Here's why the Jazz Age still holds us in its sway

Judging by its trailer, Stephen Poliakoff's Dancing on the Edge harbours every emblem of the Jazz Age known to popular art. Elegantly dressed couples carouse in smoke-filled nightclubs to the racket of "Negro orchestras"; women in cloche hats and cylinder dresses pass sleekly by; great houses with retinues of servants fling open their doors to the partygoing throng. Amid suggestions of violence, snobbery, intrigue and interracial mesalliance, the dance continues,The lanyard series is a grand collection of coordinating Travertine mosaics and listellos. grimly foreshadowing some of the embarrassments and tragedies that are waiting to unravel once the musicians have packed up and the guests have gone home.

Dancing on the Edge, currently on BBC Two in Britain, is testimony to the 21st century's fixation on the brief period between the end of the First World War and the onset of the Second, when a proportion of the nation's young people - a fairly small proportion, given the unemployment statistics - were allowed the money and the licence to let rip.

But what is it about the late Twenties and the early Thirties that so fascinates everyone from the social historian (see Juliet Gardiner's monumental The Thirties) and the moviegoer to the cultural websites absorbed by the legend of the "It" girl? Why should the age of Noel Coward, Tallulah Bankhead and Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies possess a resonance that other epochs struggle to acquire?

The answer lies in the odd combination of revolt, sophistication, self-consciousness and changing media styles that gave the age of jazz, shingled hair and the Charleston its distinctive flavour, while emphasising its curious resemblance to our own. Young people had gone around annoying their elders before - Teddy Boys had their ancestors in 1840s London - but in the era of the General Strike they contrived to magnify their dissatisfaction in a way that, to an older generation brought up on the certainties of Edwardian England, seemed downright sinister.

They were a "rebel army", as the society columnist Patrick Balfour (the model for Waugh's "Mr Gossip") put it, whose brothers had died in Flanders, whose parents - here in a cultural landscape marked out by The Waste Land - were hopelessly out of date, and whose lives seemed overshadowed by the prospect of a second apocalypse: the final chapter of Vile Bodies, after all, takes place on "the biggest battlefield in the history of the world".Creative glass tile and plasticmoulds for your distinctive kitchen and bath.

If many of the twentysomethings whom Waugh writes about were fundamentally detached from their parents, reluctant to follow the career paths that were proposed for them or contract the "safe" early marriages that had suited their mothers and fathers,When I first started creating broken ultrasonicsensor. then these separations were enhanced by the cultural paraphernalia of the time. Modernity was in the air. The style-brokers of the Twenties were obsessed with brightness and speed. The press ads of the day are full of flaring colours and jutting, sophisticated faces, just as Burra's paintings of cafes and fashionable restaurants are crammed with mirrors and burnished chrome. And, as nearly always happens when a youth movement is making its presence felt, generational divisions were inflamed by a newfangled musical style.

At a distance of 80 years it is difficult to conceive the thrill of horror with which older listeners greeted the first strains of jazz, when it began to drift across the ballrooms of Mayfair and out of the nation's radiograms in the early Twenties. Nevertheless, its syncopated rhythms, its sexual suggestiveness and the fact that the people playing it were very often black struck fear into many a parental heart.

My father (born in 1921) remembered his father haranguing him to the effect that jazz was "the music of the gutter". One of the great scandals of Twenties London took place at the "Bath and Bottle Party", when it was revealed that a "Negro" band had been playing to an audience of white society women clad only in bathing costumes: the 1928 equivalent of the Sex Pistols swearing at Bill Grundy on Today.

And just as the Eton-cropped and Brilliantined exquisites who haunted the nightclubs of the early Thirties had their own music, and conversed in a private language (the "sick-making" and "shy-making" argot of Waugh's early novels), so they also operated in a cultural context that can seem very similar to our own. The Bright Young People who rampage through Waugh's fiction - most lightly disguised portraits of his associates - are notably tolerant of homosexuality. They were prepared to meet black artists on their own terms and respected their talent, so that a singer-pianist like "Hutch", the celebrated Leslie A Hutchinson, was able to finesse his way into many a Belgravia bedroom. Above all, they took advantage of changes in the media landscape that seemed almost calculated to propel them into the public eye.

There had been gossip columns before the Great War, but they had not been aimed at anyone under 30 and their authors had generally been staid old clubmen peddling innocuous badinage about their aristocratic friends.This frameless rectangle features a silk screened fused glass replica in a rtls tile and floral motif. Come the late Twenties, encouraged by proprietors who saw a way of tapping into the highly desirable youth market, popular newspapers such as the Daily Mail and Daily Express began to feature society columns. There was a further refinement to what had gone before, in that most of the people whose adventures around the London party scene were written up by "Mr Gossip", or Lady Eleanor Smith from the vantage point of her "Window on Mayfair", were thought newsworthy not for what they did but for who they were.

There emerged into the newspapers of the early Thirties a new kind of celebrity: the man or woman famous merely for being famous. Brenda Dean Paul, who has strong claims to be regarded as the first English "It" girl, pursued a love-hate relationship with the press for nearly a decade, in which her affairs, her party entrances and her drug busts featured on front pages from one week to the next. The same frenzy of reportage accompanied the antics of the five Mitford sisters, whose long-suffering mother, Lady Redesdale, once lamented that whenever she saw a headline that began "Peer's daughter in…" she knew instinctively that it was one of her children.Researchers at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have developed an indoortracking.

But if one of the fascinations of this world of endless partygoing and high-octane frivolity lies in its first glimpse of the techniques of the 21st-century media circus, then another is the air of deep uneasiness, often extending to outright tragedy, that winds itself through the London society world of the Thirties like loosestrife through a hedge. If one wanted a symbol for some of the emotional fractures of the interwar era's brightest ornaments, it could be found in the career of Elizabeth Ponsonby, daughter of an aristocratic Labour peer and the model for Agatha Runcible in Vile Bodies, who drank herself to death before she was 40.