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Comedian Harry Enfield (b. 1961) began his television career in 1988 on Channel 4’s Saturday Live, first with the character of Stavros, a Cypriot kebab-shop owner, and then his most popular and certainly most influential character, Loadsamoney. A vulgar, loud-mouthed builder who had made a great deal of (or ‘loads of’) money in the 1980s’ London property boom, Loadsamoney had turned his back on his traditional working-class, Labour-voting origins and was now a fan of Margaret Thatcher, constantly waving a wad of pound notes at the audience.
‘Loadsamoney’ the record, co-written with producer William Orbit, was also released, and the word became a popular catchphrase. However, when Enfield realised that people were taking his Loadsamoney character at face value and not seeing that he was satirising the Thatcherite ‘yuppie’ phenomenon, he killed him off in the first episode of his 1990 BBC series Henry Enfield’s Television Programme.
The yuppies – ‘young, upwardly mobile professionals’ – were a new class of rich people, most of whom had benefited from the policies of Thatcher’s long, radical Conservative premiership (1979-90). Unlike the ‘Sloane Rangers’ – the 1980s’ name given to fashion-conscious ‘old money’ who shopped in and around London’s King’s Road, and whose patron saint was Princess Diana – Loadsamoney and the yuppies were very much part of the nouveau riche. In the following decade, the women of this class would often be satirised as ‘footballers’ wives’, from the popular TV series of the same name.
