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One of the things I used to like about going shopping with Mum when I was a kid was when Mum would let me have ten pence to buy some penny sweets. You’d take your ten pence piece, and exchange it for a little white paper bag with your own selection of yummy sweeties safely stored inside. Looking back, I always remember having trouble deciding what to eat first, and thinking that there was an almost never ending supply in that little paper bag. Ten pence wouldn’t stretch far these days, but in the days of the half pence you could have ended up with twenty sweets in there, which to a four year old certainly appeared close to infinite.
There were two ways in which you could choose your sweeties. If the shop was a small one (e.g. a corner newsagent) then quite often there would be a tray containing all the various sweets stocked, usually under a piece of glass meaning it was only accessible from the shopkeeper’s side of the counter. You’d point a little digit at the sweets you wanted, and the shopkeeper would count up the price as they popped them into the bag.
The Saturday evening family game show has always been a popular choice for TV schedulers, and one of the most remembered game shows has to be 321. Hosted by the genial Ted Rogers, the show started with a quiz to find out which couple would get to play the game proper. The main part of the show was then a series of sketches and musical numbers featuring “famous” star guests of the day, who would then come over to the contestants with a particularly obscure clue to one of the prizes available to be won.
Come on, everybody must have grown up owning one of these! The wiggly plastic snake was a very simple toy, basically consisting of a number of plastic segments which were connected together in such a way that when you held the tail of the snake, the rest of the snake would wiggle about in much the same way as a real snake would. The entire snake would be made out of a single colour of plastic, quite often a colour that was most un-snake like. There would also be stickers on each segment to give the snake some markings.
Monkey was shown many times during the 80’s and quickly became a firm favourite with teenage kids due to its wacky Japanese comedy, cool fight sequences and bad dubbing into English. It followed the story of Tripitaka, a young monk who was on a journey to India to collect some sacred scriptures. He was accompanied and protected (if you can call it that) by The Monkey King, who was given the task by Buddha as a punishment for getting a bit too big for his boots whilst up in the heavens. Also along for the ride were Pigsy, a self-centred humanised pig who had an eye for the girls, and Sandy, a water spirit, who always seemed to be morose and down in the dumps.
Which song is still the staple method employed by wedding disco DJ’s of trying to get everyone up on the dance floor to embarrass themselves after all these years? The answer is, of course, The Birdie Song. There will come a time during most wedding receptions that The Birdie Song will be put on, and everybody with no shame, from the tiniest tot to the drunkest uncle gets up to make their hands look like bird beaks, flap their arms like wings, wiggle their backside and then skip round in a circle.
TRRRIIIIIIIII-O! TRRRIIIIIIII-O! I want a Trio and I want one now!
Released in 1986 by Disney, Flight of the Navigator is a great kids Sci-Fi film which had the lot. A cool metallic transforming spaceship, a child star you didn’t want to strangle (even when he started singing Beach Boys songs), time travel and lots of strange alien animals.
In the days before videogame consoles, home computers ruled the roost, and probably the most popular was the Commodore 64. Released in 1982, and somehow managing to stay on sale until 1994, it sold a massive 17 million units across the world! In the UK there were several home computers to choose from, but most kids allegiances would be to either the Commodore 64 or the