Child Of The 1980’s

If you come from outside of the UK, Ireland or several other European countries then you would be forgiven for thinking that the title of this post was wrong, and should in fact be Ninja Turtles. Well, these days that is definitely the case, but back in the mid 1980’s, when the Turtles cartoon first aired in the UK it was renamed because the word Ninja was seen as being too violent to be associated with a childrens TV programme.

Luckily this didn’t really effect the cartoon too badly. Other than a change to the logo and a few changes to the theme song the adventures of Raphael, Donatello, Leonardo and Michelangelo were relatively untouched by the censors scissors, at least as far as I’m aware. Michelangelo did have some nunchuks, which were banned in films and on TV for many years in the UK, even in adult films (most notably Bruce Lee’s Enter The Dragon, which suffered a fairly heavy cut) so there may have been a few scenes cut here and there involving those, but given these would have only been fight scenes the storylines and humour of the series would not have been compromised too much.

Originally the Turtles started life as comic book characters, but it wasn’t until the cartoon series appeared in 1987 that Turtle Power really hit the big time and they became a merchandising sensation stretching to action figures, films, videogames and all the other associated things like pencil cases and lunch boxes. More on some of these another time perhaps, but for now we’ll concentrate on the cartoon.

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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.

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Donkey Kong is one of the first examples of the popular platform game genre, and its just as playable now as it was when it first appeared in the arcades back in 1981. It is also a bit of a landmark in videogame history because it was also the first of many adventures for Nintendo mascot Mario, although in typical Japanese style he was originally called Jumpman! His name may have been different, but the player character certainly looked like Mario, and given that Donkey Kong was created by Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, its pretty safe to say that it was Mario to all intents and purposes.

The aim of the game is to rescue damsel in distress Pauline (nope, it wasn’t Princess Peach, Mario had yet to become an inhabitant of the Mushroom Kingdom at this point) who had been kidnapped by Donkey Kong, a giant ape in the style of King Kong. Donkey Kong got his name thanks to a Japanese to English dictionary. A word meaning stubborn was required, and donkey was the suggestion, presumably in relation to the phrase “stubborn as a mule”. Mario’s, sorry, Jumpman’s task was to try and rescue Pauline by getting from the bottom of the screen to the top, running along girders, jumping and climbing ladders.

The game was split into four distinct levels, the first of which involved running up a set of girders joined by ladders. To try and stop you Donkey Kong was hurling barrels down the screen, which could either be jumped over or smashed with a hammer. The problem with the hammer was you couldn’t climb ladders whilst holding it, so I always used to ignore it. Reaching the top before the timer ran out completed the level, but Kong would grab Pauline and head up higher.

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There can’t be a kid in the land who hasn’t built something out of Lego at some point in their life. Lego has always been a firm favourite of mine, simply because you can use it to create anything you want. There have been many kinds of Lego over the years, but the late 1970’s and early 1980’s saw the introduction of the familiar poseable Lego man that is still in use today. So, were you a Lego Town kid, did you prefer Lego Space or were you more of a Technic fan? Let us know!

When it came to the school holidays if there was one thing you could be almost certain of appearing on the BBC morning kids tv schedule it would have been Why Don’t You? The show is another shining example of the BBC’s ability to make long running TV series, with it first appearing on screens in 1973 and disappearing 42 series later in 1995.

The premise of the show was to give you ideas for things to do once you finally switched the goggle box off. Indeed, its official full title was actually Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set And Go Do Something Less Boring Instead? but being a bit of a mouthful was thankfully shortened to just Why Don’t You? The format as I remember it best was a group of vair unobnoxious child presenters informing you of things to make or cook and introducing short films following some viewers hobby, rounded off with some jokes and sketches.

During the 1980’s there were a number of Why Don’t You? gangs, as they were called, who all hailed from different parts of the UK. Initially there was just the Bristol gang, but they were soon joined by gangs from Newcastle, Liverpool, Cardiff, and cities in Scotland and Ireland too, though I forget which ones now. This was quite amusing as some of the kids had some pretty thick accents.

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Blind Date first hit the screens in the mid 1980’s and managed to stick around for almost 20 years, and was hosted by the UK’s favourite Liverpudlian, Cilla Black, for the entire duration. It marked the beginning of Saturday nights line-up of shows on ITV, and only came to an end when Cilla herself, realising the shows waning popularity, decided to announce on air that she was going to give up the show at the end of the current series, much to the surprise of the TV company!

The show centred around the idea of Cilla being a kind of match maker, sorting out blind dates for the contestants. Three contestants were sat on stools on one side of a movable wall. A single contestant of the opposite sex was then brought on to choose between the three potential dates, but they were only allowed to ask three questions to each of the contestants. These were normally laced with innuendo, and the reply was similarly full of double entendres. The Carry On team would have been proud! It would normally go something like this:-

Contestant: “I’m a bit of a whizz in the kitchen, but what kind of dish would you say you’re most like?”
Date 1: “I’d say I’m most like a curry, because I’m hot and spicy”
Date 2: “A jam doughnut, because I’m soft and cuddly with a sweet surprise in the middle”
Date 3: “I’m like a cheese burger, thick and meaty and fills the hole in your stomach”

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Some toys are totally useless, yet still remain amazing fun to fiddle with. The Gurning Flexiface is just one of those toys that I remember having as a kid, and has probably been around for a fair few years before I had one.

Consisting of nothing more than a reasonably ugly looking rubber face, the toy had a number of holes on the back into which you could insert your fingers. By moving your fingers in different directions the face could be amusingly distorted into all kinds of strange and disturbing poses, the kind of thing that if you were to pull them yourself, your Mum would probably tell you to “watch out, because if the wind changed direction you’d stay like that“. Funny the untruths that come out of parents mouths to stop their children showing them up, isn’t it?

Whoever came up with the idea for the Flexiface must surely have got it from watching TV footage of championship Gurners. You don’t seem to see it much any more, but Gurning competitions presumably are still running. Gurning is basically a competition where ugly looking men (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a female Gurner) try to contort their face into the weirdest configuration they possibly can. Some of these guys must have extra facial muscles looking at the kind of weird things they can do. I’ve never understood quite why they have to stick their head through a toilet seat or a horse harness to do this though…

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For music the 1980’s was a bit of a mixed bag. Whilst the early 1980’s saw a ton of originality from bands such as Culture Club, Duran Duran and Adam and the Ants, the late 1980’s suffered from an explosion of manufactured pop music, most notably the output from “The Hit Factory” team, as they called themselves, of Stock Aitken Waterman. At their height they dominated the UK music industry, churning out songs for the likes of Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan, Bananarama and the subject of todays post, Rick Astley.

Rick was originally discovered when he was just 19 by Pete Waterman, but he was at first reluctant to leave his current band, FBI.  Eventually he was enticed away, and hit it big in 1987 with his first solo single Never Gonna Give You Up, the song for which he will probably always be best remembered.

His non-threatening good looks and the lyrics for the song itself instantly scooped him a gaggle of adoring teenage girls as fans.  After all, he told them that he was never gonna let them down, lie or say goodbye, and more importantly seemed fairly honest about it at the same time.  Personally I always thought he looked a little bit like the Harry Enfield character Tim Nice-But-Dim, as the accompanying picture I think shows (sorry Rick).  Rick also only seemed to have a single dance routine, called the Rick Astley Shuffle by many, which involved sidling side to side waving your arms up slightly at the extremes of the shuffle.

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