From the archive: looking back on a horrible year, December 1987

Zeebrugge, Hungerford, Enniskillen, King’s Cross… and there was worse to come

At the end of 1987, the Observer Magazine compiled a round-up of the year. ‘It has not been a good year,’ it began, with some understatement. ‘Zeebrugge, Hungerford, Enniskillen, King’s Cross. These are the names engraved on 1987. The number of deaths shocked; even more frightening, perhaps, was the manner of them, the threat they posed to our daily assumptions’.

Then there was the beginning of Thatcher’s third term – ‘As promised, Mrs Thatcher went on and on, assuring us that her third victory was only a staging post on a much longer journey’ – and the stock market crash on Black Monday, a few days after the great storm had flattened southeast England.

There was unabashed schadenfreude in a list of ‘the unfortunates hereunder who had it even worse’ – BBC weatherman Michael ‘There’s no hurricane on the way’ Fish; Edward Windsor, whose year ‘was hardly a knockout’ after his short stint in the Royal Marines, referring to the legendarily naff It’s A Royal Knockout! that he organised; and Jim and Tammy Bakker, the toppled TV evangelists whose ‘greed and hypocrisy were exposed by auditors’.

And how about this, a brazen appeal for Russian interference in American democracy? ‘Run, Gorby, run! encouraged a US paper when a poll revealed Gorbachev to be more popular than every Democratic candidate except Jesse Jackson. But really, he’s had quite enough on his plate at home.’

Despite the many tragedies, there was a reminder of ‘the wells of personal courage from which mankind continues to draw’, and there was of course good reason to cheer the historic US-Soviet treaty eliminating intermediate-range nuclear missiles.

But two days after publication on 29 December, there was yet more bad news: Kylie Minogue’s I Should Be So Lucky was released.

Contributor

Chris Hall

The GuardianTramp

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