From the Cutting Room Floor - the Death of Lymeswold

Even in a book as vast as my forthcoming work on Britain in the 1990s, there's not room for everything, and some stuff got cut at an early stage. But I'm loath to lose things, so here's a passage from the first draft that got excised:

...The good news came in 1992 when it was announced that production of Lymeswold was to cease. The product had been launched with great fanfare a decade earlier, the first new British cheese for two hundred years, at the behest of the Milk Marketing Board and with the endorsement of the agriculture minister, Peter Walker. It was given a fictitious name that was supposed to evoke an ideal English village ('The Americans are crazy for that sort of thing,' explained a sales director, as British hearts sank) and, rather implausibly, it was intended to be capable of exporting to France, as though that country didn't have enough creamy blue cheeses of its own.

This latter aspect of the project foundered almost immediately when it was discovered that that the word Lymeswold was virtually unpronounceable for the French, but even a rebranding overseas as Westminster Blue didn't help since the product itself was so bland and tasteless. The domestic market was similarly unimpressed, particularly since Lymeswold was more expensive than many imported French cheeses.

After a decade of underperformance, the Milk Marketing Board gave up the struggle and closed down the factory in Birmingham that had been making the stuff, with the loss of thirty-eight jobs.

There was a free-market moral to be learned here, opined The Times in a leading article: 'Politicians and civil servants and nationalised industries have their uses, but cheese-making is not one of them.' Private enterprise, however, was not always much better than the bureaucrats. The following year saw the launch of Emmerdale, an equally unimpressive cheese, in a licensing deal with Yorkshire Television, the company that made the soap opera of the same name. (Its elder soap sister, Coronation Street, had blazed this trail by licensing to Carlsberg Tetley the name of Newton & Ridley, the fictional brewers who supplied the Rover's Return.)

Even beyond such mass-market monstrosities, there were major structural problems with the cheese industry. Britain was importing five times as much 'cheddar' from its European partners as it was exporting, and unpasturised cheese had almost entirely disappeared, hunted out of existence by officials concerned that it breached health and safety guidelines. A 1993 episode of the Lenny Henry sitcom Chef! was centred on the search for under-the-counter unpateurised Stilton.

Hope, however, was at hand, in the shape of an unforeseen boom in dedicated, independent cheese-makers, embraced by a foodie minority in the same way that the real ale campaign was finally winning converts. And increasingly this seemed like the polarised future of food more generally: a rise in highly processed ready-meals (sales grew by 70 per cent in the ten years from 1994), accompanied by a growing diversity of choice at the top end and in the specialist fringes...

Top Ten: Cultural Highlights of 1992

In my forthcoming essay on the lasting legacy of 1992, I shall be discussing at length some all or fewer of the following cultural moments in British life:

1. Men Behaving Badly
The new lad got into his strides on this ITV sitcom, while the BBC was giving women a similar range of role models in Absolutely Fabulous.

2. The Jack Dee Show
The first alternative comedian to reach a mainstream audience without sacrificing his original fan base. Though the John Smith adverts the following year were more influential.

3. Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
The moment when the yet-to-be-branded Young British Artists convinced the world that making money should be considered one of the fine arts.

4. Suede in the Melody Maker
‘The best new band in Britain’ get their first magazine cover without having released a record yet, and inadvertently give birth to Britpop.

5. ‘Cherubim and Seraphim’, Inspector Morse
Danny Boyle is in the director’s chair as the Venerable Morse attempts to understand this rave and drug culture on which the youth seem so keen.

6. The death of Lymeswold
Invented by committee as an English brie a decade earlier, this tasteless, cultureless monstrosity of a cheese was finally killed off in a major victory for British food.

7. Morrissey waves a Union Flag at Madstock
He got pilloried by a generation for whom the national flag was a right-wing symbol, but within a couple of years the imagery was ubiquitous.

8. Brian Deane scores the first goal in the Premier League
Manchester United came back from their defeat by Deane’s Sheffield United to win the first Premier League title, to the delight of all those who talked about football as a product.

9. Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch
It changed the cultural status of football and changed the face of literature.

10. Charles and Diana announce their separation
Two colliding views on the nature of modern Britain give up their hopeless alliance and declare war on each other.

Incidentally, the title of the e-book has changed and will now be known as Things Can Only Get Bitter: The Lost Generation of 1992. It'll probably be available early next month.