A 1980s Childhood

by Michael A. Johnson

  Barbara Woodhouse

  I’m still slightly confused about Barbara Woodhouse. There’s no doubt she was an interesting person and an experienced animal trainer, but quite how she managed to secure a BBC prime-time slot on Saturday evenings for her series Training Dogs the Woodhouse Way, I really don’t know. Having spent most of her life as a horse trainer, dog breeder and kennel owner, she first appeared on television on the programme What’s My Line?, a game show where panellists had to guess her occupation. Although they failed to correctly guess what she did, something about her indomitable, eccentric, schoolmistress personality seemed to appeal to the general public, or perhaps it was her tweed skirts and sensible shoes, I don’t know. Whatever it was, she instantly became a hit and her weekly dog training TV show made her a household name in the early eighties.

  Barbara Woodhouse was best known for her catchphrases ‘Sit!’ and ‘Walkies!’ both pronounced in the most forceful and frightening manner guaranteed to subdue her canine pupils as well as their owners. A stern hand gesture accompanied the ‘sit!’ command and if the dog’s owners didn’t perform the gesture correctly or pronounce the catchphrase forcefully enough they would be severely chastised by Mrs Woodhouse. In fact, I seem to remember Barbara Woodhouse spending more time training the dog’s owners than she did training the dogs themselves, and she always explained that there were no such things as bad dogs, only inexperienced owners.

  Having become something of a sensation with a reputation for being able to tame even the most badly behaved dogs (and their owners), Barbara Woodhouse was summoned to Hollywood to perform her magic on the pooches of the rich and famous, including those of Britt Ekland, Zsa Zsa Gabor, David Soul and William Shatner, among others. However, the highlight of her career, in my opinion, was when she was asked to advertise eggs for the British Egg Marketing Board. Barbara was filmed reclining in her armchair telling us to show eggs who’s boss. She then violently attacked a boiled egg with a teaspoon as she reeled off the catchphrase, ‘Go smash an egg!’ Genius!

  Rod Hull and Emu (and Grotbags)

  My earliest memories of Rod Hull and Emu come drifting back to me from the children’s television series Emu’s World, in which Rod and a relatively sedate Emu would entertain a group of children visiting the Pink Windmill where the pair were supposed to live. Every week the doorbell would ring (or rather make a sneezing sound) and Rod Hull would chant the catchphrase, ‘there’s somebody at the door, there’s somebody at the door’, before opening it to find a green-faced, overweight witch called Grotbags who was intent on stealing Emu. Why he opened the door each week is anyone’s guess since we all knew it was going to be Grotbags and her useless assistants: a cowardly crocodile unimaginatively named Croc and a robot butler rather strangely named Robert Redford.

  Grotbags would proceed to terrorise the children by pointing at them with her ‘bazzazzer’, a gold-coloured fake arm with an umbrella handle at one end, activating it by shouting ‘Bazzazz!’ Fortunately, the bazzazzer was completely harmless and never inflicted any injury on the children, but it did double up as a kind of mobile phone for Grotbags, which was handy.

  At this point I should backtrack a little and explain that prior to Emu’s World, Rod Hull and Emu had been performing together since the early 1970s and had become highly successful with adult audiences as well as with children. The Emu puppet became well known for its highly aggressive personality that caused havoc when it attacked people without provocation; meanwhile, Rod would make a pantomime of trying to hold back the uncontrollable blue bird, often rolling on the floor or on top of the victim in the process. It was one of those things you watched with a mixture of horror and fascination and made you laugh nervously, wondering what the crazy man was going to do next. There seemed to be no boundaries for Emu’s outrageous behaviour. Not only did Emu knock Michael Parkinson off his chair during an interview, he also destroyed the Queen Mother’s bouquet of flowers during the after-show line-up at the Royal Variety Performance, and attacked Richard Pryor on The Tonight Show shortly after Pryor had undergone major emergency surgery. Not everyone saw the funny side of Emu, though, and Billy Connolly threatened to break the bird’s neck and Rod Hull’s arm if they came anywhere near him on the Parkinson show.

  I had an Emu puppet as a child and would attack my brothers with it occasionally, but for some reason I never got away with it. If Rod Hull did it, everyone thought it was funny, but if I did it I got sent to my room. Not fair.

  The Roly Polys

  Imagine a group of five fat, middle-aged women dressed in sequined cabaret costumes singing and dancing badly to show tunes. No, seriously, just picture it for a moment. This was the image that hit television screens and stages across the country in 1982 after Les Dawson and Ernest Maxim dreamt up the act for a BBC television series. There was no accounting for their tremendous success which saw them become guest stars on countless television shows and led to a long-running career on stage supporting cabaret and comedy acts such as Cannon and Ball and Frank Carson.

  Sylvester Stallone in 1983 sporting a pair of highly fashionable Aviator sunglasses. (Courtesy of Alan Light/Wikimedia Commons)

  The larger-than-life ladies would skip, strut and tap dance their way across the stage, often incorporating elements of comedy, involving deliberate mistakes or improbable and unpleasant dance moves such as pelvic thrusts. Leading lady Mo Moreland became such a notable character in her own right that she was eventually the subject of This is Your Life.

  Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks

  If someone told you that you were going to have to wrestle with an overweight, middle-aged man in a leotard called Shirley Crabtree, you might be forgiven for thinking you had a decent chance of winning. But if you knew that Shirley Crabtree was the real name of Big Daddy, one of the best-loved British wrestlers of all time, you might want to think again. Dressed in his signature Union Jack jacket and glittery top hat, the 6ft 2in, 26 stone wrestler from Halifax was someone you really wouldn’t want to mess with.

  Big Daddy’s arch rival was Martin Ruane, a 6ft 11in giant of a man weighing in at 48 stone, known in the wrestling world as Giant Haystacks, and the pair famously had a long-running feud which resulted in high ratings on ITV any time they battled each other. Wrestling mania swept the country in the 1970s and 1980s and attracted enormous viewing audiences of all ages. Even little old ladies would be seen at the ringside screaming at Big Daddy to pound his opponent to oblivion. Sadly, that’s exactly what did happen in 1987, when Big Daddy delivered his trademark ‘belly-splash’ move on his opponent Mal ‘King Kong’ Kirk. Kirk never recovered from the belly-splash move and was rushed to hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival. The inquest later found that Kirk’s death was the result of an existing heart condition and while Big Daddy was cleared of any responsibility, he blamed himself for Kirk’s death and bowed out of professional wrestling.

  Big Daddy was seen a few more times into the early 1990s, mainly appearing in tag team matches, but he had removed his belly-splash move from the routine altogether and chose to simply stand firm as his opponents attempted to body-charge him, usually just bouncing off his enormous belly. Giant Haystacks continued to wrestle internationally under the ring name The Loch Ness Monster, or simply Loch Ness, until he became ill and died in the late nineties leaving an enormous haystack-shaped hole in the heart of the wrestling world.

  Dave Lee Travis

  Some remember him as DLT, some remember him as The Hairy Cornflake and some remember him as ‘that bearded bloke from Radio One that resigned live on air’. However you remember him, Dave Lee Travis was one of the most popular Radio One presenters of the 1980s, hosting numerous different shows over the years. He was responsible for coining the catchphrase ‘comin’ atcha through the cornflakes’, the bizarre sound effect ‘quack quack oops!’ and introducing the nation to the concept of radio snooker.

  Personally, I remember him as the bloke that hosted the Radio One Roadshow in the eighties, touring t
he nation in a large truck with drop-down sides that doubled up as a stage. On the sides of the truck were the blue and red Radio One logo and the numbers 275/285, which was the station frequency at the time (they didn’t broadcast on FM until 1988). A selection of mediocre musicians would tour with them and perform their latest hits on the truck/stage, while the disproportionately excited audience were supplied with Radio One hats, t-shirts and various other poptastic goodies.

  It came as something of a surprise in 1993 when Dave Lee Travis resigned live on air, complaining about changes afoot at Radio One that he wasn’t happy about telling listeners: ‘… and I really want to put the record straight at this point and I thought you ought to know – changes are being made here which go against my principles and I just cannot agree with them.’ It turns out he was going to be retired in a few weeks anyway so it was probably a good chance to get in there first and pretend it was all his idea.

  The Hairy Cornflake left Radio One with his big, hairy head held high and moved on to new pastures which included a spell at Classic Gold Radio followed by a brief stint working for the Army’s Garrison Radio. He then spent a few years on BBC Three Counties Radio and a whopping twenty years presenting a show on the BBC World Service. The Burmese pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who spent fifteen years under house arrest from 1989, told the BBC that Dave Lee Travis’s show on the World Service had made her ‘world much more complete’.

  John Candy

  Never has the phrase ‘larger than life’ been more appropriate than when describing John Candy, the plus-size, loveable Canadian actor. Born in 1950, Candy began acting at an early age and appeared in his first movies in the early 1970s in fairly low-key roles. By the early eighties, Candy’s career was picking up and he was offered more significant roles in the films Stripes, Heavy Metal and National Lampoon’s Vacation, before appearing in what many consider to be his breakout role as Tom Hank’s womanising brother in the romantic comedy Splash.

  Candy went on to appear in a number of successful eighties movies, including Brewster’s Millions and Little Shop of Horrors, before co-starring alongside Steve Martin in the classic John Hughes comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Candy plays Del Griffith, a talkative, travelling, shower-curtain ring salesman of no fixed abode who befriends Neal Page (Martin) during a business trip. The unlikely pair embark on a long-winded journey together in an attempt to get to Chicago in time for Thanksgiving, enduring numerous setbacks along the way, mainly thanks to the well-meaning but accident-prone antics of Griffith.

  Two years later in 1989, John Candy starred in the under-rated comedy Who’s Harry Crumb? as a bumbling and inept private investigator hired to look into a kidnapping case. But for me, Candy’s defining role came in the same year when he played Uncle Buck in the eponymously titled film. Uncle Buck tells the story of Bob and his wife Cindy and their three children Tia, Miles and Maizy. Cindy’s father is unwell and both Bob and Cindy need to spend a few days away visiting him so they desperately look for a babysitter to take care of the children; they finally agree to ask Bob’s brother Buck to do the honours. With some trepidation, Bob and Cindy leave the children with Buck knowing that he is a lazy, unemployed gambler who smokes, drinks and earns a living betting on rigged horse races. Despite Buck’s outward appearance, he has a heart of gold and looks after the children wonderfully in his own unique style. This involves taking the kids to Buck’s favourite bowling alley, beating up a drunken clown at a child’s birthday party and intimidating Tia’s no-good boyfriend with a hatchet.

  Miles, the middle child, is played by Macaulay Culkin in one of his earliest movie appearances, and it is his role in Uncle Buck that inspired the concept for the film Home Alone. Geeky film-spotters will notice numerous similarities between the two films which are both written by John Hughes. Not only is Macaulay Culkin’s character extremely similar in both, but there are a number of scenes in Uncle Buck, including the interrogation scene and the letterbox scene, which are clearly reflected in Home Alone. In Home Alone John Candy’s role as Gus Polinski ‘the Polka King of the Mid-West’ is clearly inspired by his earlier character Del Griffith from Planes, Trains and Automobiles (also written by John Hughes).

  Somewhat typecast as a loquacious but lovable character, Candy went on to appear in a number of other films, but sadly his movie career was cut short when he died of a heart attack in 1994.

  Ronald Reagan

  Ronald Wilson Reagan was the fortieth President of the United States of America holding office between 1981 and 1989. Born in 1911, Reagan first worked as a radio broadcaster before starting his career as an actor, appearing in over fifty movies and becoming a well-known public figure prior to his involvement in politics. In 1967 he was elected thirty-third Governor of California, a role later filled by movie actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and in the 1980 presidential elections he defeated incumbent Jimmy Carter, taking office on 20 January 1981 as the new President of the United States.

  US President Ronald Reagan in 1983 doing a fine impersonation of his Spitting Image puppet. (Public Domain)

  As president, Reagan introduced dramatic new political and economic initiatives, including the reduction of taxes to promote economic growth, the reduction of government spending and the deregulation of the economy. After only sixty-nine days as president, Reagan was nearly killed in an assassination attempt that left him, his press secretary James Brady, police officer Thomas Delahanty and Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy seriously injured. Miraculously, Reagan survived the incident, as did all his colleagues, and he came to believe that God had spared his life so that he might go on to fulfil a greater purpose. As it happens, the incident had a great influence on Reagan’s popularity polls which peaked at 73 per cent after the shooting and he went on to complete two terms in office.

  Princess Diana

  Very little introduction is needed for one of the most famous women of all time, Diana the Princess of Wales. Following her official engagement to Prince Charles on 24 February 1981, the blushing 19-year-old was wrenched from obscurity and thrust into the public spotlight. The wedding took place at St Paul’s Cathedral in front of a congregation of 3,500, while 600,000 spectators lined the streets outside. This was dwarfed, however, by the 750 million viewers around the world who watched the event on TV, making it the most popular programme ever broadcast at the time.

  Just months after the wedding Diana became pregnant and gave birth to her first son William on 21 June 1982; a second son, Harry, was born on 15 September 1984. What the public didn’t realise at this stage was that Prince Charles’s long-running relationship with Camilla Parker-Bowles was already putting a strain on his marriage to Diana and as the marital relationship broke down, so too did Diana’s relations with the rest of the royal family.

  Throughout her marriage to Charles, Princess Diana was heavily involved in charity work making countless appearances at hospitals, schools and other facilities, taking a particular interest in charitable work relating to serious illnesses such as AIDS and leprosy. She became well known for her compassionate nature and demonstrated a fragile and sensitive personality that was troubled by depression and eating disorders.

  Her marriage to Prince Charles broke down irrevocably and in 1992 the couple announced their formal separation. Having become the most famous and photographed woman in the world, Diana found it impossible to escape the intrusion of the paparazzi and it wasn’t long before her relationship with Dodi Al-Fayed hit the headlines, along with intimate photographs of Diana and Dodi together on holiday.

  As we all know, the story had a tragic ending with Diana and Dodi being killed in a high-speed car accident in Paris on 31 August 1997, leaving the nation to mourn the loss of the ‘people’s princess’.

  Cannon and Ball

  Back in the 1980s, when Cannon and Ball had their own TV show, I remember thinking that they weren’t particularly funny, but I was so young then I probably didn’t get their jokes. It wasn’t until many years later, when I lo
oked back at their shows, that I discovered I was right all along – they’re not particularly funny. I was never a fan, but some people obviously liked them because they had 17 million viewers at their peak and were the highest paid act in British comedy in the eighties.

  The comedy double act met when they worked together as a pair of welders in Oldham, Lancashire. Bobby Ball did a bit of singing at the weekends and asked Tommy Cannon if he wanted to come along; soon enough Tommy became part of the act which evolved from a singing duo to the comedy double act that was so popular in the eighties.

  A lucky break in 1979 meant they caught the attention of the right people at ITV who offered them their own television show which became an instant success. The duo became so popular that in 1985 their Summer Season outsold Bruce Springsteen’s British tour and the pair were reportedly earning around £50,000 per week.

  Viewers loved Bobby Ball’s cheeky clowning antics and his famous catchphrase ‘Rock on Tommy!’ but Tommy Cannon always maintained a straight-man image and suffered severely in the popularity stakes as a result. I remember interviewing both Tommy Cannon and Bobby Ball in 2007 just before they appeared on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!. Tommy told me that he was very close to Bobby and the bullying antics he showed on staged were all part of the act, although some people didn’t seem to realise that. Poor Tommy said that he’d had to endure forty-one years of audiences booing him, old ladies beating him up with their handbags and threats of violence from the crowd.

  Towards the end of the eighties, the duo’s popularity began to tail off as the new breed of alternative comics dominated the comedy circuit. The pair famously converted to Christianity in later years and set up their own Gospel Show which tours churches around the country, sometimes involving fellow Christian Syd Little, of Little and Large fame.