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I’ve always enjoyed the books of the late Roald Dahl, and indeed Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is still one of my favourite books even now. Roald Dahl has a way of writing that just appeals to kids because of all the larger than life characters he creates. Whilst the cast of his stories might be weird and wonderful, they are still somehow believable.
The Twits was the first book to be published by Dahl in the 1980’s, and one of the first to be illustrated by Quentin Blake. Indeed I believe Mr. Blake has gone back to most if not all of Dahl’s childrens books and reillustrated them in his sketchy style, which for most of the books is an ideal match.
Mr. and Mrs. Twit are the titular Twits that the book is about, and neither of them are particularly nice people, even to each other. Mr. Twit has a horrible matted beard that traps fragments of all the food he eats, thus providing an emergency snack when necessary (urgh!), whilst Mrs. Twit is a bent over old hag of a woman who uses a walking stick and despises children. They go through life being mean to anybody and everybody, and have a habit of playing practical jokes on one another.
These are another example of a toy that dates back many decades, but which were still popular in the 1980’s, and probably are still popular today, if you can find where to buy one that is.
I know that my friend Philip will be smiling broadly when he sees the image accompanying this post, if only because it features ace 1980’s puppet series Star Fleet (note to self: must write about Star Fleet properly sometime). Today’s post is actually concerned with Look-In, the magazine for which this image was once the front cover.
First published in the 1960’s, I remember learning to read with the One, Two, Three and Away books when I was at primary school. The corner of our school hall was also the school library, and there was an entire shelf of these little white books arranged neatly, in order, on the bookshelves. You would borrow one of the books, take it home and read it with an adult. When you’d finished your book you could take it back and get the next book in the series.
If you wanted to know anything about pop music during the 1980’s then the best place to start was with Smash Hits! magazine. For most of the 1980’s and early 1990’s it was the first choice magazine for many teenagers, at it’s peak selling half a million copies every bi-weekly issue. A record breaking issue in 1989, featuring Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan, sold more than a million copies!
The 1980’s was a very popular decade for the mail order catalogue, and whilst many of these old catalogues still exist today they are not what they used to be in terms of size and range of goods. This can probably be attributed to two main causes - one being the Internet (and indeed most of these catalogues have an Internet presence too) the other being the fact that people are now much more able to get to the shops, now that we have Sunday shopping and more people have access to cars and other forms of transport than ever before.
The Home Computer Course was one of those “part-work” magazines that you collected up every week and filed in the supplied hard backed binder to eventually build up into a useful reference library - or at least that was the idea. The Home Computer Course, by Orbis Publishing, was one such example of such a publication. It aimed to teach you everything you needed to know about computers from playing games, to home accounts, to programming in BASIC (Leading to many annoyed Dixons staff when some kid came in and entered the classic 10 PRINT “BIG BOO IS COOL!” 20 GOTO 10 on all the demo machines). In reality of course it was never going to make you a computer expert, but it had fun trying.
The Mr. Men books were created by Roger Hargreaves and first appeared in 1971 and have been firm favourites with kids ever since. The characters themselves were very simply drawn, which was part of their appeal, and the books were very easy for young children to read themselves, making them popular with parents too as a way of getting their children interested in reading. The fact that each characters name was a big clue to what their personality would be like meant that kids could easily remember which were their favourites when choosing a book to read.