Child Of The 1980's

When I was growing up the range of dilutable fruit squashes available wasn’t quite as wide as it it now.  Normally it was a choice between orange, lemon or blackcurrant.  In order to get noticed therefore the different brands of these drinks needed to have some catchy advertising, and one of the best adverts for orange squash was the one for Kia Ora.

Whoever came up with this advert deserves a medal, as it was such a simple piece of work yet it was instantly memorable.  A little black boy in a straw hat is walking along on a bright sunny day, carrying a stick with his belongings tied in a bundle on the end, and a jar of orange squash.  The boy’s dog, somewhat bizarrely, lives inside his hat.  A crow in a sharp suit spots the squash and is hopeful of getting a glassful, but the little boy says “It’s too orangey for crows – just for me and my dog“.

Fair enough, thinks Mr. Crow, and in a last ditch effort too secure some sweet orangey goodness proclaims “I’ll be your dog“, and we are treated to a procession of crows doing all following behind doing various things and all saying that they’re willing to become a canine companion to the little boy as well.

Read more…

The Mary Rose was an English Tudor warship, the pride of the Royal Navy and apparently King Henry VIII’s favourite warship. What an odd idea that is.  You are I might have a favourite song or TV show, but not many of us can stand back and say, “of all my warships, this one is definitely my favourite”.

Built in Portsmouth around 1510 the Mary Rose saw active service for over 30 years, and over that time saw its fair share of sea battles.  Armed with no less than 78 guns, which increased to 91 after it was upgraded in 1536, the Mary Rose was one of the first ships to be able to fire all it’s broadside cannons at once, making it a force to be reckoned with.

So what is a 16th century boat doing on a web site devoted to the 1980′s?  Well, I’m getting to that.  In 1545 during a battle against the French the Mary Rose was sunk in the Solent.  It lay at the bottom of the sea for the following centuries, briefly being discovered in 1836 before being forgotten about in 1840.  The sediments at the bottom of the sea covered the wreck, and it wasn’t until 1967 that sonar was used to rediscover it’s resting place.  In 1971 weather conditions caused the wreck to be partially uncovered, and it could be studied by scientists.

Read more…

These days it may be frowned upon, but as I was growing up I used to really enjoy the TV adverts for PG Tips tea featuring all those chimpanzees dressed as humans, and it seems I’m not alone as the advertising campaign can claim two records.  First, it is the longest running ad campaign for any brand, with the first advertisement shown in 1956, and the last in 2002!  That’s almost fifty years of monkey mayhem!  Secondly, one of the ads (Mr. Shifter, the piano mover) is the most shown advert on UK TV, having been aired more than 1000 times!

Over the years the chimps have got up to all sorts of things including the Tour de France (avez vous cuppa?), microwave repair, digging holes in the road, and of course dropping pianos down the stairs.  There was also a series of ads where one of the chimps was a secret agent named Brooke Bond, taking his name from the manufacturer of PG Tips at the time.  The final set of adverts featured various chimps playing the members of a typical family – Mum, Dad, teenage daughter and young son.

The chimpanzees would also be made to look as if they were talking, which was usually just them flapping their mouths open and shut randomly, although sometimes they would play film backwards and forwards to make the speech fit better.  This trick was also used to make the chimps motions fit what the advert required.

Read more…

I wrote about Spandau Ballet this week after hearing they were regrouping for a tour later this year.  Not that I group Spandau in this way, but it got me thinking about the number of things from the 1980′s which are being rejuvenated these days.  It’s also not solely the eighties which is being ransacked for remake ideas, other decades are also being raided, particularly the 1970′s.

In the past few years we’ve had new versions The Dukes of Hazzard, Battlestar Galactica, The Bionic Woman and Knight Rider, and even my fave film Ghostbusters is getting a lot of attention thanks to the new videogame, with rumours of a new film to follow (mind you, there have been plenty of those).  Another fave of mine, Red Dwarf, is also due back on our screens for a new 3-part story over the Easter weekend on satellite channel Dave.

Anyway, this weeks survey is to see how you feel about this trend.  Is it mostly good or should it be stopped?  When it’s done well, like Battlestar Galactica for example, I think it’s a good thing, but what happens if the remake is a turkey?  Does it spoil your enjoyment of the original?  I’ve heard bad things about the new Knight Rider series which make me suspect it might fall into the feathered camp.  Let us know your thoughts by adding a comment, and please vote in our more generic survey below…

I remember that at some point during my childhood there was a real craze for slip on shoes, or loafers as they are perhaps more correctly called.  All the kids at school were wearing them with their white terry towelling socks and I wanted a pair too, for several reasons.

Firstly, they were easy to keep clean.  Shining your slip ons was simple, just apply polish, rub it in and buff, without having shoe laces keep getting in the way.  The tongues on my lace up shoes always ended up looking worn out because I couldn’t be bothered to remove the laces to clean them.

Sticking with the laziness motif, they were also easy to put on and take off.  Slip on, slip off (as Mr. Miyagi might say).  Laced shoes were more bothersome.  All that tying of bows was just too much hassle, plus you sometimes end up with a knot that you have to pick undone to get the shoe off.

Of course the real reason any kid wants anything is peer pressure.  I didn’t want to stand out with my normal lace up shoes.  In the end I never did get a pair, Mum always said something about my feet being the wrong width or some such excuse, but that was OK.  Not having a pair of slip ons paled into insignificance when the “what brand of trainers are you wearing?” question was asked…

Spandau Ballet have recently announced that they are reforming to tour the UK in October this year, so let’s take a quick look at the band as they were back in the 1980′s.

The bands origins begin in 1976 when Gary Kemp and Steve Norman formed a band called The Cut whilst still at school.  John Keeble, Tony Hadley and Gary’s brother Martin joined over the following months, and the band started playing a few gigs and were moderately successful.  The band changed name to The Makers for a time, before finally settling on the name Spandau Ballet, which they did in fact pinch from another earlier band.

The band generated quite a following and were soon signed up by Chrysalis Records, and their first song, To Cut A Long Story Short, was rushed to market in 1980 and soon reached number 5 in the UK charts.  Their first album Journeys To Glory, was released the following year and also managed to reach position 5 in the UK album chart.

Read more…

During the late 1970′s NASA were busy developing their Space Transportation System project, better known to you and me as the Space Shuttle.  This fascinated me, and I loved watching pictures of it on the news as the project went through development.  First their were pictures of the Shuttle Enterprise piggybacked to a jumbo jet, which led to it eventually being decoupled and attempting a landing, first in a lake and eventually on a proper runway.

The idea of the project was to make space travel more cost effective by constructing a space craft that was capable of being reused.  Much was made of the special heat resistant tiles that had been developed and covered the body of the Shuttle, allowing it to withstand the great amounts of heat generated during re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.

It wasn’t until 1981 that the Space Shuttle finally made its maiden voyage into space, as mission STS-1 aboard the Columbia Shuttle took off from Kennedy Space Centre at 7am EST on April 12th.  The original launch date had been planned to be two days earlier, but technical problems prevented this.

Read more…