Child Of The 1980’s

We’re pleased to announce a new feature on the site starting today which we hope you will all enjoy and find interesting. Every Saturday there will be a new “Saturday Survey”, based around a particular topic of relevance to the 1980’s.

To take part, simply select your answer to the question from those provided, then click the Vote button, and you’ll be presented with a graph showing the most popular selected option. You can only vote for one option, and once you’ve voted you won’t be able to vote again.

The usual commenting system is still in place, so if you want to comment further on your vote, or perhaps voice your opinion on a missing voting option, then feel free!

Like the campaign to save the phrase Nitty Nora from becoming a trademark of a chemical company (if you’re quick there’s still time to pledge your support to this one today), here’s another campaign we at Child of the 1980’s feel strongly about, covering as we do some of the finest examples of children’s TV (in our opinion) from the 80’s.

The Save British Kids TV campaign has been set up to try and redress the balance in terms of kids television programmes that are made in the UK. It is alleged that only 1% of the programmes aimed at children that are currently shown on British TV have originated in the UK, a statistic I personally find startling and disheartening. Apparently the main UK TV stations, aside from the BBC, have either cut or completely removed from their budgets the commissioning of new programmes aimed at children.

To illustrate the point, a video has been made from old clips of The Wombles, a classic show from the 1970’s (which was still shown a lot in the 1980’s and is still shown today). It’s called Badass Wombles of Central Park, and gives a chilling (and hilarious) example of what The Wombles could have been had it come from the US! Obviously this is a bit of an exaggeration (there are some fine US kid’s shows such as Sesame Street after all) but it makes a good point. You can view it below, or on the campaign website.

If you are a UK citizen then please show your support by signing up to the Number 10 petition and by e-mailing a letter to your MP, both of which are easily achievable via links on the Save British Kids TV website.

Just over a month ago I wrote about Nitty Nora The Bug Explorer, more properly known as the nit nurse. Today a comment was added to this article by Lucy Weis detailing her heart felt crusade to try and stop the term Nitty Nora becoming a trademark of a chemical company. Lucy is hoping to be together a case to block this trademark application, but she needs to do it before April 11th 2008 (that is, in around 2 weeks time).

This website is certainly happy to back Lucy in her efforts, if only for nostalgia sake. I urge any of you that feels the same to both post a comment of support on the article above and also to send Lucy a pledge of support, and any other Nitty Nora related items you may know about. Lucy has set up a website at www.nitworks.co.uk, and you can e-mail her at lucy@nitworks.co.uk, so please give her your support.

We’d like to take this opportunity to wish all our readers a Happy New Year! We hope you’ve enjoyed our site so far, and we hope you’ll enjoy it even more in the year to come. Don’t forget you can subscribe to our RSS feed, or get our latest posts delivered straight to your Inbox using the links at the top right hand side of the page to sign up.

If you have any comments or there is anything you’d particularly like to see on the site then please do let us know either by leaving a comment on this post, or by e-mailing us directly at bigboo@childofthe1980s.com.

Firstly, you may have noticed that some of our posts about TV shows now feature a new little widget courtesy of LocateTV, which let’s you know when you can next catch that programme on TV.  For an example, check out our Bagpuss page.  Incidentally, we must send an overdue thank you to LocateTV for our mention on one of their blog posts.  Thanks guys, and thanks for the great widget too! 

We also wanted to let you know that as well as subscribing to our RSS feed as a way of keeping up to date with all our latest posts it’s now possible to get updates to the site delivered straight to your e-mail inbox, thanks to the wonderful boys and girls at Feedburner.  Links to subscribe via both methods are available at the top of our side panel.

Both services are completely free to use, and you can unsubscribe at any time - but we hope you wouldn’t want to do that anyway!

This weekend I’ve been working on a new feature for the site - integration with Amazon.co.uk!

You’ll now find that some posts will have an extra link at the end of them (when you view the entire post) that will either take you to a relevant product page on the Amazon.co.uk website, or alternatively a list of search results relevant to that post.  Well, that’s the idea, but if you browse the web with Internet Explorer the search version probably won’t work!  The links work fine on Firefox however, so I think something is going wrong with Internet Explorer or Amazon themselves.  I’ll keep looking though, in case it’s something I’ve done wrong!

I’ve also added a handy search box for Amazon in the side bar of the site that lets you quickly do a search of Amazon’s catalogue.  This box does seem to work OK with Internet Explorer!

Let me know what you think of these new features, I hope you’ll find them useful.  Since we are based in the UK we’ve initially concentrated on integrating with the UK Amazon website, but if there’s enough demand then we might consider adding links for the US site too, as it appears we do have plenty of readers in the States too.

This is just a quick post to tell you about the latest addition to our site, the BlogRush “From The Blogosphere” widget that is now gracing our sidebar.  This useful little widget shows random post titles from other blogs on the web who also have the widget on them, and in return, our post titles get randomly displayed on their web pages.  From our point of view this means we hopefully will get more visitors to our pages, and with luck it will give you, the reader, something else interesting to read about.

If you have a blog yourself, and you think it sounds interesting, then you can either sign up to the service at the BlogRush web site, or alternatively you can click on the bottom section of the widget in our sidebar to do the same thing.  It’s completely free, so what have you got to lose?  Oh, and if you click on one of the links from our web site, you’ll be giving us a helping hand as BlogRush rewards referring sites by giving them bonus chances of having their post titles displayed on other blogs!

As the name suggests, this site is dedicated to everything about growing up during the decade of the 1980’s.

We try to cover everything from TV and film to toys and sweets. Basically anything aimed at kids, from pre-school to teenagers, during that decade is ripe for inclusion within our pages. Sometimes we may cover things that actually originate from a time outside of this period, but if you were a kid for any part of the 80’s, you’ll probably remember them.

So please browse through the entries, and see what you can find that brings back a wry smile or happy memory. We’d love to hear your own stories and opinions on the things we write about, so please post a comment whenever you feel like it!