Child Of The 1980's

Treasure Hunt was one of my favourite shows from the early days of Channel Four.  It first aired in the final week of 1982 and ran until 1989, and it was a rather more cerebral television game show.  Each week a pair of contestants had to guide Skyrunner Anneka Rice and her helicopter crew around an area of the UK by solving cryptic clues.

The contestants were aided in the studio by former newsreader Kenneth Kendall under the watchful eye of TV-am weather girl Wincey Willis.  Wincey tracked the route of Anneka on a wall mounted map whilst Kenneth helped solve the clues.  It was always claimed that neither Kenneth or Anneka knew where they were supposed to be going, although both gave a fair bit of help to the contestants.

The studio was decorated like a little library with reference books lining the walls, from atlases and encyclopaedias to a few relevant classic novels or some books about the local area in which Anneka was treasure hunting.

The contestants won cash prizes for solving each clue and, most importantly, getting Anneka to the correct location.  If the time ran out before Anneka had the next clue or the final treasure object in her hand the prize was not awarded.

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Home computers were one of best things about growing up in the 1980′s as far as I’m concerned. I knew I wanted to do something with computers when I grew up from a very early age, so my old Vic-20 and Commodore 64 helped me on my way to achieving that goal.

Most families probably had a home computer at some point, normally bought for the kids by Dad who used the excuse “it’ll help with their homework” to get it passed Mum. Of course, he wanted to fiddle with it himself really.

I think you could probably count the number of times it helped with my schoolwork on the fingers of one hand, but it taught me to program and I loved playing games (and still do).

This week I’m expecting the final answer to be a landslide victory…

If you take a perusal of the songs I’ve featured in the Music – Songs category of this site you’ll soon realise that most, if not all, are novelty songs of some kind or another.  Part of the reason for this is that as a kid I was never really into music in a big way, and certainly wasn’t a fan of any one band in particular, so the songs which I tend to remember most vividly, perhaps regrettably, are the rather less serious ones.

Apology out of the way here’s todays whimsical offering – John Kettley is a Weatherman, by A Tribe Of Toffs.  This little ditty was released in 1988 and although many people will remember it even now it only actually made its way to number 21 in the UK charts.  The chorus lyrics were simple and straight to the point:-

The main verses went through a series of well known people at the time and a little something about them, such as Johnathan Ross collects moss (possible I guess?), Andy Crane has no brain and Simon Parkin is always larking.  Amusingly enough whilst Simon Parkin was a childrens TV presenter at the time of the record he is now, wait for it, a weatherman on ITV!

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If you had an 8-bit computer when you were a kid then chances are this image will bring back many happy memories of going into all the shops that sold home computers and making them run this little program.  Of course, you may have made it display something other than just “HELLO”, but whether it was just extended to include your name (e.g. “BIG BOO IS COOL”) or something a bit ruder was up to you.

In those days just about every computer you could buy had a built in version of the programming language BASIC (who will be first to post the answer as a comment I wonder?).  This meant that you could write your own programs (which normally meant games) if you could be bothered to learn all those weird commands like PEEK, POKE and GOSUB.  For those that didn’t want to learn all that rubbish, there was always the type in listing.

Back then magazines such as Your Computer (remember that computer buffs?) printed pages of listings for you to type in yourself at home.  Normally these were written in BASIC but occasionally they were written in machine code, as it was referred to, which was the native instruction set of the central processing unit.  On many computers this meant typing in a BASIC listing first which then let you type in thousands of hexadecimal numbers.  What joy!

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