Sensation: 25 years on from the show that made stars of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin

We can’t say we weren’t warned. The organisers of 1997’s infamous survey of contemporary British art at the Royal Academy of Arts were even considerate enough — or was it commercially canny enough? — to post an ominous disclaimer at the entrance: “There will be works of art on display in the Sensation exhibition which some people may find distasteful,” it said. “Parents should exercise their judgment in bringing their children to the exhibition. One gallery will not be open to those under the age of 18.”

The exhibition more than lived up to the feeling of dread invoked both by that warning, and by the show’s bombastic title. Sensation delivered, big time. The works of art assembled in its august halls were at the same time admired and denounced, lauded for their audacity and lambasted for their pitiless intention to shock.

If the portrait of the serial killer (“Myra”, 1995, by Marcus Harvey) didn’t get to you, the giant, extreme close-up of the bloody skull wound (“Bullet Hole”, 1988-93, by Mat Collishaw) surely would. And what to make of that cow corpse, sliced solemnly into 12 glass cases, just so audiences could enjoy ambling next to its innards? (Take a bow, Damien Hirst, and also one for that smart-arse title: “Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything”, 1996.)

Crowds flocked, critics bayed. This was not usual for the viewing of an art collection. This one belonged to Charles Saatchi, “an exceptional collector and voracious consumer of the latest in art,” in the words of Norman Rosenthal, then exhibitions secretary of the RA. Whatever had happened to London’s art scene?

Their stance was Sex Pistols, but they were making their first moves in a Duran Duran world

A new three-part BBC series, Sensationalists: The Bad Girls and Boys of British Art, celebrates the 25th anniversary of the RA’s show by focusing on the emergence and legacy of the Young British Artists, as they came to be known, who abruptly brought the opaque and quizzical ways of contemporary art to the forefront of cultural debate. Many of them feature in the first episode, Upstarts, which traces the genesis of the new movement. (There is little in Upstarts on Tracey Emin, whose “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995” was a highlight of Sensation, and whose work’s shock value was tempered by its raw intimacy; she will presumably be covered in later episodes.)

It was the most improbable of developments. Before the YBAs, the art world had been the least dynamic sector of Britain’s cultural life, dominated, in the words of Antony Gormley, “by a few old men who called the shots. It was a dinosaur world”. Rosenthal says: “There were 100 people interested in new art” in London, with barely an air of overstatement. “It was a very, very limited world.”

But the crop of young artists, many of them graduates of Goldsmiths College, who emerged in the 1980s, were infused with and enthused by the spirit of punk, and sought, above all else, to challenge convention. They were by no means the first generation of artists to be fired by rebellious intention, but their timing was good. They stepped into a scene that had been hardened by punk attitude, but was soft enough to appreciate the smooth skills of the marketeer. Their stance was Sex Pistols, but they were making their first moves in a Duran Duran world.

Another fortunate tailwind: Saatchi, a collector of vision and no little boldness, fell hard for the YBAs. The advertising mogul’s blue-chip art collection — Warhol, Koons, Kiefer — had been barely known outside the art world. Artist and Goldsmiths tutor Michael Craig-Martin recalls visiting the home of Saatchi and his wife Doris for the first time: “I almost dropped dead. Most of the room had no furniture, it was only art. And there were incredibly important works there.”

The collection would have been feted in a city like New York, he says. “But to do that in London, [would have been] to have people come round and say, ‘You have lost your mind! You are idiots! What are you doing? What is this rubbish?’”

Saatchi held his nerve, and confirmed his commitment to new art by purchasing and converting into a gallery a vast building in Boundary Road, St John’s Wood, which was to act as a kind of sanctuary for the YBAs. “People migrated there like it was an area of great worship,” says artist Jake Chapman. “It was like walking into a kind of 2001 monolith.” Jeremy Deller, another emerging talent of the time, continuing the extraterrestrial theme: “It was like a giant spaceship had landed in London. It was just transformational.”

Hirst was struck, above all, by the sheer scale of the YBAs’ new spiritual home. “I wanted my art [to be] that big, in those sorts of spaces,” he says. This telling statement was not so much punk, as the opening salvo of a megalomane. It was as if Johnny Rotten had said, after his group’s first concert at Saint Martin’s School of Art, that he wanted to play Wembley.

But Hirst’s thirst for grandeur (Rosenthal describes him as “an impresario, an entrepreneur, a businessman”) was ignited. In 1988, he organised his own show, Freeze, in Surrey Docks, and gave Rosenthal a lift to the show’s opening early in the morning. By the time he arrived, Rosenthal informs us casually, Saatchi had already visited the exhibition. He liked what he saw, and spent some money.

In the aftermath of the show, Hirst put his hustling to one side sufficiently to produce an extraordinary work of art, “A Thousand Years” (1990), an enthralling tableau of life and death starring maggots, flies, a cow’s head and an insect-o-cutor. The impresario became the most significant YBA, just like that. Saatchi bought the piece for £4,000. Seven years later, it was, still, a major talking point of the RA’s Sensation show.

This first episode of Sensationalists is strong at capturing the heady moments of those early times, and the confidence of its protagonists. They were nothing if not clever at exploiting the Thatcherite order in the 1980s, using the newly formed Enterprise Allowance Scheme, grants of £40 a week to encourage the unemployed to set up small businesses, establish studios and push their fledgling careers into the twilight.

Entrepreneurship was always as potent a force as the desire to shock in the YBA sensibility, which in a way made it yet more shocking. By the time of its peak in the 1990s, it shared the stage with a sister movement, Britpop, to announce briefly a renaissance of British popular culture. But while the tired guitar riffs of that shortlived musical moment looked explicitly backwards, Hirst and his cohorts took the visual arts to a whole different level. Many involved in both trends became very rich.

But in this relatively early, in art historical terms, look back at the era of Sensation, there is more than a touch of hubris in the swagger. How else to describe the verdict of Gordon Burn, novelist and one of the chief chroniclers of the movement, when he wrote in 2009 that the work of none other than Francis Bacon had begun to seem, in the wake of the YBAs, “overcooked, shouty, despairing and fetishising of death in a dated way”? That claim looks outrageous today; but then this smart and galvanising period of art never did care much for proportion.

‘Sensationalists: The Bad Girls and Boys of British Art’, BBC2 from September 20