This is a fond look back at a decade that will probably go down as Oxford's Golden Eighties, when egalitarianism was suddenly passé, and undergraduates could once again sample the honey of Brideshead. A dozen of them are interviewed here, and to good effect. Presciently, this 2009 production identifies David Cameron and Boris Johnson as the two likeliest future Tory prime ministers, which indeed they turned out to be.
Not surprisingly, the notorious Bullingdon Club ("the Buller") soon comes into the picture, with the sound of a restaurant window being smashed by a vandal with an unruly mop of fair hair, out to prove he's not bourgeois (which he is), but failing to make good his escape, and suffering penalties. A fellow-member has also been skylarking along with the best of them, but chooses the right moment to go home. This second one is David Cameron, often sneered-at as "Call me Dave", which Boris sees as an affectation.
Many of us saw Cameron the same way as PM, uncomfortable on TV, apparently wrestling with his privileged background. Yet his Oxford contemporaries remember him as a well-adjusted and popular undergraduate, winning the pub darts tournament and baby-sitting for a Rastafarian restaurant owner, without any suggestion of fashionable slumming.
However outrageous the excesses of the Buller, we don't seem to detect much levelling talk in this film, no tumbrils that I could hear. The tangled snobberies and reverse-snobberies of Oxford seem to fascinate those who observe them close-up, so that they regard them almost with affection. For example, Boris was not quite gold-standard Eton. He was a 'scholarship kid', which might be expected to confer extra status, but didn't. It branded him as some sort of charity case, not really one of us.
Of course the Buller is supposed to be the Puller - a big macho power-display to overawe the girls, yet the only female interviewee, Boris's admirable sister Rachel, just thought they looked silly. The arrogant expression they put on in the ritual group-photograph is nothing specially elitist; someone commented that rock-groups put on just the same look. (The anti-bourgeois trashing of rooms was also a hallmark of the punk rockers, hardly an elite club.)
But whether or not because of his Bullingdon antics, Boris was seldom short of a warm bed for the night. Someone commented that he was good at getting people to do things, especially his laundry. The film ends with Boris making his first visit to a launderette, and Dave/David having to show him how the machines work - upsetting Boris's self-image as the man of the people, upstaging the aristocratic chinless wonder.
The Boris-lookalike they selected is too inclined to mimic the man, rather than simply act the part; Dave is played with a little more conviction. I think the scriptwriter may not know much about Oxford, as we twice hear "Christ Church College", a phrase never uttered around these streets (Christ Church is a cathedral first, and a college second.) The narrator, Anthony Head, may have got the right voice and manner, but we can never catch the last word of the sentence; he keeps throwing it away, so I can't tell which school James Delingpole attended, when this was meant to be a key point in the story. Finally, I gave up counting how many dozens of times Toby Young said "Kind of" or "Kinda", sometimes twice running. I couldn't quite see what message this non-Etonian was trying to put out!
