by Paul Feeney
Apart from the 1981 wedding of Charles and Diana, the most-watched television shows of the decade were all episodes from either soaps or situation comedies. The 1986 Christmas episode of Eastenders topped the list; the royal wedding was next and then came Coronation Street, Dallas, To The Manor Born, Bread, Neighbours and Just Good Friends. The BBC1 News broadcast from 25 November 1984 managed to sneak in at number nine most watched, and the 1989 Christmas Day episode of Only Fools and Horses reached number ten in the ratings. Overall, there were an enormous number of memorable 1980s television shows and it is difficult to choose which ones to mention and which to leave out as any omissions are bound to include someone’s favourite. The same goes for films; there was a whole raft of good ones released during the 1980s, far too many to mention individually. Notable British ones include Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, Educating Rita,Mona Lisa, Hope and Glory, The Last Emperor, My Left Foot, Scandal and Shirley Valentine; not to mention the five James Bond films that were released in the 1980s. There was an exceptionally large number of big box-office American films of the day and these included Airplane!, The Blues Brothers, Fame, E.T., Beverly Hills Cop, Back to the Future, Top Gun, Crocodile Dundee, Fatal Attraction, Batman, Ghostbusters, Dirty Dancing, Die Hard and of course the Indiana Jones films. Whether on television at home or at the cinema, we were certainly not short of good stuff to watch. Unfortunately, we had to wait until the end of the 1990s before we could buy and rent films on DVD.
The popularity of big venue rock and pop concerts of the 1960s and 1970s continued to grow in the 1980s and it was no surprise that Bob Geldof and Midge Ure chose this type of money-making event as the best way to raise money to aid the Ethiopian famine relief. The event they organised was held on 13 July 1985 and it was called Live Aid, which consisted of two huge, dual-venue live concerts. The main concert was held at London’s Wembley Stadium and the other was held at the John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, USA. These pop/rock concerts were staged as a follow-up to the successful multi-artist charity single that Geldof and Ure had produced for sale over the Christmas period of 1984; a very catchy tune with an extremely moving message, the song was called ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’. On that memorable day in July 1985, Live Aid became a global event with other smaller concerts being held in such places as Australia, Germany, Russia, the Netherlands and Yugoslavia. Prince Charles and Princess Diana officially opened the worldwide charity rock concert from the stage at Wembley Stadium and the BBC television pictures were beamed around the world, to be viewed by 1.5 billion people in 160 countries in the biggest broadcast ever known. The two main concerts at the Wembley and JFK Stadiums featured most of what was considered to be the royalty of pop and rock music, including members of the British baby boomer generation within the line-up of bands, such as The Boomtown Rats, Dire Straits, Queen, Status Quo and Ultravox, and solo artist baby boomers such as David Bowie, Phil Collins, Elton John and Sting. The Who were also there but only the drummer, Kenney Jones, can be classed as a post-war baby boomer; Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend are too old, having been born during the Second World War, as was Paul McCartney who appeared in the Wembley finale, and Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger who both featured in the JFK concert. It should make all baby boomers feel quite sprightly to be reminded that they are in fact younger than these rock superstars, many of whom were still performing in 2012. Amazingly, Phil Collins managed to perform live in the two main Live Aid concerts on either side of the Atlantic. He did this by boarding a supersonic Concorde flight from the London to New York straight after his performance at Wembley Stadium. Live Aid raised a total of £40 million with half the money spent on food and the other half on long-term development. In those days of high unemployment and job insecurity the spirit of British generosity was clear to see, as whole families queued one after the other to use the house phone (few people had mobiles then) to give their credit card details to volunteers tending special Live Aid donation phone lines at call centres around the country.
But we weren’t just watching television every minute of our spare time. In the home, we were busy sanding the varnish from our floors and stripping paint from the woodwork to reveal real pine floorboards, doors and stair rails. We bought loads of solid pine furniture and decorated our rooms with Laura Ashley-style miniature floral-patterned wallpapers and fabrics. We ripped out all of those 1970s coloured bathroom suites and damp bathroom carpets and replaced them with classic white suites and ceramic floor tiles. Those of us lucky enough to have a garage painted over the purple garage doors using more subtle colours. At last, we were bringing style and good taste back into our homes. By the end of the decade our homes had been completely restyled to resemble times gone by but in a very bright and cheery fashion with country cottage kitchens, dado rails and pretty patterned wallpapers. To add to our satisfaction, we were doing it all ourselves. The do-it-yourself (DIY) home improvement craze was now approaching its peak and the companies that had opened high street DIY stores in the early 1970s, many in old cinemas, were now opening huge shed-like DIY superstores in the retail parks, and they usually occupied the largest and most prominent sites available. More and more new-style business and retail parks and shopping malls were being built on out-of-town sites and in inner city disused industrial areas, and DIY stores always featured prominently. There were lots of successful DIY companies around at the time and many became household names. They included B&Q, Do It All, Dodge City, Fads, Focus, Great Mills, Home Charm, Homebase, LCP, Payless, Texas and Wickes. Most of these old names have long since disappeared, having been taken over or shut down over the years, but these were all big retailing names of the 1980s and we spent lots of our money in these stores buying all sorts of DIY products to improve our homes. In some cases it was less of a do-up and more of a botch-up, as many a homebuyer has discovered to their cost since those daft days when thousands of DIY fanatics all across the country could be heard practising their amateur skills late into the night during every weekend and holiday period. They were ever-ready with their electric drill in hand, like a coiled spring waiting to burst into action.
It was during the 1980s that we first began to feel some level of hostility towards our friendly neighbourhood postman. As each year went by we found more and more junk mail littering our doormats, promoting everything from double glazing to foreign holidays, and a lot of it was being delivered by the postman in personally addresses envelopes. It was a fairly new experience for us, something we were not used to, and certainly not on this scale. We regularly got letters telling us that we had won a fortune – we just had to phone a special number to make our claim. Credit card companies bombarded us with part-filled application forms with letters advising us that we had been specially selected to receive one of their credit cards – even gold and platinum cards. We ended up with so many different credit cards that we had to buy special purses and wallets to accommodate them all. Unknown to us, we were becoming targeted consumers. Large companies were gathering information about us and using it to target us for all sorts of consumer products and services. They also began to phone us and use high-pressure sales techniques to sell us their specially priced offers. And guess what? These offers were exclusive for you, and you had to commit to buy them there and then to get the special exclusive prices. These telemarketing companies even sold on our personal information to other marketing companies so that they too could send us mountains of junk mail. We were categorised by these marketing companies and these target categories were given acronym names like Dinky (short for a couple with ‘double income no kids yet’). This was certainly the age of consumerism. Each and every one of us was fitted into one category or another and there was a special name to describe every section of society from Tweenies (between 5 and 12 years old) to Empty Nesters (couples whose children have grown up and gone). We weren’t very happy with the amount of junk mail and telemarketing phone calls we were getting in the 1980s but we had no idea how bad it was going to get – and we were yet to experienc
e the wonders of the Internet and all the junk mail that would create. In the early 1980s, we in Britain had seen the arrival of the first home computers with such makes as Apple, Apricot, Amstrad, Commodore, IBM and Sinclair, who made the ZX Spectrum, Britain’s best-selling computer, but we would have to wait until the 1990s to experience the Internet and email messaging.
The 1980s was the decade in which we saw the birth of young upwardly mobile professionals, or yuppies as they were more commonly known. These were high-earning young professionals who were totally absorbed in their own world of opulent living and completely out of touch with ordinary life. City traders working on the financial markets in London’s financial Square Mile were earning huge salaries and bonuses and they characterised the British yuppie image to the extreme. They were mostly under 30 with fully loaded gold and platinum credit cards that were burning holes in their pockets. They developed a reputation for being shameless in their unbounded spending on lavish champagne lunches costing hundreds of pounds a time, and for leaving tips that were large enough to feed an average family for a week. They bought all of the expensive trappings that you associate with ostentatious rich people (or flash gits, as many less-privileged mortals were inclined to call them). They spent money like there was no tomorrow. Top of the range Porsches and gold Rolex watches seemed to be among the essential parts of their kit. They took to wearing wide-striped braces in a style that was perfectly portrayed by Gordon Gekko’s character in the 1987 film, Wall Street. They used the ‘work hard and play hard’ ethic to explain their brash overspending, but the whole culture was generally viewed as being an unbridled feast of self-indulgence. Many young people were attracted to the yuppie image and the desire for such a lifestyle became contagious. Soon other young professionals were imitating the city high flyers, albeit to a lesser extent. Business executives throughout the land bought leather-bound Filofax personal organiser wallets, the must-have yuppie accessory before the days of electronic organisers. They stuffed their Filofax wallets with as many loose-leaf pages as they could possibly fit in; the bulgier the Filofax the more important they looked. As with any fashion trend, there were a lot of wannabes: less-wealthy young people who couldn’t afford to keep pace with the true yuppies but still wanted to be seen as part of the yuppie set. Many were willing to get themselves into debt just so they could hang around expensive wine bars and at least look the part. Fortunately, by then most of us baby boomers were a little too old to be cast as stereotypical, young, upwardly mobile professionals, and so perhaps we can rest easy in the knowledge that we played no part in the culture of extreme greed and self-indulgence that was linked to the yuppie lifestyle of the 1980s. Well, at least some of us can.
The worldwide stock market crash of 1987 instantly restrained the extravagant spending habits of the city whiz kid yuppies. The wine bars, restaurants and clubs that the high-spending yuppies had previously heaped money upon soon came creeping back to ordinary Joe Public to fill their tills. Venues that had previously been standoffish to all but the big spenders suddenly threw their doors open to welcome all-comers in the face of fierce competition to fill empty tables and floor space.
As was the case in previous decades, the 1980s is remembered for having some very distinctive styles of dress. The passage of time does tend to play tricks with our minds and, as such, we have a tendency to arrogantly mock bygone clothing fashions. We cringe at the thought that we could ever have worn such things, and the 1980s do not escape ridicule from today’s critics. Whatever you might think of the fashion trends, the 1980s must surely go down in the annals of history as having been a much more tasteful and stylish period than the early to mid-1970s. The large shoulder pads, tight jeans and leg warmers of the 1980s really weren’t that bad. Okay, so the mullet hair cut did reach the peak of its popularity in the 1980s and there was an early trend for men to perm their hair to look as if they had a poodle sat on their head. Oh, and yes in the late 1980s some men did take to wearing short ponytails for a while. Even back then, most of us thought that these were all awful hairstyles and the majority of us were sensible enough to trim our 1970s locks into much smarter hairstyles, and generally smarten ourselves up. Power dressing was the slogan of the day. The elegant Armani suits and high-collared lace blouses of the 1980s must make up for all of the chavvy shell suits, ripped sweatshirts, rah-rah skirts and Lycra leggings that we saw parading through our shopping centres at the weekends. There were a lot of classic styles around but we tend to overlook these and concentrate on the fashion faux pas. Many of us wore expensive and well-tailored clothes but we sometimes wore them in a strange way; like the designer jackets worn with sleeves hitched up to the elbows and a casual t-shirt underneath, in the style of the 1980s Miami Vice TV series. Brand names became status symbols and designer labels began to appear on everything we bought from sportswear to luggage. We willingly paid ten-times the price of a cotton t-shirt to get one that was printed with a designer name or logo emblazoned across the front. Gone were the days when companies had to pay to have their logos displayed on the high street. We consumers were now paying them for the privilege of flaunting their brands everywhere we went. It became fashionable to wear wax cotton jackets in town, especially Barbour jackets, and when it was wet a matching pair of green Hunter wellington boots. They gave the impression that you were up from the country for the day. This was also the decade in which the term Sloane Ranger first came into use to describe the wealthy, young, upper-class set that lived in the Chelsea area of London and were regularly seen shopping in and around Sloane Square. The Sloane Ranger tag was mostly applied to the women of the Chelsea set who invariably had cut-glass English accents and family estates in the country; a prime example was Diana, Princess of Wales, or Lady Diana Spencer as she was before her marriage to Charles, Prince of Wales. There was even an official Sloane Ranger Handbook and a Sloane Ranger Diary, both published by the magazine Harpers & Queen. Meanwhile, there was an unusual change going on in everyday footwear. While we baby boomers continued to wear our highly polished leather shoes, all around us the younger generation were binning the tradition and formality of leather shoes in favour of new-style designer trainers from the likes of Nike and Reebok. To the young, these designer trainers were now acceptable for everyday use, to be worn with anything and on any occasion. Some children were now growing up having never worn anything else on their feet but sports trainers. It was difficult for us, the plimsoll generation of the 1950s, to adjust to such a radical change in everyday footwear. How could anyone wear casual trainers with a suit or a dress and expect to be taken seriously? We baby boomers would never do that, would we? Surely, we could never become that tacky.
Having joined one of the thousands of newly opened gyms in the 1970s and taken up jogging as well, we were certainly buying gym shoes in greater numbers than ever before. Our interest in keep fit was proving to be more than just a short-lived fad. Women were especially keen to trim and tone their figures, which for those of our generation were not quite as young and trim as they used to be. Spurred on by 1980s dance-themed films like Fame, Staying Alive, and Flashdance, armies of women of all ages were donning headbands, leotards and leg warmers and joining aerobic classes at dance studios and church halls throughout the land. Home fitness videos topped their Christmas wish lists, especially the Jane Fonda workout videos and the Physical video by Olivia Newton John. We may have taken up jogging in the 1970s in an attempt to get fit, but this was now serious stuff – we were even signing up to run marathons (the London Marathon and the Great North Run half marathon were first staged in 1981).
It was as well that we were toning our bodies and increasing oxygen to our brains because we would need all of the energy and brain power we could muster to keep us going as we left the 1980s behind us and moved on into the 1990s, with the bleak prospects of further falls in house prices and increasing numbers of repossessions, high interest rates and rising inflation. The decade ended on a high note with news from Germany that East Germany’s
communist rulers had given permission for the gates of the Berlin Wall to be opened. On 9 November 1989, for the first time since 1961, the 28 mile wall was officially breached and hundreds of East Berliners surged through the openings while large numbers of jubilant West Berliners climbed to the top of the wall and began breaking up sections of it.
Pass the Reading Glasses
When we closed the door on the 1980s we ushered out much of what remained of the good old-fashioned Britishness that symbolised our traditional way of life. In the past, evolution of gadgets had been a gradual process but towards the end of the 1980s new technology was really starting to speed things up. Once underway, the impetus could only get faster as technology continued to develop more and more new and better gadgets to improve ways of doing everything, whether in the workplace or at home. From communications to cooking, technology was fundamentally changing our traditional way of life as increasing numbers of people of every age group made use of each and every new gadget as soon as it became available. During the 1990s everything was changing and developing at breathtaking speed. It may have been an involuntary act but by buying into the technological age we were altering our whole way of life, and in a very short space of time. As we look back, we probably remember the 1980s as being the last decade that was not totally dominated by electronic gadgetry in one form or another. From mass ownership of mobile phones to nationwide CCTV surveillance cameras in our streets, shops, workplaces and buildings, the rapid advancements in technology during the 1990s was exciting and most of us were unable to resist the temptation of joining this new high-tech society, thus drawing us ever closer towards a twenty-first-century lifestyle and taking us further and further away from the world of pen and paper in which we grew up.
