Do you remember trying to solve the Rubik’s cube whilst dressed in your He-Man picture pyjamas? Did you try to make ‘cool’ sound effects with your mouth like Jones from Police Academy? If that sounds like you, there’s no mistaking you were a child of the 1980s. This is an unashamedly biased collection of the things that I remember, the way I remember them and, because there’s nowhere near enough space for me to catalogue everything from the eighties, I’ve selected the things that I found most memorable or meant something special to me.
5. The ZX Spectrum 48k Computer
I still remember the excitement and awe I felt as I played an actual full blown flight simulator on the little rubber-keyed ZX Spectrum – quite an impressive feat for such a tiny computer with just 48k of RAM and a diminutive 3.5MHz processor. Whilst the Speccy was a fantastic computer, it did require a fair amount of patience since games were loaded on audio cassette, often taking several minutes of rapidly flashing, stripy loading screens, and frequently ending with the painfully familiar message “R TAPE LOADING ERROR”. Still, when you did get the games to load they were amazing and included such classics as Head Over Heels, Rainbow Islands and Dizzy.
4. The Chicken Song
Peculiarly popular pop song Agadoo by Black Lace was the inspiration for Spitting Image’s parody called The Chicken Song. Every child of the ’80s will remember at least a few of these lyrics:
Hold a chicken in the air
Stick a deckchair up your nose
Buy a jumbo jet
And then bury all your clothes
Paint your left knee green
Then extract your wisdom teeth
Form a string quartet
And pretend your name is Keith
I remember my whole class singing along to this over and over again on a school coach trip until the teacher could take it no more and forbade us to sing it ever again.
3. The Raleigh Grifter
At the weekends my friends and I would take our bikes up to the dirt ramps in the woods and pretend we were Evel Knievel doing spectacular jumps over the Grand Canyon. Whilst my friends soared gracefully through the air on their lightweight BMX bikes, my leaden Raleigh Grifter stayed firmly planted on the ground ploughing through every obstacle like a runaway train. Whilst the Grifter was one of the heaviest children’s bicycles ever made, it’s cumbersome weight and twist-grip three speed gears made it feel more like a real motorbike than a bicycle, especially when I added a rear view mirror to it!
2. Back to the Future
For me this was the defining film of the 1980s and one that I still watch whenever it’s repeated on the telly. Michael J. Fox stars as the super cool Marty McFly, whose eccentric professor friend Dr Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) invents a time machine in the guise of a DeLorean sports car. After accidentally being sent back in time to the 1950s, Marty inadvertently diverts the course of history and ends up trying to persuade his teenage parents to meet and fall in love. The combination of fast-paced adventure and pumping ’80s soundtrack provided by Huey Lewis and the News make this an unforgettable ’80s movie.
1. The Mullet Haircut
A bizarre phenomenon of the 1980s was that lots of men (and even some women) began to grow their hair long at the back whilst keeping the top and front short or spiky. The resulting disaster was the mullet haircut perhaps most notably sported by cheesy celebrities Pat Sharpe and Ian McShane a.k.a Lovejoy, the loveable rogue antiques dealer. I remember watching Lovejoy and thinking how cool he looked with his stonewash denim jeans, cowboy boots, leather jacket and mullet haircut. How wrong I was, and how glad I am my mum never let me grow my own mullet!
Michael A. Johnson is the creator of www.DoYouRemember.co.uk and the author of A 1980s Childhood. Rev up your DeLorean, switch on the Flux Capacitor and take a cruise back through the decade that made you the person you are today. This amusing and entertaining collection of reminiscences will jog the memories of all who grew up in the same decade where greed was good, mullets were cool and white dog poo littered the streets.
Do you agree that the ZX Spectrum deserves to be number 5 or should it be even higher? What are your best (or worst!) memories of the 1980s?