The two big players in the Christmas sweet market in the Eighties, who are both still very popular today, were Quality Street and Roses. Our household were very much in the Quality Street camp.

We were never allowed to open the tin of Quality Street until Christmas Eve, which I think went some way towards making the whole experience of them that much sweeter (no pun intended).

On Christmas Eve my Mum would open up the tin, and put a few large handfuls out into a serving tray, which then sat on the sideboard (and topped up when necessary) along with the other Christmas staples of Orange and Lemon jelly slices, nuts and a box of Eat Me dates (which were only ever eaten by my Dad several weeks after Christmas).

My personal favourite was and still is the Green Triangle, although I’m also quite partial to the Strawberry and Orange creams. I also liked the Gooseberry cream which looked identical to the Orange cream but was in a green wrapper. They did bring this sweet back for a special edition version a couple of years back, and I had to confess that until this happened I was convinced the green fruit cream flavour had been lime, but obviously not.

The only problem with Quality Street was the sheer number of toffee sweets included, and indeed I feel this is still a flaw of the selection now. When the tin was nearing the end there was always a huge number of Golden Pennies, the Caramel Finger (the thin yellow one) and a little hard square lump of toffee which thankfully has now been dropped.

My Auntie on the other hand always plumped for the Cadbury’s Roses, so when we went to visit her at Christmas time we always looked forward to sampling some of her sweets as well. The Roses selection never seemed as interesting to me for some reason, although I really don’t understand why now I look back on it, since for the most part the two brands have got equivalent sweets in them.

Today I still enjoy having a tin of Quality Street in the house at Christmas, although we’ll sometimes plump for Celebrations instead. Roses are banned from the house now though, after I mistakenly ate a Brazil Nut Toffee one year and got rushed off in an ambulance one Christmas after suffering an Anaphylactic shock. I suppose I should be thanking them though, since they did confirm that I had a nut allergy, which was something I had suspected for a while but didn’t know for sure until that day.

As an avid goggle box guzzling Eighties child though, I think the thing that really started to indicate the coming of the Christmas season were the changes that suddenly occurred on the television. A number of changes happened, normally around the time December began, and in this post I want to discuss some of them. So, in no particular order…

The Christmas Movie and TV Specials Preview Adverts

One of the first signs that Christmas was coming was the arrival of the trailer advert that showed all the films that a channel would be boasting come Yuletide.

This was a time when we didn’t have satellite TV and therefore channels devoted to playing movies, which meant that it often took several years after their box office releases before films finally made it onto TV. Christmas was therefore a time when the TV channels had a captive audience, and so the majority of movie premiers occurred during the Yuletide break. The advert was thus always very exciting as you made a mental checklist of all the films you wanted to see.

There was also another similar trailer advert showing all the Christmas specials of various TV shows that you could look forward to watching whilst waiting for the turkey to digest.

As soon as the Christmas editions of the TV Times and Radio Times became available I would then scour the pages of them to identify all these wonderful films and shows I wanted to watch, and would note down when they were on, which channel, and how long they were, so I could also make sure I had enough video tape space to record anything I wanted to keep.

Christmas TV Idents

Not that I knew they were called Idents back then (indeed, they may well not have been called that until recently) but another change that occured to the TV was the introduction of the Christmas Idents. These are the little snippets of film or animation that TV stations play whilst the announcer tells you about the next and following TV shows.

These days the complexity of TV channel idents has become quite extreme, with Channel 4 in particular having some very impressive examples, but back in the Eighties we were just as impressed by the TV station logo just having a layer of snow across the top of it.

Christmas Product Adverts

The sorts of products that got advertised in the run up and after Christmas also changed, and as a kid one of the most notable changes was that toys suddenly started to be advertised.

Hard to believe (and it is possible my memory is wrong on this point, but I don’t think so) but toys just weren’t advertised on TV for the rest of the year. I guess TV advertising cost a whole lot more back then so advertising toys just wasn’t cost effective for manufacturers during the rest of the year, as I believe far fewer toys were bought outside of the Christmas period that are bought today.

Other products that started to be advertised before Christmas were things like fragrances and soaps (I’m thinking of the Yardley adverts in particular, but also Brut 33, Denim and Old Spice), alcohol (Harvey’s Bristol Cream with Hinge and Bracket, and QC Sherry), and sweets (Quality Street and Roses).

After Christmas you were then bombarded with all the adverts for various department store sales, which I guess we still get now, but you also quite often saw a lot of adverts for more local independent stores that wouldn’t bother to advertise on TV at any other time of year, again due to the prohibitive costs involved.

The Change To Normal Programme Schedules

Of course this still occurs today, although I think the schedules possibly return to normality a little quicker now. It also seemed more of a marked difference as the handful of channels we had back in the Eighties all changed dramatically around Christmas, whereas now a lot of the satellite and cable TV channels may only feature a temporary blip of changes before returning to their normal offerings.

I think we got a lot more better quality TV specials back then too. Most popular TV shows would be given a special edition programme, and again this happens still today, but we also seem to get a lot of what I can only call “filler” shows, such as the countless number of “Top 100 Best Sporting Mishaps” or “The Best 50 Car Chases” style compilation shows. These are far too easy to get sucked into watching, just so you can see which is the best thing, and I’m half expecting this year to see “The Top 50 Best Christmas Compilation Shows” air on Channel Five this year…

This year however it was reported in the local newspaper that Mr. Christmas would not be visiting our town, basically because it seemed nobody bothered to organise it this year for various reasons I won’t bore you with. Anyway, this saddened me somewhat as when my sister and I were little going to visit Father Christmas was one of the highlights of the year for us.

There were two options for us when it came to visiting Santa’s Grotto. The first was closest to home, in our home town’s independent department store. This shop used to devote a small corner of the toy department to the Grotto, which was a pretty simple wooden shell with a curtain for a door, with Father Christmas sat inside.

St. Nicholas was nestled between two tubs of toys (boys and girls) and after saying you had been good this year and reeling off the list of things you’d like to have you were allowed to choose a toy and that was that.

This was a fairly traditional Father Christmas experience I guess, but as I said we had a second option available to us. We often used to visit the next nearest (and far bigger) town to us for shopping trips with our parent, and this town always had a really impressive Santa’s Grotto in the main shopping centre.

So impressive was the Grotto here that there was always a massive queue you had to endure first. They tried to make it as interesting as possible though with the queue winding through a fake snowy landscape complete with polar bears and penguins (despite the fact that this is quite obviously a nonsense proposition due to them living at opposite poles of the Earth).

The Grotto itself was a proper looking log cabin affair (I’m sure it wasn’t actually made of logs though), and once inside you got to sit on Father Christmas’ knee and do the usual ritual. Then somebody (probably dressed as an elf) took your picture, which if I remember correctly you could come back and collect later that day – it may even have been included in the price.

You said your goodbyes to Santa and upon leaving were handing a bag containing your gift and a few other novelties such as a badge and balloon. The best thing though was the card for extra presents!

In what was a smart marketing move on the part of the shopping centre, this card had the names of around eight of the shops in the centre printed on it. You could then visit each shop in turn to be given another little present of some sort, meaning that by the end of your traipse around the shops you came away with quite a good haul of little gifts.

As you get older it becomes very easy to remember things as being a lot better when you were younger, when perhaps they weren’t, but I feel in this instance our old visits to the Grotto at the Christmas were far superior to the kind of offerings most shopping centres and department stores offer – if indeed they offer anything at all that is!

Does anyone have any interesting stories of past visits to see Father Christmas to share with us all?

Ah yes! Here we are, there’s an example of a modern Hostess Trolley on the Argos website, although it’s made from wood and looks a great deal more sturdy, and dare I say it, tasteful than the old metal versions that I’m thinking of.

The retro Hostess Trolley was basically little more than a couple of trays on wheels. The idea was to make it easy for the “hostess” to bring food and drink through from the kitchen to the dining room table, thus enabling them to spend less time travelling backwards and forwards to the kitchen and more time with their guests.

I distinctly remember my Nan having one very similar to the one in the picture accompanying this post. I think it was given to her as a present by my parents and several of my aunts and uncles clubbing together to buy it.

I remember always wanting to wheel it about as a kid, and being told I wasn’t allowed to, which was probably just as well as my other overriding memory of it was that it was a bit wobbly and rickety – not exactly what you want for transporting drinks and hot food around.

For part of the decade we only had three channels to choose from, and as kids we had to share these channels with all the other programmes intended for every other possible age group and interest. During term time this meant a couple of programmes for the very young around lunch time, and then a block of a couple of hours in the mid to late afternoon.

In the school holidays however, we considered ourselves lucky as both BBC1 and ITV would devote the entire morning to kids TV from around 9am onwards. This was a time when we would be treated to reruns of old cartoons, long running serials and the odd new show if we were really lucky.

Today then, I present to you my memories of watching TV in the mornings during the school holidays. Think of it as a very out of date page of the Radio Times or TV Times from the late Seventies and early Eighties.

9:00 TV-am: Roland Rat would start my day. Yeeeaaahhh!

9:30 BBC: An old black and white serial – I’m thinking of something like the old Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers serials, or the equally cool King of the Rocketmen! If it was Champion the Wonder Horse though I would perhaps watch whatever ITV might have on instead though.

10:00 ITV: Normally a cartoon show of some sort, maybe the Smurfs or Wacky Races or something of that ilk.

10:30 BBC: Back to the Beeb for Why Don’t You. A great little show with kids as the presenters. Something for everyone – jokes, recipes, things to make and those reports on other kids hobbies.

11:00 BBC or ITV: Really depended what was on. Normally this would be around the time that the BBC would air one of those long running live action serials. The classic example here would be Heidi, but there was also Silas and Robinson Crusoe. If I didn’t fancy that then ITV might have something good on, but if ITV failed to intrigue then the TV would probably go off now.

11:30 Sorry, couldn’t tell you. The TV had usually gone off in the previous half hour so I really can’t remember what sort of shows would have been on here. There might have been a cartoon but I have a feeling things started to revert back to normal lunchtime/early afternoon TV fodder.

The first InterCity 125 trains came into service in 1976, and they were the pride of British Rail’s services right into the 1980’s. With a top speed of 125mph they allowed many journeys to be made in a shorter amount of time and with greater comfort for the passenger.

As a child though, the thing about the InterCity 125 that was most appealing was its design. Looking almost like a rocket with its sleek angled nose, painted bright yellow, it looked incredibly futuristic to my eyes. I remember the excitement must have even got to my parents, as the first train journey I can ever remember taking was a trip down to Devon to the seaside on one of these trains.

With Sir Jimmy Saville, then the public voice of British Rail, singing their virtues alongside the classic “this is the age of the train” slogan, you’d have thought the future of the railway in Great Britain was assured. Here’s an example of one of Sir Jim’s TV adverts, this particular one aimed squarely at business men…

Sadly the nineties saw British Rail privatised (nope, we can’t blame Maggie for that one) and this would seem to have been the start of the decline of the rail service in Great Britain.

However, the InterCity 125 trains are still going, though they have since lost their more exciting name and are now known simple as HSTs or High Speed Trains, which most people sat waiting to get to their final destination will probably find a bit of a joke. They now sport a variety of different liveries, depending on which part of the railway network they belong too, but most still have that bright yellow front, presumably for reasons of visibilty and safety.

Whether you enjoyed going to school or not (and let’s face it most of us would probably have rather have been doing something else than double French on a Monday morning) this phrase haunted any shopping trip you might embark on during the summer break, and quite often for the last few weeks before school actually broke up too.

Whenever I used to see it I would think, “give us a chance, we’ve only just finished, don’t force us back already“, and would look sadly at those pictures of kids wearing pristine school uniforms that used to normally accompany the “Back to School” announcements in shop windows.

This of course was a chance for shops to make a bit of money selling charcoal coloured trousers and royal navy jumpers which just wouldn’t shift any other time of the year (indeed most shops only tend to stock a decent range of school uniform items during the summer period) to a panicky group of parents who were never sure whether to buy a size too big or not, so might end up buying both sizes just in case.

It was also the prime time to advertise stationery items such as calculators, geometry sets and pencil cases, the latter of which was perhaps the only chance a child had to have any fun whatsoever in the back to school buying bonanza, as you’d always try to persuade your Mum that a Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles pencil case was much more preferable to a blue one with “Pencil Case” written across the front.

Of course whilst I may have hated that phrase as a child, what I probably didn’t really appreciate is that my parents no doubt hated it too, as I’m sure they didn’t relish the idea of having to spend loads of money on school kit and having to drag a couple of bored and complaining kids around the shops trying on clothes.

It’s the same sadness I felt when Concorde was put out of service, as it feels somewhat like it has happened prematurely. For both these amazing flying machines one of the principal reasons for their retirement has been safety after catastrophic accidents, and whilst I can completely understand why such decisions were ultimately made, it doesn’t stop the fact that the end of an era has come, and that feels like a shame to me.

In the case of the Space Shuttle, there were two big disasters. In 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger exploded only a minute or so after launch, whilst in 2003 Columbia was destroyed on re-entry, after suffering damage to one of the wings during launch. Hindsight seems to suggest that both of these disasters could have been avoided, particularly the Columbia mission where NASA refused to opportunity for the astronauts to take a space walk to inspect the sustained damage, and therefore perhaps be able to make some kind of repair.

The final Space Shuttle mission was carried out by Atlantis. Launched on July 8th 2011 it touched down back on Earth on July 21st. The purpose of the mission was to take supplies up to the International Space Station and return with some waste materials and components.

As a Child of the 1980’s, the Space Shuttle really came to embody what the idea of space travel meant to me. It’s design made it feel like something of the future when compared against the much older traditional rocket, yet the fact it actually existed and worked seems somehow remarkable. Indeed the realms of entertainment also made great use of the Shuttle for pretty much the same reason, as it never fails to conjure up a sense of awe.

So, farewell to Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour. Space missions just won’t be the same without you.