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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 magazine covered whatever was hot in the world of pop, which could reasonably encompass anything that was lighting up the music charts at the time. It was slightly biased towards a female readership, being more likely to cover Rick Astley or some other Stock, Aitken and Waterman produced artist, which was fair enough since that was the music that was selling in the largest quantities at the time.
Inside it’s pages you would find a mix of interviews with different bands and singers, reviews of new albums and singles, competitions and most importantly the lyrics to the current hot songs. The latter is probably the reason why the magazine was so popular, as it allowed you to sing along with Top of the Pops and the radio.
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.
Doctor Snuggles started off as a character in children’s books created by Jeffrey O’Kelly which appeared in the early 1970’s. I must admit to never having read or even seen the books before, but I do remember the TV cartoon series of his adventures. It used to be shown on Children’s ITV in serialised five minute chunks, in much the same way that Dangermouse was originally shown, with a new segment shown each day.
Masquerade was a book released in 1979 that sparked the hunt for the pictured jewelled hare. It was written and illustrated by artist Kit Williams, who decided that he wanted to do something a bit different, and came up with the idea of a treasure hunt that was to be solved by decoding clues in the lavishly painted images held within the pages of the book. The book also told a children’s story about the journey taken by Jack Hare to deliver a treasure from the Moon to her love the Sun. Upon reaching the Sun, Jack discovers he has lost the treasure, and it is therefore up to the reader to solve the clues to discover where it might be.
Sticker albums may not have been exclusive to the 1980’s, indeed they first appeared in the 1970’s and are still available today, but they’re one of those things that you remember about growing up. Most people probably had a phase during their childhood of finding these things the coolest idea ever, before they realised that actually completing one of the damn things was often near impossible. They were generally made by an Italian company called Panini, although in recent times another company called Merlin has also been getting in on the act.
Ladybird books are a bit of a British institution, and have been instrumental in teaching generation of kids how to read for many many years, and I am glad to report are still going strong today. The first Ladybird branded book were published way back in 1940 and was called Bunnikin’s Picnic Party, so I’m definitely too young to remember that one, but chances are it may have been one of the books my parents read as a child!