Nineties culture in Britain. Remember how it was? Blur vs Oasis. The Spice Girls.
New Labour and Cool Britannia. The ghastly English football anthem Three Lions, with its “football’s coming home” refrain. The Big Breakfast, The Word and TFI Friday on the telly.
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels at the pictures. Noel Gallagher, a champagne flute instead of a can of lager in hand, hanging out with Tony Blair at No10. Right at the heart of it all, influencing as well as embodying all that was good and bad about the decade, sat lad magazine Loaded, which exploded on to the scene in 1994.
The story of the meteoric rise and fall of the magazine in a haze of booze, drugs and hubris, as well as its role in fostering the culture of toxic masculinity we see today, is told in the documentary Loaded: Lads, Mags and Mayhem (BBC2, Friday, November 22). It’s unruly, uneven and overlong, yet very watchable nonetheless. It opens with an archive clip of Irish journalist Eilis Brennan asking Loaded ’s creator and first editor James Brown: “Are you just a bunch of drunken louts who got together to set up a magazine and somehow quite accidentally cracked it?” “Yeah,” drawls Brown, brushing a tumbling mass of floppy black curls back from his face, “but no more drunk than anyone else”.
In Loaded ’s heyday, Brown often came across as cocky and obnoxious. Mind you, he had some cause to be. Feature writer Michael Holden’s intake led to him being sectioned on New Year’s Ev.
