It’s hard to see why Etch-A-Sketch provokes such fond memories. Thanks to the magic of the Internet we can see people producing incredibly intricate portraits of popstars or heads of state using one – but these people are one-in-a-million superhumans. It was billed as “the ultimate doodling tool” – but despite huge sales, that title is still held firmly by the humble pencil and paper.
Aerobic Larks and Abandoning Marx: The Eighties
It was known as the “me” decade, the one where “should I, shouldn’t I” was finally replaced with “I will! I will! I did! Oh, I wish I hadn’t”. As countries attempted to haul themselves out of another recession in preparation for the next, the younger generation became obsessed with the brash, the dayglo and the electronic, while their parents did their utmost to remain sensible, sombre and analogue.
We had to cope with hypercolour sweatshirts, left-wing terrorism and AIDS, although fortunately not in the same weekend; we wore Katherine Hamnett T-shirts without realizing they carried anti-abortion slogans, gyrated provocatively to music that emerged from gay discos, and donated our pocket money to famine-stricken Ethiopia after being harangued to do so by a furious-looking Bob Geldof. It was a decade like no other, mainly because that’s just how the space-time continuum works.
Wearing Deely Boppers in an Attempt to Appear Approachable
We find some aspects of the natural world so beautiful that we try to incorporate the look into our homes or our outfits. Snakeskin handbags, fox-fur stoles, floral-print curtains, those cat-paw slippers with claws at the front. Not to everyone’s taste, granted – but aesthetically speaking you’d have to admit that these examples are several leagues above making yourself look like some kind of space-age insect with flapping antennae.
1982 was the year of the deely bopper, or the beany bopper, space bopper, bonce bopper or “those headbands with things on”. The person who had the idea has wisely decided not to own up to it, but the offending item seems to have emerged in New York and then spread to Britain during that summer via tabloid newspapers who described them as a “hot new American trend”. Nearly all of America was, at best, ambivalent about the deely bopper, but the British started buying them anyway. Pre- teenagers could just about get away with the futuristic snail look. But alarm bells sounded when middle-aged receptionists without a shred of dignity started sporting them, explaining that “I’m mad, me. Mad. Ask anyone.”
Taking out an Endowment Policy to Pay for your Home
The world is still reeling from the foolhardy, self-interested actions of the global banking system. But the vast majority of us are as bewildered by the laws of economics as we are by differential calculus, so we’re happy to take advice from anyone in a suit with a briefcase and an approachable manner. When they tell us that they’re the best ones to look after our money, we believe them, and never consider for a moment that greed might be their motivation. But as greed is our motivation, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise.
The 1980s saw the financial world come up with a fresh new approach to paying off the mortgage on your home: don’t pay it off at all. Just pay the interest, and invest some more money in the hope that it’ll magically grow to the size of the loan by the time it’s due for repayment. We were promised returns of ten, or even twelve percent, and that we could well have a pot of spare cash at the end of it. Unfortunately, returns were more like four percent, and lenders were eventually forced to admit that the whole plan was flawed, and that our investments were falling well short. Mis-sold endowments spawned their own flourishing industry based on clawing back some compensation, while “endowment mortgage” became as dirty a pair of words as “crack whore”.
Making yourself Appear much Heavier by Wearing a Shell Suit
Tracksuits look great on the people who were designed to wear them. Athletes. Not those whose idea of sporting activity involves lolling on a sofa and watching wrestling while consuming deep-fried potato and belching loudly. Tragically, the things that make tracksuits ideal for athletes – easy to get on and off, lightweight, comfortable – also appeal to those of a more spherical build, and nothing kills off a fashion faster than its rapid adoption by people who look terrible while wearing it.
But shellsuits took the tracksuit somewhere even more dark and sinister. We’re not just talking garish colour schemes here (and they certainly were garish, with bright green and purple being one inexplicably popular choice) – they simply made chubby people look obese, and obese people look like barrage balloons. By elasticating all the areas where the body emerged – wrists, ankles, waist, neck – and constructing the garment out of a parachute-like material, the contours of the body were replaced with a new set of even more unflattering contours. Add to this the fact that it felt as tactile as a shower cap, and that you could clearly hear people’s thighs scraping together as they approached, and it adds up to a piece of clothing as diametrically opposed to the sensuous glamour of the velvet smoking jacket as it’s possible to get.
Communicating to Lonely Lorry Drivers Via CB Radio
The Internet has made us blasé about communicating with strangers. In fact, after one too many slanging matches on online forums, the whole concept can start to lose its appeal. But 1970s films such as Smokey And The Bandit and Convoy led to a surge in interest in Citizens Band Radio, and governments in both the US and the UK were forced to relax laws to allow us to mumble incomprehensible jargon into plastic handsets and hope for a crackling reply from someone we didn’t know.
In the US, a license was originally needed to use CB, but repeated flouting of the law led to this requirement being dropped. In the UK, it was illegal to use one at all, but again, the sheer number of people using imported radios forced the government’s hand. Christmas 1981 saw CB become one of the top UK gift ideas – and in turn saw it become the victim of its own popularity. Channels were swamped with people trying and failing to master the intricacies of the NATO phonetic alphabet, repeatedly asking “good buddies” for an “eyeball”, or just swearing loudly and repeatedly. CBs were henceforth quietly packed away and left under the stairs – a perfect example of the idea being way more exciting than the reality. The ubiquity of mobile phones has made CB look like a particularly unusual relic.
Becoming Obsessed with a Three-dimensional Hand-held Puzzle
The 3x3x3 multicoloured cube invented by Ernö Rubik is generally considered to be the world’s best-selling toy. Bearing in mind that it generated frustration rather than excitement, could only be used by one person at a time, and was unsolvable by normal human beings unless they’d referred to books entitled something like “How to solve the Rubik’s Cube”, this is a pretty astonishing achievement. And the fact that most of its sales were concentrated in the first half of the 1980s indicates how enormously successful it was during that period.
While those of us who felt oppressed by the cube removed and reattached its stickers or hacked it to pieces with a screwdriver in order to achieve some kind of pyrrhic victory over it, those who studied and memorized the optimum methods of cube solving would engage each other in speed trials. Their cubes were greased with Vaseline and primed for action – but by that stage it had stopped being a puzzle, and started being about following instructions very quickly. People even started solving it underwater in a single breath; fortunately their impulse to stay alive proved greater than their need to solve the cube, and as far as we know, no one died.
Collecting Stationery that Smelled Nice
Erasers perform one very simple function: removing pencil marks from paper. As activities go, it’s pretty mundane – at least it was until enterprising stationery companies decided to liven up erasing with a range of exciting aromas. You might think there’d be as much point in this as manufacturing a smelly door or a tasty car, but kids loved it – and collecting delicately perfumed erasers became a popular and relatively inexpensive hobby.
But in the UK this was suddenly curtailed by the British government with the introduction of its “Scente
d Erasers Safety Order 1984”. No joke. There was widespread concern that small children – who, after all, enjoy putting unusual objects in their mouths – would turn erasers into a potential choking hazard. Most children would have discovered that they taste far less pleasant than they smell and rapidly spat them out – but the order came into effect regardless. One panicking importer who found himself stuck with £270,000 worth of unsellable stock decided to challenge the ruling, pointing out that children are far more likely to choke on a piece of fruit; the government conceded that this may be true, but people need to eat fruit, and don’t really need to rub out pencil marks with something that smells nice. These days, no sensory pleasure can be derived from correcting drawing errors. None.
Wearing Leg Warmers Because the Girls on Fame did
The term “leg warmer” is a bit misleading. A more correct description might be “shin concealer”; that does make them sound utterly pointless but, frankly, they were. True, dancers could conceivably give their calf muscles an extra layer of protection from the vicious elements that one experiences in the average gym or dance studio, but they were happy to leave their feet and thighs exposed to those wild oscillations in temperature, and the lower leg isn’t generally regarded as a dangerous area for heat loss. Ask any polar explorer.
OK, so we’ve established that they probably served little purpose. So why were they so popular? Could it have been merely to expand the circumference of the shin? Part of the blame can be laid at the door of the films Fame and Flashdance, which featured hundreds of aspiring stars of the future wearing leotards, ballet pumps and leg warmers. But how they reached the silver screen in the first place is a mystery. Perhaps it’s the fault of the person who came up with the toilet roll cover (see Protecting Toilet Rolls from Everyday Stresses and Strains with Knitted Covers).
Considering “Liver in Lager” to be an Exciting Food Innovation
The world of high-class French cuisine experienced something of a revolution in the 1970s, as the rich sauces of haute cuisine were replaced by the “nouvelle cuisine” of chefs such as Paul Bocuse: speedy cooking processes, fresh ingredients, inventive and attractive dishes. French citizens who could afford to eat in top restaurants understood these innovations, because they recognized the tradition that they were rejecting.
But when the idea finally reached places like Britain, nouvelle cuisine was suddenly synonymous with food that a) came in exceedingly small portions, and b) contained horribly incompatible ingredients. Ambitious chefs, eager to be seen as cutting edge, would place two small mounds of contrasting food on a colossal white plate, draw some kind of hieroglyph on the side using an unctuous jus, and charge £20 for it. “Where’s the food?” asked bemused diners, who weren’t used to having to buy three Mars Bars on the way home to fill themselves up after a meal out. Nouvelle cuisine became heavily satirized ( Mike Leigh’s Life Is Sweet featured king prawn in jam sauce, saveloy on a bed of lychees, and lamb tongues in a rhubarb hollandaise) – but its innovations eventually became more sensibly incorporated into modern dining, and we were eventually allowed to say farewell to meals that resembled overpriced minimalist paintings.
Distracting yourself from Work with an Executive Toy
There’s barely anything more offensive to the average hard-working citizen than the notion of highly paid executives having so much time on their hands that they spend precious hours mucking about with objects on their desk. If bus drivers or nurses casually interrupted their own working day to idly explore the concept of perpetual motion using a bit of swinging chrome, they’d be told to get back to work, or be sacked. Executives, however, just received a polite enquiry as to whether they were having a nice day at the office. Which they probably were, and especially on that kind of salary.
Newton’s cradle is perhaps the best known of these toys; popular in the 1970s, it featured five spheroids suspended from a metal frame, rocking to and fro to neatly prove the law of conservation of linear momentum. By the 1980s, however, we had Japanese zen rock gardens, sunburst fibre optics, and pin art. Pin art, in all its chrome and black glory, consisted of a vertical surface into which were embedded closely packed horizontal pins. If you pushed an object into one side, a representation of it – in pins – would emerge from the other. And you could happily repeat this until the conference call finally came through from LA. These days the Internet has successfully replaced the executive toy by cleverly allowing you to waste time while appearing to be working.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it: sayings that have lost their currency
It’s a crying shame that audio recordings were only invented in 1877. How disappointing that we’ll never get to hear the measured tones of, say, Oliver Cromwell, and discover to our surprise that he had his own catchphrase which he’d deploy in moments of stress, something like “The shops are now open, madam.” The patterns of speech in medieval times might have been utterly thrilling to the modern ear – and, even more excitingly, they might have thrown in phrases and colloquialisms that would have us furrowing our brows in disbelief. In the same way that they’d be nonplussed by seeing crowds of teenage boys repeatedly yelling “Wasssuuup” at each other. And even more nonplussed when we attempted to explain Budweiser to them. Or commercials. Or television.
We also find “Wasssuuup” pretty irritating these days; popular sayings simply fall out of favour – either because their reference points have disappeared, or we’ve found a new way of expressing the same idea, or because sheer repetition has utterly devalued it. In the 1980s, British men would imitate comedian Harry Enfield by waving a wad of notes at their chortling friends, and shouting “Loadsamoney!” Today, this would be met with disbelief bordering on contempt. In the same way, Americans tend not to say “where’s the beef?” when they feel short-changed, because they’d sound as if they’d just awoken from 25 years in a coma.
But some phrases, long since abandoned, could do with being rehabilitated. Imagine the joy you’d feel if you leapt into a taxi and shrieked at the driver: “Home, James, and don’t spare the horses!” If we had the slightest recollection of the Battle of Warburg in 1760, and the fact that the Marquis of Granby lost his hat during a cavalry charge, we might still say “going bald-headed for something” to indicate bravery. Few of us have a copy of Edward Cocker’s wildly popular and influential 1677 Maths textbook Arithmetick on our shelves, but if we did, we’d still describe anything that was absolutely correct as “according to Cocker”. We don’t describe honoured guests as being “above the salt”, or a woman’s scolding of her husband as a “curtain lecture”. If someone makes a preposterous suggestion we don’t say “the answer’s a lemon”, and we don’t announce the purchase of a round of drinks by saying “bumpers all round and no heel taps”, more’s the pity.
But we’ve been happy to see the back of more recent popular phrases and sayings. For years, British children would call each other “Joey”, in a reference to a disabled man by the name of Joey Deacon who appeared occasionally on kids’ TV show Blue Peter – and adults of a certain age will still lapse into it when they’ve had too much to drink. We’ve been trying to get rid of “Put that in your pipe and smoke it” for a good 150 years, but still people come out with it when they’re feeling slightly smug. British comedy shows gave us “hello sailor”, “that’s your mum that is,” “steps back in amazement” and “ooh, I could crush a grape” – all of which are infused with the atmosphere of the period in which they originated. Affixing “not” to the end of our sentences to indicate sarcasm feels inappropriate in a post- Wayne’s World-world, as does screeching “Aciiiiiieeeeed” while dancing at clubs – but these were both things that we were delighted to do a few years ago.
You can’t force the pace of change (“bad” might mean “good”, “wicked” might mean “even better”, “bloody awful” will always mean “terrible”) but you can bet that describing something as “well nang” will feel dated by the time this content is published. If it isn’t already
.
Hanging Mass-produced Art on the Walls of your Home
Not many of us have the millions of pounds required to put an original work by a respected master in our kitchen. In the absence of a Vermeer or a Magritte, we might turn instead to an artistic friend and commission him or her to come up with something “not too tasteless” to fill up the empty space. Or perhaps put up some daubs done at school by our kids, in order to make absolutely certain that they feel some kind of embarrassment as they get older.
But the 1980s saw poster company Athena shift millions of copies of one particular poster called Man and Baby, featuring a rugged hunk showing affection towards a gurgling infant, and it became a sophisticated decoration choice for the thinking woman. It symbolized the “New Man” that they were probably keen to meet – a man who wouldn’t come home hours after the baby had been put to bed, and drunkenly bellow for his dinner before demanding sex. The model, Adam Perry, demonstrated zero New Man credentials by sleeping with three thousand women as a result of his appearance on the poster; he intended to write a book about his experiences, but conceded that it “got a bit boring”. The original posters have long since been rolled up and shoved in the attic, and if you see one today it’ll only have been put there in a knowing, ironic way. Not the fate, you’ll notice, of a Vermeer or a Magritte.
The Next Big Thing Page 13
