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...
Too thick to do the football pools? No matter, you can still be relieved of all your spare cash by doing Spot...
'We've noticed the garden's been getting a bit much for you lately...'
The world of tinned meat has made few lasting inroads into popular culture, but Yeoman’s range of stewing steak, chilli con carne...
Yugoslavia’s answer to the Fiat 125 started appearing in British forecourts in the late 1970s alongside classics of Euro-tinniness the Lada Riva...
The school play. Fraught auditions, fumbled lines, dad's old trousers nicked for costumes, and of course the Good Name of the School...
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