A 1980s Childhood (14 page)

While Sony was the first to the market with its Walkman, it wasn’t long before a range of competing products arrived and I remember just how thrilled I was when I was given a bright red Bush personal stereo one Christmas. It came with a pair of large headband-type headphones with orange foam padding for the ears and it had graphic equaliser sliders on the side and a button called ‘boost’, or something similar that essentially toggled the device between sounding disastrously terrible and somewhat acceptable. Despite being a portable stereo player, it was a tad on the large side and when it was clipped to my waistband it nearly pulled my trousers down. An unusual ‘feature’ of my personal stereo was the way the pitch of the music changed in time with the movement of my walk. The slight jolt of each footstep would create a wobble in the music so that it sounded like a warped record and as the batteries gradually ran down, the music became slower and deeper and ultimately made the Bee Gees sound like they were singing in normal voices.

I remember my dad reading me an article in the
Daily Express
in the 1980s about how some day we would no longer go into music shops like Our Price and buy cassette tapes with music albums on them. Instead, we would take our Walkman into the shop, plug it into a machine on the wall and ‘download’ the individual songs we wanted directly onto our own blank cassettes. Well, they got the downloading bit right I suppose, but back then we just couldn’t see how anything could surpass the cassette tape.

The huge popularity of the personal stereo meant that compact audio cassettes received a significant boost in sales, finally putting paid to their ageing predecessor, the eight-track tape. And while the audio cassette was in its heyday, the video cassette also entered its prime after a decade of preparation.

The video cassette first appeared in a commercial format in 1971 when Sony invented the U-matic system comprising an enormous wood-panelled video recorder with cassette tapes that were slightly larger than standard VHS cassettes. This was undoubtedly a very desirable piece of technology, but few people could afford the $1,395 price tag which equates to over $7,000 today. Over the next few years, more competing formats were introduced and prices were driven down to the point when, in the late 1970s, people began to buy, or more frequently rent, the still very expensive video equipment. The famous format war between Sony’s Betamax system and JVC’s VHS system meant that there were two competing video cassette formats for a number of years; Sony fought a brave battle but ultimately conceded defeat in 1988 when they finally gave in and began producing VHS recording equipment.

I remember the excitement of our first video recorder with great clarity. My dad returned home one day staggering under the weight of an enormous wood-panelled VHS recorder which looked like a very sturdy and solid piece of equipment indeed. The buttons were large and heavy and made a reassuring thud when pressed and it came with a plug-in remote control with a coiled cable and a protective dust cover to keep it in pristine condition.

My dad pushed the eject button to open the cassette tray and with a loud clunk and crash the top of the video recorder sprung open to allow him to insert a VHS cassette. He showed us how you could record live television and then noisily rewind it and play it back; how you could pause the picture and how you could watch pre-recorded films from the video rental shop. Every weekend we would rent a film from the shop in town and come home and watch it. Then we would rewind it and watch it again. Then we would go to bed, wake up early and watch it again before taking it back to the video shop. Unfortunately, the video recorder was so noisy on account of its durable construction that our early morning film sessions woke my parents up, with the loud clunk-whirr-clunk noise when rewinding the tape, alerting them to our repeated viewing of the ladies’ shower scene in
Police Academy
.

One of the early RCA VHS camcorders. Imagine lugging this baby around with you on holiday.
(Courtesy of Darian Hildebrand)

As the video cassette recorder (VCR) was taking its place in a growing number of households, Sony released the first consumer camcorder in 1983 which allowed people to record video footage that could be played back on their televisions. Prior to the invention of camcorders, the only way most people had been able to record moving pictures was by using old-fashioned and expensive cine cameras, which then had to be played back on a reel-to-reel projector. With a camcorder you could record your family holidays and watch them back on the television. Or, you could film a crazy professor time-travelling in a DeLorean, like Michael J. Fox did in
Back to the Future
. In fact, if you watch that scene in
Back to the Future
again, you’ll get a good idea of what the first camcorders were like. They were huge shoulder-mounted things that made you look like you were filming an outside broadcast for the local news station.

Gradually, improvements in technology meant that the camcorders became smaller and more affordable, and before long they had become so popular and widespread that a whole new genre of television show emerged at the end of the decade where people sent in their funny home videos, mainly of people falling over. Although no one realised it at the time, this was the beginning of the YouTube generation where people started to film themselves instead of just watching other people on the television. All of a sudden, unsigned bands could produce their own low-budget/no-budget music videos using hideous pixelated transition effects, wannabe actors and singers could show off their talents and my brothers and I could record ourselves re-enacting Monty Python sketches.

YouTube was still twenty years away in the future so there was no easy way of sharing your home videos with the rest of the world yet, but that didn’t stop us recording hours and hours of pointless nonsense on to little VHS-C cassettes that could only be viewed by putting them inside a special motorised VHS cassette adapter that you could play in your VCR. In fact, I still have a collection of these little tapes in a cupboard somewhere but have no way of watching them since I have neither the VHS adapter anymore nor a VCR to watch them on. Probably just as well really, since I imagine it would be painfully embarrassing and possibly incriminating watching these with my family now.

With all this talk about CDs, Walkmen, VCRs and camcorders, you would be forgiven for thinking that the technological advances of the 1980s were confined to the improvement of our home entertainment, but in fact this was just one aspect of a technology revolution that was touching virtually every aspect of our lives. The eighties was a time when the research and development of the previous decades came into fruition in a very visible and practical way.

Take, for instance, the telephone system which had remained largely unchanged since its introduction almost 100 years earlier. Sure, there were a lot more phones now and the switchboards had become automated, but basically the system was the same. You dialled a number and you spoke to someone at the other end. That was it; there was no need to change the system because it worked beautifully. Back in 1980 my parents still had one of those telephones with an old-fashioned circular dial on the front that you wound round to dial the numbers, and this was fairly typical of many households at that time. A few ‘trendy’ people had replaced their old phones with fancy schmancy Trimphones that had a digital warble for a ringer instead of a mechanical bell, and some show-offs had bought expensive answering machines, but that was about as advanced as it got.

Early in the 1980s, though, Sony and a number of other manufacturers began to shake things up when they introduced the very first cordless telephones for the consumer market. Awkward teenagers everywhere could now slope off to their bedrooms, taking the telephone with them, to have their grunted conversations in private rather than next to the telephone within earshot of their parents. What many teenagers didn’t realise, however, was that the early analogue cordless phones could easily be listened in to by any radio amateur and their supposedly secret conversations were probably being overheard by their nosey next-door neighbour.

Until the introduction of the cordless telephone, if you wanted to have a telephone conversation you had to stand right next to the telephone or risk severe entanglement with the coiled cable if you dared to try walking while talking. Now you could walk around with the telephone and had the freedom to even take it outside and have a conversation in your garden if you wanted to. Of course, some people took this freedom to unpalatable extremes and started taking their cordless phone with them into the bathroom and would have conversations with friends or family while seated on the lavatory. They might have thought no one knew where they were, but the tell-tale echoey background noise gave the game away.

Time to upgrade my mobile phone, I reckon. This stylish beauty is an AEG Telecar CD 452.
(Courtesy of Christos Vittoratos/Wikimedia Commons)

The cordless phone was a precursor to the mobile phone and it wasn’t until people began using cordless phones that they realised just how useful it would be if they could take their telephones out and about with them wherever they were. If you wanted to make a telephone call while away from home, you had to use one of the many red public telephone boxes dotted around the country. This was all very well if you found a telephone box that hadn’t been vandalised and happened to have a big, old-fashioned ten pence piece with you, but otherwise you were stuck.

Fortunately, the technology industry was one step ahead and had already been thinking about this problem for some time, and by 1985 the necessary infrastructure was in place to launch the UK’s mobile network. At a few minutes past midnight on 1 January 1985, the very first mobile phone call in the UK was made by fledgling telecoms group Vodafone, heralding the beginning of yet another technological revolution.

The first mobile phones were amazing pieces of equipment that were hugely expensive and even more hugely proportioned. Motorola’s DynaTAC 8000X was over a foot long and weighed in at almost 2lb, with an original asking price of $3,995. If you want to see an authentic DynaTAC in action, check out Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film
Wall Street
. Don’t worry, you’ll know it when you see it – there’s no missing it!

Nokia’s first mobile phone, the Mobira Senator, was even worse than the DynaTAC, comprising a telephone and separate base station that weighed in at 21lb altogether, although in fairness this was designed to be used in a car.

The prohibitive cost of the mobile phones themselves and the exorbitant call charges meant the mobile industry was initially patronised by wealthy yuppies, who saw the mobile phone as a status symbol, and big businesses that could justify the costs. For many businesses the benefits of being able to communicate with their employees wherever they were outweighed the enormous costs involved, but a lot of businesses still preferred to use pagers as a cheaper alternative. Pagers were introduced way back in the 1950s but it wasn’t until the 1980s that they really reached the peak of their popularity – particularly in the USA. For some reason pagers never really caught on in the UK, but if you look at any 1980s American movie, it would seem that all business people wore pagers attached to their belt and were often paged at the most inappropriate times.

For some, the cheapest communication solution wasn’t pagers or mobile phones but Citizen Band (CB) radios which cost nothing to use except the licence fee. Although CB radio had been widely used in America since 1945, the British government strangely refused to legalise CB radio on 27MHz until November 1981, after a series of high-profile public demonstrations. CB radio instantly became popular with truckers, farmers and taxi drivers, among others, who used the service for professional purposes; and a huge number of hobbyists took to the airwaves no doubt inspired by Rubber Duck and his friends from the 1978 film
Convoy
and the 1977 film
Smokey and the Bandit
. Throughout the 1980s CB radios became widespread and foreshadowed internet chat rooms which were to appear in the late 1990s. CB users would chat to strangers on a wide range of subjects and, in common with internet chat rooms, developed their own unique slang vocabulary. Each person on the CB radio had their own ‘handle’, which was their nickname, and seemed to spend a lot of time saying ‘ten-four’ which was an unnecessarily complicated way of saying ‘yes’ or ‘OK’. To the uninitiated, an exchange of dialogue between two breakers (CB users) sounded like gibberish, but truckers in particular understood each other perfectly and knew that eyeballing a spliced seat cover could get them in trouble. If you’re not sure what that means, do a bit of Googling for a guide to CB slang.