80s Actual: Sweet Memories From The 1980s

04 April 2012

Sweet Memories From The 1980s - Decade Of Turmoil...

The Commodore 64 with its amazing 64K memory, There's A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis, Roland and Mrs McClusky of Grange Hill School, Tucker's Luck, The New Statesman, Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster, Tetris, Desperately Seeking Susan, Live Aid and Inspector Gadget... what do YOU remember?

Chris writes:

I love this blog so much, it almost hurts! So much changed in the 1980s - there was a real social revolution and technology ushered in a new era, inventions like the World Wide Web pointed the way to an even more technological future, but the 1980s weren't only yuppies and Greenham Common Peace Women, Thatcher and Reagan, Chernobyl and Big Bang, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Commodore 64, the C5 car and Boom and Bust. They were Den and Angie of EastEnders and the CB radio craze and Rubik's Cube and dancing flowers and Adam Ant and whacking great shoulder pads and lycra leggings and No 73 and Wincey Willis and Gilbert the alien and jelly shoes and...

Well, I could go on!

Thank you for '80s Actual. I'm completely hooked. You dig up the most unexpected things alongside those that everybody associates with the decade and I take a great deal of pleasure in reading your latest findings.

I went from ten to twenty in the '80s and I'll never forget those years. They were the best of my life so far, kicking the daylights out of the smug, hypocritical 1990s and early 21st Century and giving me loads to look back on. '80s Actual is, to coin an '80s phrase, simply the best!

Thank you! I'm really chuffed with your e-mail. We're forging ahead here with posts in the pipeline ranging from our continuation of the Albion Market soap (not for the faint hearted!) to an in-depth look at the Ronnie Corbett comedy Sorry! and more on '80s news stories. We never set out to hype or rewrite the decade (as has been the case with a certain other decade!), the '80s provide us with all the material we need without any need for tweaking. So much we weren't aware of at the time, so many memories.

Don't be too hard on the 1990s and early 21st Century though - every era is somebody's favourite and every era has redeeming qualities.

Good to know you're with us!

3 comments:

Tim said...: I remember the 1980s for being so many different things. Most of all, I remember them for being so colourful and eventful - and for deelyboppers and Gordon The Gopher!; April 05, 2012
Pat On A Diet said...: I remember life being much more interesting and people being more passionate about politics and life in general. Life today is so insipid by comparison.; April 06, 2012
Annie Lennox's carpet slippers said...: It was all so varied and exciting... Cold War fears, replaced by Cold War evaporating then ending; riots and royal weddings; Greenham Common and AIDS; Pac-Man and the Rubik Cube; the Commodore 64 and the Apple Mac; yuppies and ecologists; Edge of Darkness and Gilbert's Fridge; New Romantics and Acid House... There was never any time to feel bored. I never felt more alive than in the 1980's.; April 07, 2012

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INTRODUCTION

The '80s Actual blog is designed to be an antidote to all those television shows and on-line articles of recent years which examine pop culture - and frequently get it hopelessly wrong!

If you sat watching the BBC's "I Love The 1970s" and exclaimed over items being shown "I could swear that was 1968!" or "Wasn't that 1981?" chances are you were right.

If you look at certain '70s fan sites and think a lot of the material written about is actually from the '80s, you are almost certainly correct.

If on-line encyclopedia articles which state that pop culture of 1983 is really 1977, or similar, have you wishing for reality, then '80s Actual is for you.

There is a huge drive in the media and on-line to negate the 1980s, to attribute that decade's innovations and fond memories to other decades, and basically to present it as a completely vapid ten years, not worthy of examination.

I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's just comforting to have a decade people can scapegoat and declare "HORRIBLE"?

This blog is based on actual memories, media footage (thank you, YouTube!) and snippets of newspaper and magazine articles from the 1980s. If you read it here, I think you can rest assured it's accurate, though I can take no responsibility for the newspaper reports from the decade!

The '80s Actual blog examines the decade's news stories - from the emergence of Lady Diana Spencer into the public eye in 1980, to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Was it simply "The Greed Decade" as many like to claim? I think not - the '80s saw the emergence of yuppies, but also Red Wedge, the Greenham Common Peace Women, and increasing concern for the environment. It may be convenient to scapegoat the '80s as the cause of all known ills, but the reality of the decade was far different - absolute bedlam, as Right fought Left, idealism fought corporate ambition. The election of Ronald Reagan as American President in 1980, and his second victory in 1984, had a far more decisive effect on the international political landscape than the three successive general election victories of UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979, 1983 and 1987.

Fashion came fast and furious - deelyboppers, ra ra skirts with lycra leggings, Swatch watches, pixie boots, jelly shoes, shoulder pads, blonde highlights, hair gel, hair mousse, men in pink, goths, shell suits, New Romantics, donkey jackets, leg warmers...

Musically, the 1980s saw the beginnings of House Music, the exciting and still evolving world of synths taking centre stage, the evolvement of Rap music into the fully-fledged Hip Hop scene, Band Aid and Live Aid, great Indie, startling Acid House, and Raves...

At the amusement arcades, Space Invaders ran rampant and we first met Pac-Man...

And there was so much more! The decade truly had something for everyone - and provided a welcome escape for a while from the long-running and boring saga of flared trousers as fashion, begun back in the 1960s!

It was a brilliant decade for telly - bringing us such wonders as A Very Peculiar Practice, Inspector Morse, Spitting Image, Hot Metal, The BeiderbeckeTrilogy and Edge of Darkness.

The 1980s also saw the creation of The Simpsons, Twin Peaks, and other wonderful (often groundbreaking) American TV shows like Kate & Allie, Cheers, The Golden Girls, Married... With Children, The Cosby Show, Roseanne, and Hill Street Blues.

The '80s gave us some wonderful UK TV ads. Remember Ted Moult advertising double glazing at the Tan Hall Inn with "Fit The Best - Everest"? Remember the Weetabix gang? Remember the Scotch video tape skeleton ("Re-record, not fade away"?). Remember the romantic yuppie couple in the coffee ads? And what about "Lotta Bottle"?

In fact, the '80s totally transformed our telly viewing, bringing us Channel 4 and Sky TV.

The '80s were a fascinating time for science and technology! Video recorders became widespread, the Sony Walkman arrived, the first hand-held mobile phones hit the streets (expensive analogue bricks!), the ZX Spectrum, Game Boy and the World Wide Web (Thanks, Sir Tim Berners-Lee!) were invented, the first computer mouse eeked its way into our homes and Sir Alec Jeffreys accidentally discovered DNA fingerprinting. It's all here!

There are also also '80s Actual sister blogs taking us back to the '70s and '60s - The Real 1970s and Spacehopper.

The view of the 1980s presented here is from an English perspective - much of the original '80s material used is from England, but I hope this blog will prove useful and enjoyable to people in the other nations of the UK and much further afield.