What happened in the UK in 1993?
Here are the biggest news, sports and entertainment stories from 1993…
Britain’s longest recession since the 1930s officially ended as the economy grew during the first three months of the year. Conservatives took credit for the rebound in fortunes, but critics claimed it was luck more than anything else. However it was accomplished, it was well received by the people of the nation who could now look forward to spending again.
A new place they could spend on being Buckingham Palace; the public was first allowed inside during the summer of ’93. Since the entrance fee was set at £8, it wasn’t cheap, but that did nothing to dampen demand; within a week of going on sale, all group advance booking slots to visit Buckingham Palace had been filled for the next three years.
Other news included an oil tanker it was carrying ran aground near the Shetland Islands (resulting in the spill of 84,700 tons of crude oil into the North Sea and a major ecological catastrophe); and anti-racist demonstrations across London in response to the drop of criminal charges against two young men accused of murdering black teenager Stephen Lawrence.
In the world of sport, the huge horse racing event ‘The Grand National’ (with a worldwide audience of 300 million people) ended in ‘chaos’ after many of the jockeys failed to realize that it had been played. called a false start and they started around the racetrack The Jockey Club was forced to declare the race void; meaning the bookies had to return the £75m worth of bets that had been placed on the race (and miss out on their biggest payday of the year!).
On a personal mission to solve alien-related ‘chaos’ were FBI agents ‘Mulder & Scully’; his popular US series ‘X-Files’ crossing the Atlantic for UK screens. Motivated by the belief that Mulder’s sister had been kidnapped by little green men, they set about trying to find the ‘truth’. One place where the truth definitely wasn’t was on the ‘Beavis & Butthead’ couch. These guys spent ’93 becoming world famous for changing the TV channel and playing soccer with frogs.
With Britain itself still struggling to find its own blockbuster movies, ‘Jurassic Park’ and ‘Indecent Proposal’ were the top films hitting theaters during the year. ‘Jurassic Park’ involved dinosaurs (real and scary looking ones!) running around a theme park created by an eccentric millionaire. ‘Indecent Proposal’ was another story involving a rich man (this time a billionaire played by Robert Redford); This guy offers a couple, who had just lost a fortune in Las Vegas, $1 million to spend the night with his wife.