Turner links the absence of the early 1960s generation from politics to the crassness of today's culture. We experienced the mass unemployment of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The leftists (your correspondent included) were highly politicised, serious, censorious, and more often than not on the dole or in jobs well below our talents. It seemed unconscionable that the rest of the country could not hate the Thatcher government as we hated it. Like the opinion pollsters, we expected Labour to win the 1992 general election. Instead John Major secured more votes than any other victorious prime minister in history.

To the despairing leftist the British had confirmed themselves as a crass, heartless people wallowing in materialism. Many gave up on politics, and the talented among them went into satire, comedy and journalism. No harm in that you might think, until you glance at the quality of the work they produced. Will any of it last? Look at the "new lads" of the early 1990s, as represented by Nick Hornby or the characters in the BBC's Men Behaving Badly. "The loss of faith implied in the new lad," says Turner, "the wilful wallowing in bad behaviour, however ironic, amounted to little more than a feeling that if we couldn't beat the system, we might as well join in. Everything was a bit of a laugh anyway, nothing was sacred, so why not give in, drink up and think of Engerland?"

If the new lads do not convince you, examine the comedy of Armando Iannucci, Steve Coogan and Chris Morris. It is all about style and never about substance. They target the media or the processes of politics — the spin, the lies, the backstabbing — in "political" satires that are devoid of political purpose. Or consider the representative stars of the "alternative television" of the past 15 years — Jonathan Ross, Angus Deayton, Ricky Gervais and Graham Norton. They like sexist (but never racist) jokes, as long as their sexism is ironic. They revel in the power to break taboos and enjoy celebrity culture (ironically again, of course) but their claim to be alternative comes solely from a vague sense that they would never vote Conservative. (Or if they did, would keep quiet about it for career reasons.)

Turner's grasp of politics is feeble. More even than Milne and Flannery, he is interested solely in the Left. He can think of no reasons beyond the mercenary why anyone would want to leave it. He believes there was no difference between New Labour and the old Tories. He does not understand that the socialist religion was dying everywhere in the 1980s, not just in Britain. He never mentions that the "sell-out" he condemns occurred in part because Britain was entering the longest boom in its history. Yet for all his parochialism, his description of how we moved from the harsh and confrontational world of Thatcher to the soft and mendacious world of Blair remains superb.

That boom is over, as I'm sure you will have noticed. We are due artists who can confront hard times. The critics may have dismissed Paula Milne's drama as old-fashioned. But I suspect that it will soon be clear that it is the critics rather than Milne who are the true has-beens.