I think Jedward should record Ding Dong... They are a perfect product of the world that Thatcher so enthusiastically ushered in.
How, you may say? I'm glad you asked. If you did.
Thatcher de-regulated the telephone industry, and packaged it up into bite-sized chunks to be bought by citizens of her new share-owning democracy. Plus the foreigners who bought hundreds of thousands of shares, plus big business who faked identities and addresses so they could buy even more shares.
It's very deregulation of the telco industry that ushered in the hundreds of chat line ads you saw in the tabloids. All of a sudden you, the private citizen, could set up a business account with a Telco to make money from getting people to phone you. Most people were too slow to pick up on this, but of course the spivs were onto it like white on rice, phone sex and psychic sites sprouted like mushrooms.
TV was at the forefront of this stampede, and voter phone-in shows proliferated. The money spent by frustrated voters phoning in again and again actually funds much of modern TV. Everything, it seemed, hinges on the opinion of some cretinous teenage demographic. Cell phones and the digital age merely deepened the pot of profits. This has been going on for some time. Simon Cowell is actually a latecomer to the phenomenon.
I'm not saying that these developments would not have occurred without Thatcher, only that they did WITH Thatcher, and that she is indeed, thirty years down the line, responsible for Jedward.
