Child Of The 1980’s

If there was ever a decade where companies learnt there was money to be made from kids then the 1980’s is surely it. This surely was the beginning of the merchandising age, where any toy, cartoon series, film, comic could reasonably expect to be refactored from one form of media to all of the others, with a motley array of lunchboxes, quilt covers, clothing and just about anything else you can think of thrown in for good measure.

One such example is the He-Man range of toys. The toy range was originally conceived as a tie-in range of toys for the Conan the Barbarian film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Given this films propensity for violence and “more adult themes” it was deemed that such a toy range was doomed to failure (no real surprise there - who ever thought it was a good idea in the first place?). The designs were therefore tweaked and in 1981 Mattel unleashed He-Man on the world.

In his original muscular form, our blonde haired hero wore little more than a pair of furry underpants and a harness intended for keeping his Power Sword and Battle Axe on his back. He also carried a shield. By far the most interesting feature of this He-Man was his power punch. The body of the toy twisted at the waist and was sprung loaded, so you could wind him up and make him punch other toys with surprising force. That is until the elastic inside him began to loosen up!

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Billy Joel stormed the charts in 1983 with his classic song Uptown Girl, reaching number three in the US and claiming the top spot in the UK for five weeks, knocking Culture Club’s Karam Chameleon off. The song was incredibly popular due to it’s catchy tune and simple to learn lyrics, and is the song most people will think of first when asked to name a Billy Joel song.

The song itself tells the story of a regular bloke (referred to as a downtown man in the song) who is smitten with a class socialite woman (the uptown girl of the title). The lyrics describe how this man thinks he would treat this woman were he ever to get the chance, claiming that whilst he may not be able to “buy her pearls” he would treat her well and provide the best life he could for her.

The song was written by Joel with supermodel Christie Brinkley in mind. She was his girlfriend (and later wife) and so the song is somewhat autobiographical in nature, as Joel often wondered how he could have been so lucky to end up with Brinkley as a partner. Unfortunately they divorced in 1994.

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The third film in the Back to the Future trilogy was actually released in 1990, but seeing as how I’ve already covered Part 1 and Part 2 before, I thought it was worth being complete!

Personally, Back to the Future 3 is my least favourite film in the series. Whilst the first two parts slot together in clever and interesting ways, the final film is much more of a self contained episode and as such feels a little unnecessary. I think the makers were more interested in making a comedy western and this was the ideal opportunity to do so. That’s not to say there isn’t some form of continuity in the films, a good example being Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen (Biff’s great-great(?) grandfather) ending up in a manure cart, recreating the scene from the first film quite nicely where Biff’s car gets a load of the brown stuff dumped on it.

So to the plot. At the end of Part 2 Marty McFly has been left stranded in 1955 when Doc Brown is whisked back in time when the Delorean time machine is struck by lightning. Whilst stood in the rain wondering what to do, a man approaches Marty and hands him an envelope. He is with a messenger firm, and this envelope was left with the company in 1885 under strict instructions to be delivered at a precise time and date in 1955. The envelope is of course from Doc Brown, and it tells Marty where to find the Delorean, which has been hidden for all those years.

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In 1987 Sylvester McCoy (real name Percy James Patrick Kent-Smith) took over from Colin Baker as the seventh incarnation of Timelord Doctor Who. Sylvester first came to the public eye as part of the comedy act “The Ken Campbell Roadshow”, where he played the part of a stuntman called Sylveste McCoy (note the lack of an R in the first name), putting nails up his nose and ferrets down his trousers, among other things (perhaps playing the spoons - this was a favourite mannerism of his Doctor). A reviewer of the show believed that Sylveste McCoy was the actors real name, which prompt Percy to adopt it as his stage name. Later, when he realised that Sylveste McCoy contained 13 letters, and believing this to be unlucky, the R was added to become Sylvester.

Sylvester’s career took him through childrens TV, via Vision On (with Tony Hart), Tiswas and Jigsaw with Janet Ellis before landing the role of Doctor Who. Given the show was finally axed by the BBC in 1989 he was officially the Timelord for only two years, however he is credited as having the role until 1996, since he appeared in another of the Doctor’s Children In Need charity specials in 1993 (called Dimension in Time) and also reprised the role in the much anticipated US pilot/film in 1996, resuming some continuity for the Doctor and handing over the reigns to Paul McGann.

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Colin Baker took over the role of the Doctor from Peter Davison in 1984, unusually midway through a series rather than at the end (the only other to date is when Patrick Troughton took over from William Hartnell). The regeneration occured at the end of The Caves of Androzani in a fairly quick manner with little warning, much to the surprise of the Doctor’s assistant at the time, Peri (pictured).

This Doctor was far more flamboyant and argumentative than most, with brightly coloured yellow trousers and a patchwork quilt coat more befitting of a clown. Personally I never much cared for this incarnation of the Doctor, finding him loud and rude, although the blame can’t be laid at Baker’s feet for this, being a product of the writers at the time. I therefore have few memories of any of the stories starring Colin Baker.

Interestingly, Colin Baker appeared in the show before he became the Doctor, in the Peter Davison story Arc of Infinity. In it he stuns the Doctor with a gun, leading to the joke that he got the part by force!

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With the new series of Doctor Who starting this weekend now seems a good time to reminisce about the Timelord as he was in the 1980’s. For many Tom Baker is often the most remembered incarnation of the Doctor, but given that he hung up his scarf and bag of jelly babies in 1981 after playing the character for seven years, I shall start with the fifth Doctor, Peter Davison, who incidentally also sang the theme tune to Button Moon with wife at the time Sandra Dickinson, fact fans!

Peter Davison’s was the youngest actor to play the role (he was only 29 when he started). The fifth Doctor had a bit of a shaky start, similar in fact to current Doctor David Tennant who was also not in tip top form for most of his debut story. The regeneration process didn’t quite work properly, and for the first few stories Davison’s Doctor was shaky on his feet, at one point needing to rest in a special coffin like box to aid his recuperation.

He swapped the long scarf for the garb of an Edwardian cricketer, with long cream coloured over coat, orange and yellow stripy trousers and a creamy coloured V-neck jumper. He did retain the distinctive embroidered question marks from Tom Baker on his shirt collar however.

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Like the Jacob’s Trio, here’s another blast from the past chocolate bar that’s no longer available. It was called United, and I’m presuming it was also manufactured by United Biscuits, though I don’t know for sure. I haven’t been able to track down an image at all, but hopefully this description might jog the old grey cells a little.

The bar itself was divided into three bite size chunks, and consisted, if I remember correctly anyway, of a biscuit base coated in fairly thick chocolate. The chocolate contained little bits of that strange crunchy honeycomby stuff. I’m not sure exactly what you call it, but the closest thing I can compare it to that is currently available in the UK are the crunchy bits in a Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Mint or Orange Crunch chocolate bar. I suspect it was actually nothing more than lumps of crystallised sugar, but it could have been little biscuit crumbs perhaps?

Anyway, that’s how I remember them. They were very tasty, and available in two varieties. Original flavour (whatever an “original” is), which was in a blue wrapper, and an orange flavoured one (unsurprisingly in an orange wrapper). The only other thing I remember about them is that the TV advert was based around football fans, given that the name of the biscuit is also an often used shortening for football teams such as Manchester United.

Does anyone else out there remember these?

Before The Crystal Maze (which narrowly misses out on being a show of the 1980’s since it first appeared in 1990) there was the fondly remembered The Adventure Game from the good old BBC. Instead of members of the public, The Adventure Game pitted teams of three celebrity guests against an array of fiendish puzzles, wrapped up in the concept of being an alien game show!

Presented in a similar style to The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (indeed, Douglas Adams was asked to write the series, but was busy with Hitchhikers) the show is set on the otherwise insignificant planet of Arg, which is populated by a race of dragon like creatures with shape shifting abilities called the Argonds. Anagrams of the word DRAGON played a large part in the show, with the customary Argond greeting being Gronda Gronda, the planets currency being the Drogna, and characters in the show being called Dorgan, Gandor, Dagnor and of course the great Rangdo. The latter was the ruler of Arg, who didn’t like taking human form like the rest of the Argonds, instead choosing to appear as an Aspidistra pot plant, or possibly a Teapot.

So, groups of three celebrities of the day such as Johnny Ball, Lesley Judd, Graeme Garden and Keith “Cheggars” Chegwin would try to solve various puzzles in order to escape back to Earth. Most of these problems could be solved logically, even if deriving that logical solution was sometimes a bit twisted. Some challenges were different each week, but there were some staples such as sending a robot dog through a maze, or the celebrities having to guide one of their number through a pitch black maze, which they could view using an infra-red camera.

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