, if you know what I mean. 

Lucy Douglas 24:32

Yeah, I agree. I also sort of, sort of occurred to me that like, quiet luxury as a movement and as an idea would never have originated in the UK because of this idea of like, posh people downplaying how wealthy they are.

Franki Cookney 24:47

I think that probably has a lot to do with the different, the sort of class differences in the US and here, again, I'm talking about the Good Housekeeping beauty feature, but the way they talked about American beauty being about showing off that you were doing really well at work and couldn't afford to get all these treatments done 'cause you were a professional and you were very successful. And it's, and it, I feel like that's coming through a bit in this context as well. So the like quiet luxury makes sense as a backlash to that. It doesn't make so much sense in the UK where, you know, generational wealth has always dominated. 

Lucy Douglas 25:23

Yeah. Speaking of generational wealth, would you like to know what some of the status symbols are at the end of this feature?

Franki Cookney 25:33

I would like to know what some of the status symbols are. I'm hoping you're going to explain some of them to me. 

Lucy Douglas 25:40

I can maybe explain some of them to you. Um, I, I will, I will confess, I spent so much time when I was reading this magazine, Googling who people were that I did after a while just run out of enthusiasm for it and was just like, Sure.

Franki Cookney 26:01

I will take your word for it. 

Lucy Douglas 26:02

I can make an educated guess who this person might be based on the context in which they're mentioned. So fine. 

Franki Cookney 26:08

Yeah. I mean, I said that the cover gave me imposter syndrome and I really wanted to love this feature. I could tell it was done in a very irreverent, kind of feisty way, but it felt a little bit impenetrable to me because as you say, I just didn't really know what they were talking about a lot of the time. There are a few that I can, I can access though. One I particularly liked was "Sharing Princess Michael's gynecologist." 

Lucy Douglas 26:37

I loved that one. "Getting in free at a National Trust stately home because it used to be in your family." 

Franki Cookney 26:45

Oh my God. 

Lucy Douglas 26:46

Being allowed by Princess Margaret to call her M. 

Franki Cookney 26:49

I know, yeah, I liked that one as well. A dozen clean shirts, beautifully ironed, not just the collars, in one's chest of drawers. 

Lucy Douglas 26:56

Going to Sri Lanka for eight months and not troubling to lease your flat or put your daily on half rate. 

Franki Cookney 27:03

Converting the 18th century ice house at the bottom of the garden into a nuclear shelter. 

Lucy Douglas 27:07

Working for the Queen and being unable, I'm sorry, to spill the beans, though you can admit that something big is up.

Franki Cookney 27:14

I'm sure, Lucy, that you are absolutely expecting me to say this, but this really reminded me of Things Nicky Haslam Thinks Are Common. 

Lucy Douglas 27:25

Yes, yes. Things Nicky Haslam Thinks Are Common are a series of tea towels based on things that the interior designer, Nicky Haslam, has said are common in a column that he wrote for, I actually don't know where it was.

Franki Cookney 27:46

So he had written various columns, I think for the Evening Standard and also the Telegraph, and by the by he'd referenced things he thought were common. At some point somebody collated a list of these things. and published it and put it on a tea towel. Nicky Haslam himself was just very flattered and delighted by this. And so now he sort of makes a point of releasing a new list every year or, you know, every couple, like when he can be arsed.. 

Lucy Douglas 28:12

And the list is completely unhinged. There's no apparent thread or consistency in any of these things that sometimes it's like, a holiday destination, uh, sometimes it's objects, sometimes it's just emotions or 

Franki Cookney 28:30

He said podcasts last year.

Lucy Douglas 28:32

Yeah, he did say podcasts. 

Franki Cookney 28:34

Yeah, so this piece in Tatler just immediately called to mind that. 

Lucy Douglas 28:39

Yeah. 

Franki Cookney 28:40

So I really enjoyed it on that level.  

[Jingle]

Lucy Douglas 28:42 

Oh Franki, I don't know what to do. This Christmas, I have to go out in the sophisticated world and I am so far off a totally beautiful appearance. 

Franki Cookney 28:52

Sounds to me like that husband of yours needs to pay a visit to David Morris.

Lucy Douglas 28:56

He does? 

Franki Cookney 28:57

Certainly, because David Morris produces a remarkably fine collection of jewellery with occasions such as Christmas very much in mind. 

Lucy Douglas 29:06

Oh my, that does sound terribly sophisticated. 

Franki Cookney 29:09

And apart from his jewellery, David Morris is one of the very few who can show you the work of Baume and Mercier and Piaget, the Swiss watchmaker, who, since 1874, has been making what many regard as the world's most beautiful watches.

Lucy Douglas 29:24

Well, in that case, I don't know what he's waiting for. 

Franki Cookney 29:28

No matter where you have to go this year, with David Morris in the background, you'll never have a nicer Christmas. 

[Jingle]

Lucy Douglas 29:34

Wanda had a Honda. 

Franki Cookney 29:36

Priscilla had a Porsche. 

Franki Cookney and Lucy Douglas [together] 29:38

Stephanie Lee's got a PhD and drives a Colt, of course!

Lucy Douglas 29:42

Here's a car where head and heart can meet.

Franki Cookney 29:45

Breathtaking Colt Sapporo, a full four seater two door coupe whose stunning visual impact is matched by exciting performance and a truly brilliant record of reliability. 

Lucy Douglas 39:56

It has power steering as standard and an aircraft like interior with a digital clock and swivel mounted reading light. 

Franki Cookney 30:03

Plus, with a catalogue of luxurious extras that even includes a vandal proof aerial, Sapporo is a pace setter to top any thinking woman's guide to luxury motoring.

Lucy Douglas 30:14

Move up to a Colt! 

[Jingle]

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Franki Cookney 30:17

Wow, a digital clock and swivel mounted reading light. 

Lucy Douglas 30:20

I know, a vandal proof aerial. 

Franki Cookney 30:22

The thinking woman's guide to luxury motoring. 

[Music break]

Lucy Douglas 30:27

"Looking at the world through vole coloured glasses. 1980 looked different to readerships of different magazines. Nicholas Coleridge squints through ten sets of blinkers." So basically this feature is just taking 10 totally different magazines and doing a little sort of precis of some of their, of like, a selection of their stories over the year. And it's absolutely fucking brilliant. It's written with a perfect amount of, like, irreverence and bite, and they've also picked like the most random seeming selection of titles. Shall I, shall I talk through what the titles are? 

Franki Cookney 31:08

Yeah, definitely. 

Lucy Douglas 31:09

So the first one is The Stage, um, which does still exist today. It's the tagline underneath it is the weekly newspaper for resting actors. The next magazine is called Sheba, the glossy quarterly for Arab women, which I don't believe still exists. Then we've got the Church Times, independent weekly organ of the Church of England. Vole, the monthly newspaper for ecologists. The Lancet, which is a medical journal, a famous one, still exists. The Lady, the agreeable fortnightly for the genteel. 

Franki Cookney 31:45

That's still going. 

Lucy Douglas 31:46

So yeah, The Lady is very definitely still going. Campaign magazine is still going. It's a, like a B2B magazine for the advertising industry and creative industry. Financial Weekly, The New Trafalgar House Financial Newspaper. I don't know if that still exists. I'm gonna hazard a guess that it's been folded into some other title over the years. And then you've got the NME, New Musical Express, the with it pop paper, and The Field, the fortnightly magazine for country pursuits. 

So what I really loved about this feature, I felt like it sort of fell into this category of feature that you can do, that you can run, if you're like a plucky little independent who's able to take some risks with what you publish. What happens is when you are part of like a big stable of magazines, as Tatler is now for Condé Nast, like there's so much money and research and effort that's spent on learning who the reader is and what they want. And it's very easy to kind of fall into this trap of giving them the same thing, and then it becomes quite safe, which can mean that you're dismissing things that your readers might really, really enjoy, but they're just a bit different to things that they've seen before. And I feel like this is something that probably wouldn't have got in once Tatler was sold to Condé Nast, which happened under Tina Brown as well. Basically, she kind of, she kind of grew the audience of Tatler tenfold when she was, in the sort of four or five years that she was in charge of it. And then the, the previous owner was able to sell it to Condé Nast off the back of her success. 

Franki Cookney 33:36

Oh, okay. Yeah. I mean, yeah, this definitely kind of comes under that category of like, Let's just have a go.

Lucy Douglas 33:33

Yeah. 

Franki Cookney 33:34

I actually thought that, I think, I know you said you loved it and I feel bad now dissing it. 

Lucy Douglas 33:41

No, no, diss it. 

Franki Cookney 33:43

I think it could have been either funnier or more interesting. 

Lucy Douglas 33:48

Oh, okay. 

Franki Cookney 33:49

Yeah, I felt like, like I definitely got that it was supposed to be funny. So, so Nick Coleridge is the same writer who wrote the status, that wrote up the list of status symbols. And he actually later became Editorial Director of Condé Nast, Managing Editor, Vice President, and then finally President of Condé Nast International. So, we are seeing him in his formative years here, which is just kind of cool, I think. Um, and then, you know, he's done all these little sign offs at the end of each one. So he's, you know, they're obviously supposed to be funny and kind of piss-takey. However, I... again, it's just a lot of text, and it's a lot to read, a big old list, and I did sort of, it did lose me after a while. 

Lucy Douglas 34:38

Did you get bored? 

Franki Cookney 34:39

Yeah, yeah, I got bored after a while. 

Lucy Douglas 34:42

Okay, yeah, fair enough. 

Franki Cookney 34:43

So I felt like if they, rather than kind of format it by insisting on doing January to February, March to April like that, if they'd just done a rundown of the top stories in chronological order, or even just like trends from each magazine. That would have been quite an interesting read or alternative, they kind of focused on the quirky stories and headlines that would have been like the more entertaining side of it. There's kind of a bit of both and you have to pick through it to find the little. nuggets of comedy. So I think I'm just really telling on myself as a 2024 reader with a shitty attention span.

Lucy Douglas 35:23

But I do, so I do think, and similar to your previous point, I think that a lot of the humour here is in the references and like really understanding the culture of the time. So I spent a lot of, I was like, Oh, that line looks a bit sassy, I'm going to Google what they're talking about. And then once I, once I Googled it and read a bit more about it, I was like, oh yeah, that's very funny.

My point is like, I wouldn't have had to research it in 1980. I would have just read it and laughed. In the, in the, The Stage section up the front, there's so many of these stories are about plays that have been really badly reviewed or like massive flops, which felt kind of sassy and, and quite funny.

And then there's also, okay, so this is not funny, but really interesting and something that I didn't know about before. So in this section from Sheba, this glossy magazine for Arab women, so March, April, "Amid much criticism, Lord Carrington apologises to the Saudi royal family over the television program, Death of a Princess." So I looked that up. It was a dramatisation rather than a straight documentary about a Saudi princess and her lover who were executed in Saudi Arabia. And it sort of became like a, the airing of it became like a kind of an international incident between Saudi Arabia and like various Western countries that broadcast this show.

Franki Cookney 36:50

Oh, wow. 

Lucy Douglas 36:51

Lord Carrington was the, was Margaret Thatcher's foreign secretary at the time. And he had to kind of issue an apology over the fact that it had been aired. And obviously that was really criticised because that was sort of against freedom of speech and like, yeah, why shouldn't, you know, the Saudi Arabian government did this, why shouldn't we talk about that? So yeah, it was, uh, it was really, like, some really interesting things there as well. 

Franki Cookney 37:16

On a slightly lighter note, a few that I liked were, there was one from Financial Weekly. "Observers notice a growing trend for cocaine sniffing in city lavatories." Who'd have thought? 

Lucy Douglas 37:33

Yes, I also really enjoyed that one. "Observers." 

Franki Cookney 37:37

And then from The Field Magazine. "Admiral Sir James Eberle, Joint Master of the Britannia Foot Beagles, is incensed by an undignified paparazzi photograph in the field of him clambering over a stile." 

Lucy Douglas 37:51 

There's another really great one from The Field. "The Enfield Chase Hunt, Hertfordshire, is accused of killing domestic cats, not foxes. Joint Master retorts, "We've not killed a cat for three seasons." 

One glaringly apparent absence from the NME's list of stories, and that's because it wouldn't have happened by the time this magazine was being written and went to press, the death of John Lennon, 8th of December, 1980.

Franki Cookney 38:19

Yes, it hadn't occurred to me that that's literally 

Lucy Douglas 38:22

Yeah, this is the month he died.

Franki Cookney 38:24

Wow. Yeah. The final one that I'd sort of written down as finding it interesting, in Campaign, the magazine for the advertising industry. September, October. "Colett Dickinson Pearce's latest surrealistic ad for Benson Hedges, a cigarette packet concealed in an electrical circuit, is voted by campaign the most obscure advertisement yet." And, I looked up that advert, and it's sort of considered, like, quite an iconic cigarette advert from the time. And, um, yeah, and then I sort of went down this rabbit hole because I'd noticed in other magazines that we've looked at that cigarette ads in particular are really creative and often quite surreal and they are very light on copy and maybe you knew this but it's because advertising standards had just been, you know, the government had been kind of cracking down on what you could write on tobacco adverts.

And it had just, kind of, the list of things that you could include had just got smaller and smaller and smaller. Like you couldn't feature people anymore. You kind of couldn't even really like talk about what the product was or like, you know, say anything promotive about it. You basically could just show the product and then you had to have the great big disclaimer about this product gives you lung cancer. And so as a result, the advertising is fascinating, I think. And it's a weird one to get into, because obviously, like, it is good that smoking adverts were banned, but purely from an artistic point of view. 

Lucy Douglas 40:05

Yeah. 

Franki Cookney 40:06

Some of these adverts are wild. 

Lucy Douglas 40:10

That is like a real, sort of, a thing in advertising. Generally, sort of, vice products tend to have a huge amount of money pumped into their marketing, alcohol, alcohol companies are like enormous spenders in on creative services and advertising industry gambling as well. Now. I'd say that kind of like the calibre of like gambling advertising isn't like the same level of creativity as, like, alcohol advertising, but they're still like massive spenders. And, you know, you wouldn't necessarily say that fast food is like a vice product in the same way as like alcohol and gambling, but like McDonald's, McDonald's is one of the biggest spenders on advertising. And it's also, in terms of the consistency of their like creative output, is one of the most creative brands in the world. And yeah, it's because it's because the product's shitty and bad for you and people are going to legislate against it unless, you know, governments could legislate against it unless you're so popular that like they won't be able to get away with it.

Franki Cookney 41:14

And I think when something's kind of like obviously not very good for you, you have to work extra hard on promoting the vibes. 

Lucy Douglas 41:22

And if you're, if, if, I think if, if all you've got to sell is vibe, then that, that forces you to be more risk taking and bold with your creative decisions in your branding. It's why like banks, banks and insurance companies are never, they just never have good interesting adverts because 

Franki Cookney 41:44

We don't want vibes from our banks though, do we Lucy? We want reliability. 

Lucy Douglas 41:47

Yeah, yeah. 

[Music]

Lucy Douglas 41:49

Hello, Lucy here. Just a quick one to say, if you've not yet signed up for our newsletter, you definitely should. You can read the features that we talk about, see all the amazing adverts, and get access to loads of other bonus bits. Plus, it's a really good way to support the show. Find us at maghags.substack.com.

Lucy Douglas 42:12

We've only got a fashion tip this week, I'm afraid, Franki. 

Franki Cookney 42:15

Oh, what? 

Lucy Douglas 42:16

I could not find a single beauty tip in Tatler. 

Franki Cookney 42:19

Wow. Oh my goodness. Do you know why, Lucy? It's because the upper class English people shun beauty.

Lucy Douglas 42:26

Yeah. So make sure you are buying a genuine Gucci moccasin. 

Franki Cookney 42:33

Is there a possibility? I have been buying counterfeit Gucci moccasins.

Lucy Douglas 42:37

It's actually quite likely that you've been buying counterfeit Gucci moccasins. "Roberto Gucci is the grandson of Guccio Gucci who opened the first shop. In his quiet glass and chrome office high over Bond Street, he points to a cluttered corner, a profusion of plastic holders and tacky webbing bags, all bearing the name Gucci in large letters and confiscated by Gucci agents all over the world as counterfeit goods. 'We are fighting 122 companies through the courts at the moment in Italy for forging our name. In July alone, we were able to confiscate. 860 million liras worth of false Gucci invoices. At present, because Mexico is outside the Geneva Convention, we can do nothing about the large shop in Mexico City, which bears our name and sells copies of everything we make.'"

Gucci moccasins were a kind of, perfect, quiet luxury shoe for men or for women. But yeah, they were, the, the fraudsters were running amok with their, with their counterfeit Gucci moccasins all over the world. 

Franki Cookney 43:42

Now that I'm looking at the picture of this Gucci moccasin, now see, it's interesting they call it a moccasin because I probably would have stupidly called it a loafer.

Lucy Douglas 43:49

I would have called it a loafer too. 

Franki Cookney 43:51

But, I feel like you see versions of that shoe absolutely everywhere. And I suppose if I'd really thought about it, I probably could have worked out, but it was a copy of the Gucci one, but I'm now so used to seeing it in cheapo high street form that I don't even look at that and think wow that's really aspirational.

Lucy Douglas 44:14

It says cheapo high street to you.

Franki Cookney 44:16

It just says granny loafer to me. 

Lucy Douglas 44:18

Do you know what I bet that leather is buttery soft though. 

Franki Cookney 44:21

Yeah you probably know this about me but my Saturday job between the ages of 16 and 18 was working in Russell and Bromley. 

Lucy Douglas 44:17

I do know this about you. 

Franki Cookney 44:29

On Guildford High Street. And we sold a lot of similar looking loafers slash moccasins and I think that is probably part of the reason why it just looks like a granny shoe to me. But you know what I'm realising? Actually owning a Gucci moccasin, a genuine Gucci moccasin, would be the epitome of quiet luxury, because literally nobody would know it was Gucci, because it's such a ubiquitous style. Only you walking around would know that you were wearing Gucci. 

[Music break]

Lucy Douglas 45:04

"The Beasts of Belgravia."And before I dive into the standfirst, I wanted to ask you at this point, Franki, what did you think this feature would be about? Because the, We had that on the cover as well, The Beasts of Belgravia. Did you have any kind of notion as to what this feature would be about? 

Franki Cookney 45:23

Literally none. 

Lucy Douglas 45:26

No, same. And what it is actually about is not remotely what I thought it would be. So I thought it was going to be like some sort of tale of, like, a top shagger, who's like, wooed a lot of women, like in the Belgravia area, like a notorious bounder and cad. 

Franki Cookney 45:44

Okay, yeah, yeah. 

Lucy Douglas 45:45

Who was like leaving a trail of heartbroken women in his wake. Anyway, "They have the cash, but they'd rather dash. When the beasts pound the streets, Belgravia shopkeepers quake, reports Paul Pickering." So basically it's just about people who, posh people specifically, people in the Belgravia area, which is like between sort of Chelsea and Knightsbridge, people who run up very large bills with kind of normal everyday shops, like your fishmongers, your butchers, your greengrocers, uh, the garage that, you know, the sort of shops that everybody needs to, to frequent. And then never pay them. And apparently this is kind of reaching a point that one or two businesses had sort of been driven out of, out of business as a result of people not paying their bills. What did you think, Franki? 

Franki Cookney 46:37

I mean, having said that, I had absolutely no inkling what this feature was going to be about when I read the headline. But then really quickly, I had the sense of like, oh, this thing. Like I felt immediately that I was familiar with the idea of rich people putting things on account and then just never paying the bill. And I don't know why I'm familiar with that, but I feel like it's a trope. It's somehow a trope that's woven its way into culture, maybe fiction.

Lucy Douglas 47:09

I think so too. 

Franki Cookney 47:10

However, can I just, before we get into it, can I please just talk about the very first. line of this feature. Because as with so many things in this issue of Tatler, no sooner had I started reading than I had to start Googling. Because there's just like so many obscure references. "The fishmonger cringed as a large lady with many chins and vermilion lips filled the door of his shop like Carver Doone.

Lucy Douglas 47:41

Who is Carver Doone, pray tell? 

Franki Cookney 47:43

Who is Carver Doone? And, this is so obscure, right? So, Carver Doone is a character in the novel, Lorna Doone, which is a romance published in 1869 by the author, Richard Doddridge Blackmore. It's a couple of times been made into a sort of period drama for telly in the 90s and early 2000s, variously starring people like Sean Bean and Aidan Gillan. But, but that is not who this is referring to, I don't think. The person this is referring to is a wrestler whose real name was Jack Baltus, but who, on the recommendation of his promoter, Atholl Oakeley, rebranded himself as Carver Doone in the 1930s. And that, is that something most people would have got?

Lucy Douglas 48:40 

I have no idea.

Franki Cookney 48:42

I mean, I could tell from your reaction that you also went down this rabbit hole and I found this out. 

Lucy Douglas 48:48

Yes, I did, I did. Who is Carver Doone? Oh, an English wrestler.

Franki Cookney 48:56

How completely obscure! And it, from what I could gather, his career only lasted about five years. 

Lucy Douglas 49:02 

Yeah, exactly. 

Franki Cookney 49:03 

In the 1930s. And yet here he is in the very first line of a Tatler feature in 1980.

Lucy Douglas 49:11

I did also sort of feel like it was… like, I really this whole sort of set up in this feature. I thought the writing was really acerbic and vivid and created a really rich, like I really was there in, in the fishmongers with them watching this interaction take place, but also it did kind of feel a little bit misogynistic. "The fishmonger cringed as a large lady with many chins and vermillion lips filled the door of his shop, like Carver Doone. 'Four pounds of your best salmon please. And that small lobster. You haven't any bigger? Yes, and a couple of pounds of turbot and some of that nasty thing over there.' As the waves of Madame Rochas beat down the fishy smell, the brave trader tries to catch the titan's eye. The bill has gone over 50 pounds. 'Will that be cash, Madam, or a cheque?' He mumbles with all the spaniel-eyed trepidation of a man playing poker with Nixon. And, absolutely fatal in these circumstances, he turns to consult her account. A second is all Vermilion Lips needs. She is at the door, skirts billowing like, like the Ramsgate Hovercraft. 'No, have it sent round and charge it to my account.'" 

Franki Cookney 50:24

I love it. I love it so much. 

Lucy Douglas 50:27

Yeah. Like, it's so, um, like, yeah, I'm there. I am there at the counter watching this happen. Um, but also, I don't know, it did feel like a little whiff of misogyny about it.

Franki Cookney: [00:50:40

I, I don't disagree. I just think that The whole thing I just found deliciously bitchy and like you said it's very acerbic, it had a real sort of luvviness to it, you know, I was kind of reading the whole thing in my head with a sort of slightly camp posh accent and I think the writing is fantastic and the anecdotes are really interesting and yeah, there is a little hint of, you know, misogyny, or at the very least sexism. But I just, I couldn't get too angry about it. Because nobody, none of the rich people in this feature kind of come off very well. 

Lucy Douglas 51:23

No, yeah, I couldn't get too angry about it either, because I was also like, you don't want people to write mean things about you. Don't steal stuff. 

Franki Cookney 51:32

And, you know, it is bad. They're talking about how some businesses have had to shut down because people are just not paying their bills. But there's a, there's a brilliant anecdote, and it's talking about a butcher called John Woods who had to shut up shop. And it says, "Woods, while delivering to the house of a now dead oil heiress, had the turkey snatched out of his hands and the door slammed in his face. He made his way home in the snow, cold and penniless. Perhaps it was poetic justice that this particular beast choked to death on a beef sandwich." 

Lucy Douglas 52:08

I mean, it's, it's Dickensian. 

Franki Cookney 52:10

It's fabulous. 

Lucy Douglas 52:12

And it's not long either. It's just, it's just two pages. I reckon it's probably only a thousand words total, but yeah, it's great. It's just really fun. Um, and I quite like, I quite like the idea of, I was thinking about how. I was thinking about the process of writing this feature and I quite like the idea of this journalist, like going around to all the different businesses in Belgravia and asking them, do you have trouble with some of the local residents running up massive accounts and never paying them? Because that's the sort of thing that, like, it will not be hard to get people to talk to you. You'll just need to ask that one question and people will be like, "wow, let me tell you." And, you know, once you get people started, they'll, they'll. Just they won't stop. 

Franki Cookney 53:56

Yeah, definitely. I quite like the way they, um, they're sort of distancing themselves from like other kinds of journalists, how other kinds of journalists might report this feature, because it references the fact that there was a story in the News of the World, which is actually sort of the hook for this feature, I think, because it says, it was a recent story in the notorious Whitefriar's Diary in the News of the World, which brought beast hunters back to Belgravia. So it seems like, you know, they've sort of had some press again recently, and there's a kind of renewed interest and outrage over it. And then a bit later he says, "the naughty News of the World" also reported how somebody else was short of the, "short of the readies" to pay a £50 grocer's bill. However, "while the journalists of the gutter press went through the waste paper bins at the garage trying to find the bill, the real beasts roam free." And there's this just slight hint of, well, we at Tatler don't need to do that because we could just walk in the front door of the shop and, and talk to these people. 

Lucy Douglas 53:55

Yeah, I really enjoyed it. "The big stores like Harrods and Selfridges can turn all but the most resistant beast into a babe by the use of a debt collecting agency. Booze, though, is a commodity sacred to the beast. She can owe, or just as often he can owe, a fortune to the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, but the vintner is sacred." 

Franki Cookney 54:17

Oh, I love that line. So I feel like, and it touches on this at the end of, um, the feature. At the end, it does actually say It's the younger titled people with money who run up the bills and it makes you think perhaps they do not have quite so much cash after all.

Lucy Douglas 54:31

I think there’s also definitely that idea of, like, people who are so wealthy that they don’t need to worry about anything as provincial as money. Because they’ve got so much of it they don’t need to even think about it?

Franki Cookney 54:44 

Is this again, you know, we sort of talked about the quiet luxury and understated luxury, whether or not that's a very British thing. Do you think, do we think this is a uniquely British phenomenon? 

Lucy Douglas 54:56

I don't know if it's uniquely British. I don't know if anything similar maybe happens in like other sort of older European societies. I don't think it, well, just based purely on what some of the business owners say in this piece, I don't think any of the people who come from like the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, like those sorts of places who tend to come to that kind of area of London in the summer months, this is not custom for them either.

Franki Cookney 55:25

No, they wouldn't dream of not paying for. 

Lucy Douglas 55:28

Yeah, exactly. 

Franki Cookney 55:29

Do you know what? Once again, this is all coming back to this idea of British wealth and status being about seeming not to be too bothered. 

Lucy Douglas 55:40

Yeah, yeah. 

Franki Cookney 55:42

It's like, oh, you know, I don't need to worry about such a trifling little thing as my £50 bill, which, just to be clear, hang on, £50 in 1980 is worth about £270 today, so not a small amount to have on your weekly account.

Lucy Douglas 55:58

To drop in the fishmongers. 

Franki Cookney 55:59

It just all kind of ties in with like the understated status, and the beauty stuff from Good Housekeeping, as a very particularly sort of British way to be wealthy. 

[Music break]

Lucy Douglas 56:13

So Franki, what's hot in December 1980? 

Franki Cookney 56:17

What's hot in December 1980 is sharing Princess Michael's gynaecologist.

Lucy Douglas 56:26

Wearing fur on the inside of your coat. 

Franki Cookney 56:28

Of your tweed coat, no less. 

Lucy Douglas 56:30

Of your tweed coat. And what is not? 

Franki Cookney 56:33

Running up unpaid bills at your local greengrocers. 

Lucy Douglas 56:37

Yes. 

Franki Cookney 56:38

Extremely common.

Thank you for listening, we hope you enjoyed today's show.

Lucy Douglas 56:47

If you did, please consider leaving us a glowing review and smashing that five stars button. It’ll help the podcast grow.

Franki Cookney 56:54

We hope you join us again next time on Mag Hags when we'll be investigating why money can't buy you love. Bye! 

Lucy Douglas 57:02

Bye!

[Theme music]

Mag Hags is written and hosted by Lucy Douglas and Franki Cookney.
Editing and audio production by Franki Cookney.

Our theme music is Look Where That Got You, Mattie Maguire. Additional music: Leotard Haul, Dez Moran. Both courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com.