Despite sounding like a minor European royal family from a Dynasty end of series special, the House of Dübreq was, initially at...
One of those 1950s childhood artifacts that lingered on onto the 70s and beyond by sheer bloody force of will (see also:...
This begrudgingly sickly yet alluring pudding feature enjoyed a window of mid-1980s ubiquity when any mum with a modicum of sense made...
The finishing touch to a million Sunday afternoon desserts, Ideal evaporated milk from Nestlé’s (pronounced ‘Nessles’, never ‘Ness-lay’) brought a dash of...
Unapologetic graduates of the straw boater/starched spats school of wordplay and whimsy, scarce indeed was the light-hearted magazine programme of the 1970s...
Also-ran Atari console rival from the days when cartridge-based video games still seemed just about a really good idea. Small controversy was...
In 1983, Smiths Crisps attempted to surf a wave of James Bond hysteria in the wake of the release of Octopussy by...
A loudmouth American card sharp, Ricky Jay was all over TV in the 1980s as a speciality act, or ‘bloke who can...
A staple of agreeable domestic sitcoms of a certain vintage. Hubby often balding, slightly droopy of jowl; wife big on hairspray, frowning,...
The introduction of moneyraking 0898 numbers in the late ’80s wasn’t entirely restricted to shabby chatlines at the outset – this service...
The 1970s was the decade when, in many cases, what was previously only science fiction became science. (Or, if you were an...
Ketchips were the type of fad product that would catch your eye whilst traipsing around after your mum during the weekly Presto...
This vocal sextet, formed by a bunch of like-minded choral scholars from King’s College, Cambridge, has been on the go since 1969,...
‘Yom po-pom pooom… Ah! Guten morgen!’ Don’t you just hate those chubby, ebullient German holidaymakers, forever windsurfing up to your yacht and...
Those clunky, boxy old Instamatic cameras, eh? All so very '70s.
Woolies had The Goodies, Joe Brown and – cough – Anita Harris for their Christmas advertising extravaganzas. Kwik Save, one of the...
Along with deelyboppers, the epitome of ghastly-but-fun fashion nonsensista that the 1980s retched out...
Hard to believe that Britain once had too much milk sloshing about in its silos, but by 1981 Unigate possessed such a...
It may have begun in the 13th century (then again, it probably didn’t), but the 1970s saw macrame take off as the...
Those little clicky sticks concealed in the left hand have spoiled the nation’s weather forecasters. Oh, for those pre-1985 days when Bill...
For at least a decade, which ended somewhere in the mid 1980s, all British schoolchildren were taught not just French, but Longman...
The Midland (or, as the jaunty calypso song in the ads had it, ‘Midd-er-land’) Bank’s bizarre, intimidating choice of a mythological lion/eagle...
The colour supplements of the seventies were festooned with all manner of big-nosed cartoon tomfoolery.
A fixture on The Paul Daniels Show and countless '80s variety spectaculars, nutzoid German escapologist and illusionist Hans Moretti was a name...
The theoretical practice that stated a child’s cognitive skills could be enhanced by encouraging association with physical movements certainly enjoyed one of...
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...
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