Someone, somewhere must have decided the mid-’80s economic boom wasn’t booming quite enough, because seemingly overnight, children who had previously limited their...
The three-apples-high ambassadors of Smurfland had colonised mainland Europe and the columns of Look-In before they rolled up on your local forecourt....
1983, and the alcoholic British palate is evolving at a rate of knots. Wine has finally arrived!
While Mr Kipling ran its sedate, well-mannered commercials for decades, boringly recounting scenes not seen in normal households for centuries, Lyons decided...
The campaign that begat a National Gesture.
It was Derek Jameson who unleashed the forces of housey-housey on an unsuspecting Fleet Street in the early 1980s when, as editor...
Although still going strong today, Nimble Bread is perhaps most strongly associated with the famous advertising campaign of the late 1960s and...
Of all the weird and wonderful speciality acts who peopled variety shows with their esoteric skills during the ’70s and ’80s, none...
Scene: a Stanley Baxter ITV Christmas special in the mid 1980s. The expensive film parody is The Jewel in the Crown. Posh...
In an age of supposedly sophisticated ‘viral’ marketing that counts itself successful if it makes half a dozen people look at an...
Watches specially designed for ‘her’, we can understand. But pens? Well, in those far off days when writing things out by hand...
Of all the primary school reading scheme books (Janet and John, Peter and Jane, Ant and Bee) the best loved (and therefore,...
It wasn’t gambling. They said there was an art to it, and rightly so. Deliberating the relative footballing merits of Alloa v...
Classically cased in white plastic with a black dial for tuning in the picture and a hooped aerial that was maddeningly prone...
What better way to signpost your devotion to the latest short-lived elaborately-coiffured pop sensation than by forking out three times the cost...
Yoghurts were dead exotic once upon a time. Though limited of flavour (strawberry, hazelnut, ‘fruits of the forest’ . . . er,...
The 1970s were a hotbed of audio technological advancement, despite enthusiasts having to carry on with the same old vinyl technology that...
It's widely acknowledged that, before advertising regulations were relaxed a few years back, British adverts were unable to rubbish rival brands by...
A go-ahead company founded in Newbury in 1973, Quantel is, perhaps more than any other institution, responsible for the change in the...
A ‘revolutionary’ cordless (note – never ‘mobile’) phone system introduced by Hutchison Telecommunications (geddit?) in the early ’90s, which relied on the...
Up until the late 1980s, British TV adverts were properly produced, if often uninspired, affairs. Then, as the 1980s gave out their...
Cinzano and Campari began to look a tad retrograde in the brave new 1980s world of chrome barstools and rich men without...
Sadly, with ITV regions practically extinct, the humble local telly ad’s becoming a rare species. The most basic was the still picture...
Ronco was, first and foremost, an all-American empire of tat purveying bottle cutters and Veg-O-Matics to the honest folk of Poughkeepsie –...
1983, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that pop’s brief and arguably less than bountiful dalliance with classical music, which peaked with...
The phrase may be catchily alliterative and describe the leftover bits of carpet going cheap at Allied this Bank Holiday weekend, but...
The school book club was a powerful way of teasing money out of tiny hands sent dizzy by a pamphlet featuring a...
In the sixties they were a chilling vision of things to come, dispassionately pulsing out messages of doom whilst Michael Caine struggled...
OK, so technically speaking it’s called Glass Houses, but the eyecatching, diagonally refracted, jittery typeface (never ‘font’ before 1985) in question was...
A giant white ‘SB’ in a black circle in Radio Times was the thing to look for: it meant it was time...
Those two words alone, surely, mark the historical spot where the trusty, utilitarian telephone got its first stirrings of fashionability and gadgetdom...
In the ’80s, competition was good and proper, in ever sphere of endeavour. Even, it seems, in education. Early in the decade,...
’Wow! You’ve got a Soda Stream?!’ Surely there was nothing quite like the do-it-yourself fizzy drink-maker (or ‘dispenser’ as they called it)...
The manned exploration of space is the zenith of human technological endeavour, a stirring quest for knowledge and achievement that has the...
If these worryingly over-adhesive arachnidy cephalopods were affixed to the upper portion of a smooth glass surface, they would gradually roll down...
Captain Birdseye’s ‘crew’ was the epitome of this advertising genre: the all-singing, all-dancing chorus of stage school children giving it full-on eyes-and-teeth...
Led by a jaunty insect of indeterminate species in union jack dungarees and Michael Bentine’s eager voice, the Stamp Bug Club was...
In between doling out the Crackerjack cabbages and soliciting estimates on a Mini Metro from The Price is Right’s baying mob, Leslie...
While adults stuck with their dull muesli and bran-based cereals in the morning, kids wanted something more interesting. For parents, the only...
Gardening in the 1970s was all about bringing the indoors outdoors.
Back when businesses which made deals ‘over the pond’ really were big, the only way to break news of your latest Supermousse...
They were mainly encountered at school: those seemingly gigantic tubular steel edifices which housed a clunky-buttoned Ferguson Videostar VCR and a huge...
It wasn’t so long ago that Tesco was an also-ran in the supermarket stakes. Sainsbury’s, Safeways, even Kwik Save gave the then...
You can still get the stylish ‘straight-down-the-middle hanset’ phones themselves from various specialist outlets, but not so those middle-aged men and women...
A television set used to be for life, not just for the interval between two consecutive Christmases.
A “German folk song” of unknown provenance, familiar to amateur musicians of a certain age through its inexplicably perennial appearance as a...
The great thing about pre-digital telly was that a) if it broke down, you got a bloke in to fix it, taking...
Before Alton Towers, before EuroDisney, there was the granddaddy of all theme parks, Wicksteed Park. Or, to give it its official title,...
A child of that weird part of the 1950s when Britain was obsessed with all things American but, in trying to slavishly...
The big massive all-singing all-dancing Woolworths spectacular was every bit a part of the countdown to the festive season as calls to...
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