The Rugby World Cup quarter-finals will be played on the weekend of 14/15 October, with the semi-finals on 20/21 October and the final on Saturday, 28 October. Television presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk, formerly a Labour MP on Merseyside, captured the hysteria when in August 1987 he wrote a rather hysterical op-ed for the Times entitled‘Riots That Go Unremarked’: The character referenced by Corbett, played by comedian and impressionist Harry Enfield and written by Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, was the breakout hit from Saturday Live,the UK’s own short-lived answer to Saturday Night Live. It was a parody (rather snobbish with hindsight) of the vulgar nouveau riche – a charmless working class man with little education, no manners, and the frightfully vulgar habit of mentioning how much he had earned through the dreadfully menial business ofpainting and decorating. What the character captured, however, was the class confusion of the time, which meant that money and purchasing habits had ceased to be reliable barometers of social class. As one contemporary commentator put it, ‘all the surface indicators have gone to hell’. It’s hard not to think that it simply suited police authorities, lobbying for funding increases and greater power, to present all this as a surging, terrifying trend. But this moment passed. Woking, one of the towns worst hit by town centre mass scrapping during 1987, declared the problem solved in early 1989.

And when Watney’s launched UK-brewed draught Foster’s in 1982 the attendant advertising campaign was fronted by comedian Paul Hogan, swaggering and frank, in T-shirt and jeans — the ultimate Australian male. The hysteria in the papers died down and the police moved on to fretting over ecstasy and illegal raves, and then alco-pops, and then happy-slapping and then… At the same time lager’s image began to change in line with a general cultural shift which saw the first wave of ‘new man’-ism – only subtly sexist and knowing his way round an omelette pan – give way to the hairy-chested, unrepentant machismo of the 1970s. Instead of the Scandinavia of walnut coffee tables and Ibsen, lager adopted Viking imagery — Hagar the Horrible for Skol, Norseman from Vaux.the lager lout phenomenon did, over time,work in CAMRA’s favour in that it provided an opportunity for usto make a clear distinction between the discerning cask ale drinker in the pub environment versus the loutish ‘down-market’ behaviour of those fuelled by strong, cheap lagers.

Prince Charles (attractive wife, lots of money), Don Johnson (star of Miami Vice, cars, pretty girls, expensive clothes, money), Rod Stewart and Peter Stringfellow (for the same reasons). In 1988 the problem only seemed to escalate and the baiting and assault of police officers attending such incidents seemed to intensify, as reported by David Leppard in the Sunday Times on 27 March that year.In the following decade, though lager’s share of the market continued to rise (4 per cent in 1968, 10 per cent in 1971, 20 per cent by 1975), competition grew with it. More brands emerged – genuine imports, foreign brands brewed under licence in the UK (Carlsberg, Holsten), and home-grown ‘faux’ lagers such as Greenall Whitley’s Grünhalle. The ACPO report itself wasn’t made public – they thought a list of towns where violence was a regular occurrence and the police were struggling might act as a kind of catalogue for mobile yobs – so we can’t know if it mentioned lager. Certainly the attendant newspaper coverage based on the press release does not seem to have flagged lager as a particular problem, and wine, as in wine bars, got mentioned more often. Though the report was sensible and far from fearmongering it made clear that the problem was real and that something worrying was going on Britain’s towns on Friday and Saturday nights. Warm Dregs The arrival of the police, the observers noted, was sometimes greeted with cheers from crowds simply excited that something was happening. It is the image of lager, exuding its message, ‘Stay young; stay with the herd’, which is so malign. It is the content and colour of the product which allows it to be used this way – uniformly banal in taste and texture, and brewed as a lowest common denominator mass product. But then herds are all given the same feed… When the lager lad says that beer is an old man’s drink, the reply is to ask if they have ever thought of growing up?… Lager is a candle to the moth for these people. It lubricates the louts as they lurch to the football terraces…