A 1980s Childhood (6 page)

Bono from U2 at the Isle of Calf Festival during the War Tour in 1983. Note the mullet haircut.
(Courtesy of Helge Øverås/Wikimedia Commons)

By the early 1980s the band had embarked on a worldwide tour and produced yet more number one hits, like
Don’t Stand So Close to Me
and
Every Little Thing She Does is Magic
; they also released two more albums, Zenyatta Mondatta and Ghost in the Machine, the latter being an album title which reflected Sting’s literary knowledge from his early career as a secondary school English teacher.

Sting became a huge star in his own right and began to spend more and more time developing his interest in acting; but as Sting’s fame rose, his relationship with band founder Stewart Copeland deteriorated. In 1983 the band produced its final studio album Synchronicity, before entering a hiatus period and eventually disbanding with each member going on to pursue a solo career.

I still can’t believe my mum bought the 7-inch record
Agadoo
by Black Lace; I mean, what was she thinking? And what was everyone else thinking when they bought the record? It is, after all, the worst song of all time by far, and I cannot begin to understand how the song made it to number two in the UK charts or why it stayed in the top seventy-five for thirty weeks.

If we trace the origins of the song right back to the beginning, we can reassuringly blame the French who first recorded it as
Agadou
in 1971. The French, however, deny ownership of the song and claim that it originally came from Morocco, but in the absence of any strong evidence to support this, I’m choosing to blame the French.

It is to my shame that I still remember the lyrics and the dance moves to this day:

Ag-a-doo-doo-doo, push pineapple, shake the tree,

Aga-doo-doo-doo, push pineapple, grind coffee,

To the left, to the right, jump up and down and to the knees,

Come and dance every night, sing with a hula melody.

While Black Lace will always be remembered for
Agadoo
, they did record a number of other songs with moderate success, including the UK’s Eurovision Song Contest entry in 1979,
Mary Anne
, a song called
Superman
, which reached number nine in the UK charts in 1982, and
Do the Conga
, which made it to number ten in 1984. They also recorded a string of other lightweight and cheesy songs but most of them never made it into the charts.

Now, before you get
Agadoo
stuck in your head and end up humming it all day, I suggest you cleanse your mind by moving on to something completely different. How about a nice look at the TV and movies of the 1980s in the next chapter?

When I think about the hundreds of television programmes and movies I fondly remember from the 1980s, I’m really not sure how I managed to find the time to watch them all since I spent the majority of the decade staring vacantly out of a classroom window at school. And when I wasn’t at school, I remember spending an awful lot of time playing outside with my friends on our skateboards and BMXs, making camps in the woods or bouncing aimlessly around the garden on an old Space Hopper. And when I wasn’t outdoors playing, I would be indoors playing Horace and the Spiders on my ZX Spectrum computer, Top Trumps with my brothers or board games like Buckaroo, Operation and Ker-Plunk. So how did I fit in so much TV viewing as well?

Somehow I managed to watch literally hundreds of television programmes and films in the 1980s, and while I would dearly love to share my memories of each and every one of them with you, I’m going to have to cherry-pick a few of my favourites since there is simply not enough room in this book to cover them all. At the end of the chapter I’ve included a full list of the best TV shows and movies of the 1980s which should bring back a few memories.

At the beginning of the 1980s I was a chubby 3-year-old bearing an uncanny resemblance to Ronnie Barker (according to my dad) and consequently, my memories of 1980s television begin with children’s programmes before moving on to some more grown-up television.

One of the first new children’s television programmes to air in the 1980s was the quirky kitchen-utensil-based puppet show called
Button Moon
. Each episode lasted ten minutes and featured the exploits of Mr Spoon as he left his home on Junk Planet and travelled to Button Moon in his spaceship, which was made of a baked bean tin with a funnel on top. Usually, after landing on Button Moon, which hung in Blanket Sky, Mr Spoon would look through his telescope at someone and have some kind of adventure with his wife Mrs Spoon, his daughter Tina Tea-Spoon and her friend Eggbert. On returning home, the programme would finish with the catchy and slightly melancholy song:

We’ve been to Button Moon, we’ve followed Mr Spoon,

Button Moon, Button Moon. We’ve been to Button Moon,

Button Moon … Be back soon! Button Moon.

An equally peculiar programme around this time was
The Flumps
, an animated story about friendly, hat-wearing fur balls, usually shown just after
Pebble Mill at One
. If you remember anything about
The Flumps
, chances are you will remember the theme tune played by Grandpa Flump on his flumpet (not a trumpet, you understand, a flumpet – there’s a world of difference). Poor Grandpa Flump’s single pleasure in life was playing the theme song on his flumpet, but he was too noisy for the other Flumps who would shut him up by sticking a carrot in the end of it. Father Flump reminded me of my own dad since he was furry and spent most of his time digging in the garden, and Mother Flump was the stereotypical housewife usually cooking or cleaning around the house. Mother and Father Flump had three children, Perkin, Posie and Pootle. Pootle was the youngest and was always getting things wrong and ending up confused, like the time he thought the moon had fallen into a bucket of water, not realising it was just a reflection.

While we were still trying to make sense of
The Flumps
, a strange family of Fuzzy Felt, hippo-like creatures with huge round snouts called
The Moomins
appeared on our television screens to addle our young minds further.
The Moomins
was the eccentric creation of Finnish author Tove Jansson and they were a family of trolls who lived in a house in Moominvalley, deep in the forests of Finland. Moominmama and Moominpappa had a Moomin son called Moomintroll and during their many adventures they would encounter other characters such as Moomintroll’s best friend, the Snork Maiden; Snufkin, the pipe-smoking old man; Sorry-oo, the mournful dog; Little My and The Hemulen. These and the many other strange denizens of Moominvalley had a number of adventures together, as well as assisting each other against the dangers posed by various villainous creatures, including the terrifying Groke, the Hattifatteners who lived on electricity, and the bad-tempered Sand Lion.

Fraggle Rock
was a live-action puppet show created by Jim Henson. It featured Muppet-like characters called fraggles that lived in a network of caves within Fraggle Rock which was located underneath a lighthouse. The main characters were Gobo, the leader; Mokey, a far-out hippie type; Red, an exuberant and athletic fraggle; Wembley, the indecisive one (or was he?); and Boober, a depressed and worried fraggle that enjoyed washing socks. It was certainly strange that Boober enjoyed washing socks, but it was stranger still when you realised that none of the fraggles actually wore socks.

These peaceful and playful furry critters would spend most of their time stealing radishes from the garden of the giant Gorgs and avoiding being caught by them. Sometimes, while in the Gorgs’ garden, the fraggles would talk to Marjory the Trash Heap, a kind of wise oracle made out of garden waste who would give the fraggles advice. At other times the fraggles would eat the elaborate structures constructed by the small, green creatures called the Doozers. The only one from the real world who knew about the existence of the fraggles was the lighthouse keeper’s dog Sprocket, who would spot Gobo when he came out to collect postcards from Uncle Travelling Matt, the globe-trotting fraggle.

A shell-suited and blinged-up Jimmy Savile used to host this Saturday teatime show which featured members of the public writing in to ask for help achieving their dreams. The handwritten letter would be shown on the screen as a voice narrated: ‘Dear Jim’ll, please could you fix it for the 2nd Sutton St Mary’s Cub Scouts to have a meal in an unusual place?’ You may well remember this episode which resulted in a group of the aforementioned Cub Scouts being sent to Blackpool Pleasure Beach with a packed lunch to eat as they rode the Revolution rollercoaster, with hilarious consequences. Some of the other more memorable requests included one young viewer briefly becoming the third drummer for Adam and the Ants and a young girl ‘accidentally’ dropping a seemingly valuable vase on an episode of the
Antiques Roadshow
in order to enjoy the audience reaction.

After having their wishes granted they were presented with a ‘Jim fixed it for me’ medal which Jim would produce from a secret compartment inside his magic chair.

Treasure Hunt
was the TV show that launched jumpsuit-clad Anneka Rice into the public consciousness. The bubbly blonde would fly from location to location in a helicopter, making small talk with the camera while the studio team used maps and reference books to solve cryptic clues that would lead to the location of the treasure. In the studio, presenter Kenneth Kendal and weathergirl Wincey Willis tried to support the guest treasure hunters as best they could and kept the show on track and on time. Once the studio team had identified the correct location, the helicopter would land and Anneka Rice would bounce out and run off at great speed to find the next clue. Since the clues often made no sense to anyone other than the locals, Anneka would inevitably end up grabbing confused passers-by and asking for their assistance. Legendary cameraman Graham had to keep up with Anneka, running just as fast as her with a heavy shoulder-mounted camera, and he became an unexpected star of the show as he often appeared in front of the camera lens to wipe away rain and sea spray. Much of poor Graham’s footage comprised shots of Anneka Rice’s jumpsuited backside as he attempted to follow her from location to location.

Gordon Burns famously hosted this mental and physical challenge show which involved putting contestants through a series of gruelling logic tests and assault courses. First up was the Mental Agility Round in which the contestants had to answer mind-bending questions; this was followed by the Response Round, which involved trying to land an aeroplane in a flight simulator. The Observation Round was always my favourite and involved watching a video clip and then answering questions like ‘What was the colour of the glove on the table?’

Physical Ability was the round that saw the contestants each take to an army assault course, during which they would brave rope swings, water jumps and endure a zip-wire slide into water. After this came the Intelligence Round, in which various odd-shaped pieces would have to be put together to fit a rectangular grid or other shape; some of these puzzles were so fiendish that they took 15–20 minutes to complete. On one occasion, the contestants’ tables were placed too close together which meant that they accidentally picked up pieces from each others’ tables, making it impossible to complete the puzzle. Nearly an hour went by as they tried in vain to solve the puzzle before someone finally realised what had happened.

The last round, General Knowledge, was a series of quick-fire questions which concluded the show and led to Gordon Burns adding up the scores and announcing the name of the winning contestant. The well-known theme tune to
The Krypton Factor
was played by the Art of Noise.

‘Can I have a “P” please, Bob?’ Oh, how funny we used to think that was!
Blockbusters
was a game show presented by Bob Holness in which contestants had to answer trivia questions in order to complete a path across or down the game board which was made of hexagons. Answering questions correctly didn’t guarantee you success, though, since there was a fiendish strategy involved in crossing the playing board and preventing your opponent from getting to the other side first.

Sometimes the pressure would be too much for the nervous contestants, who would blurt out the most ridiculous and inappropriate answers, such as, ‘What “O” is the generic word for any living animal or plant, including bacteria and viruses?’ The contestant confidently replied, ‘Orgasm’, before realising the enormity of his momentary lapse.

Blockbusters
was so popular it spawned an array of associated merchandise, including the Waddington’s board game which I thoroughly enjoyed playing with my family – ‘Can I have a “P” please, mum?’ Snigger.