by Plum Sykes
* In Carrie, Brian De Palma’s 1976 high school horror movie, the bullied outcast takes revenge on her class by killing them all at their prom. Glee, get lost.
* To prove their love for the beauty of the title, every male undergraduate commits suicide in Max Beerbohm’s novel Zuleika Dobson (1911). Imagine Gone Girl in Edwardian costume.
* Before the advent of DNA testing in the late 1980s, autopsies were much more casual affairs than they are now. Since there were no DNA samples to contaminate, police, hospital staff, and medical students would come and go fairly freely from the morgue.
* Until the late 1980s in Britain, it was accepted practice to sever a victim’s hands in order to take a perfect fingerprint. The families never knew.
* As pathologists couldn’t take a DNA sample from a body part in 1985, if they suspected that a case might be reopened during the next thirty years, they were legally obliged to preserve the relevant body part. Until the late 1980s, pathologists kept many victims’ brains and organs on their office shelves, “just in case.”
* Cagney & Lacey (1982–88) was the first “feminist” buddy cop show. Worried that the female detective characters were too aggressive, CBS canceled the show in 1983. Furious fans staged a letter-writing campaign, forcing the network to reverse its decision. The show won fourteen Emmys.
* Another Country (1984) starred ’80s pretty boys Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, and Cary Elwes as boarding school pupils tangled in a web of homosexuality and spying. Shot like a Ralph Lauren ad, the film was as chic as it was camp.
* The Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s controversial Unification Church, nicknamed the Moonies, became a huge cult in the 1980s. It brainwashed thousands of virtual strangers into marrying one another at mass weddings.
* Founded in 1893 as a hall for women, St. Hilda’s finally accepted men in 2008.
* The Daily Mail’s Nigel Dempster was the most influential diarist of the 1980s and was nicknamed “the Snake” for his love of gossip. London Zoo named a poisonous specimen after Dempster, much to his delight.
* White’s = oldest, grandest gentlemen’s club in London. Only woman ever allowed in was the Queen. Wait list is at least seven years long.
* Before Johnny Depp popularized pirate style, pop star Adam Ant (born plain Stuart Leslie Goddard) had the look down, only with way more makeup.
* A group of anti-punk London clubbers, the New Romantics dressed in Regency frills, vintage military jackets, and highwayman garb. John Galliano’s 1984 graduate show Les Incroyables, a direct reflection of the scene, was heavy on bows, pantaloons, and tricorn hats.
* “Elevenses” = old-fashioned British meal, usually consisting of tea or coffee, biscuits and cake, eaten at eleven in the morning.
* The Carringtons, the fictional family around which TV show Dynasty (1981–1989) revolved, were the Kardashians of the ’80s. The whole world tuned in for the on-screen catfights between Alexis Carrington (Joan Collins) and Krystle Carrington (Linda Evans).
* Membership to Vincent’s Club on King Edward Street (started in 1863) requires possession of a Full or Half Blue, as well as intellectual and social standing to match. Women members were, finally, accepted in 2016. (No, that’s not a typo.)
* Ursula did finish her essay on “The Apocalyptic Vision of the Early Covenanters” in time for her tutorial on the Monday morning of 2nd Week. Dr. Dave’s only comment on her effort: “This isn’t high school, Miss Flowerbutton.” Devastated (until now she had been a straight-A student), Ursula promised herself that she really would—honestly, absolutely, definitely, cross her heart hope to die, stick a needle in her eye—spend 2nd Week in the library working much harder on her next essay.†
†(Unless someone else was murdered.)
