The entire Blue Peter team immediately set to work repairing the damage and were able to save some of the fish, but for poor old Percy Thrower it was all too much, and he had tears in his eyes as he told Janet that the culprits must have been mentally ill.
1984 Summer Olympics
In 1984 I remember watching the opening ceremony of the Los Angeles Olympics with great excitement as a man wearing a jetpack flew around the stadium for a few seconds before landing in the middle, much to the delight of millions of spectators. From this moment on, I was fully expecting to be given my very own child-size jetpack for my birthday or Christmas and was sorely disappointed when the jetpack never arrived. It wasn’t until I saw the film Back to the Future a couple of years later that my desire to own a jetpack was replaced by my dream of owning a hoverboard, a dream which persists to this day.
The whole jetpack thing is all I really remember from the 1984 Olympics, but apparently there were some sporting events as well, which included the debut appearance of Carl Lewis, who won four gold medals, and saw Sebastian Coe become the first man to win consecutive gold medals in the 1500m having previously won gold in 1980.
In addition to the numerous sporting achievements, the 1984 Olympics were notable for the absence of fourteen Eastern bloc countries, including the Soviet Union who boycotted the Games in retaliation for the US boycott of the previous Soviet Games. The boycott had a dramatic impact, most notably in the weightlifting events where ninety-four of the world’s top 100 ranked lifters were absent, along with twenty-nine of the thirty medallists from the recent world championships and all ten of the defending world champions in the ten weight categories.
Despite the boycott, 140 nations participated in the Games with over 6,829 athletes participating in 221 events.
1988 Winter Olympics
While the 1984 Summer Olympics was most memorable, in my opinion, for the jetpack man at the opening ceremony, the 1988 Winter Olympics was most memorable for the debut appearance of the Jamaican bobsleigh team.
The four-man Jamaican bobsleigh team was assembled by two Americans, Fitch and Maloney, who visited Jamaica and witnessed a pushcart derby, which is very similar, in essence, to bobsledding. Knowing that bobsledding was dependent on very quick starts, they selected four fast sprinters to form a team and made their way to Calgary, Alberta, where the Olympics was being held.
Coming from a tropical country, the Jamaican team was something of a novelty and they had little opportunity to practise on a real bobsled track and didn’t even have their own bobsled. Fortunately, the other teams lent them spare bobsleds and offered them guidance and support in a show of sporting brotherhood. The team became firm favourites with the spectators, representing the ultimate underdog story in sport.
Despite making excellent progress, the team didn’t officially finish after they lost control of the sled during one of the four runs and crashed at over 70mph. After coming to a rest near the finish line, the four men were helped from the sled before walking to the finish line as the crowds cheered them on.
This failure didn’t deter the team and they returned to the Games in the 1992 French Winter Olympics and went on to place fourteenth in the 1994 Norwegian Winter Olympics, beating the United States, Russia, Australia, France and one sled from Italy.
The Jamaican bobsleigh team was the inspiration for a major movie in 1992, Cool Runnings, in which John Candy starred as the team’s coach.
Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ Goal
Many English football fans still feel deep bitterness and resentment towards the Argentinean football team for the events that took place on 22 June 1986 at the quarter final of the 1986 FIFA World Cup.
Having enjoyed a gradual improvement in form throughout the World Cup, England were ready to take on their old nemesis Argentina in the quarter finals, confident that they could beat them and go on to win the World Cup. Rivalry between England and Argentina ran deep, thanks to a previous falling out at the 1966 World Cup, and tensions were now heightened due to the recent Falklands Conflict, just four years earlier, which had resulted in 258 British and 649 Argentinean deaths.
An uneventful first half saw no goals scored but the second half went on to produce two of the most famous (or infamous) moments in football history. Six minutes into the second half, Argentinean player Diego Maradona punched the ball into the goal with his fist and the referee, not having seen what happened, allowed the illegal goal. It didn’t take long before the slow-motion replays confirmed that Maradona had indeed used his hand to score the goal but by that time it was too late and the referee’s decision had been made. After the match, Maradona claimed that the goal was scored ‘a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God’, leading to the goal being forever known as the ‘Hand of God’ goal.
Just four minutes after this infamous goal, with the England players and fans still reeling in disbelief at what had just happened, Maradona made an impressive 60-metre dash up the pitch, dribbling the ball past five English outfield players before manoeuvring around the goalkeeper and scoring a second goal. The goal was so impressive that it was later voted ‘Goal of the Century’ and it was this goal that secured victory for the Argentinean team over England in the quarter finals.
Zeebrugge Ferry Disaster
It was a Friday night and we had just been watching Blankety Blank with Les Dawson when the newsflash appeared on the television and Nicholas Witchell told us that a ferry carrying more than 600 people on board had capsized just one mile off the coast of Belgium. The vessel was called the Herald of Free Enterprise, part of the Townsend Thoreson fleet, and was on her way from Zeebrugge to Dover. At the time of the newsflash, little information was available other than that the ferry was currently lying on its side and that rescue teams were on their way.
It wasn’t until some time later that the full extent of the situation became clear and we learned that 193 people had been killed in the tragedy, mostly as a result of hypothermia from submersion in the icy cold water. Many of those on board had been Sun newspaper readers taking advantage of a promotion for cheap trips to the Continent.
Seconds after the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan on 30 March 1981 outside the Washington Hilton Hotel. (Public Domain)
The ferry was a roll-on, roll-off vehicle ferry and an investigation after the event concluded that it had capsized due to the bow loading doors being accidentally left open as the ship left the harbour. Water had poured into the car deck and rapidly caused the ship to become unstable and capsize within just ninety seconds of the water first entering, without time for the crew to raise the alarm.
Following the disaster, a number of modifications to the design and procedures for roll-on, roll-off ferries were introduced to prevent a similar incident ever happening again.
Chernobyl Disaster
Reactor number four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine began a systems test on Saturday, 26 April 1986 which recorded a sudden power output surge. An emergency shutdown was attempted but this was followed by an even larger power surge. A reactor vessel ruptured which led to a series of explosions, resulting in the ignition of the graphite moderator. A large plume of highly radioactive smoke rose from the reactor into the atmosphere and spread over an enormous area, causing widespread contamination of the Soviet Union and Europe. Around 50,000 people from the nearby city of Prypiat were immediately evacuated but the contamination was so severe that other towns nearby were also evacuated; in total, over 350,000 people were resettled after the disaster.
It is estimated that thirty-one staff and emergency workers died as a direct result of the accident, but the World Health Organisation estimated that 4,000 civilians may have been killed some time after the event as a result of radiation exposure. Further studies have suggested that the long-term effects of the incident could ultimately lead to 200,000 premature cancer deaths, although the full impact will probably never be known for certain.
The majority of the radio
active fallout landed in Ukraine and Belarus, but the pollution spread across Europe and contaminated some areas so badly that slaughter restrictions for grazing animals had to be imposed since their meat was considered unsafe for human consumption. As of 2012, restrictions still apply to the slaughter of sheep in some parts of the UK and it is expected that the radioactivity from Chernobyl will be found in the UK and Norway for at least another 100 years.
Christmas
Here’s something a little lighter to close the chapter – a happy world event for most – Christmas in the 1980s. The excitement would begin the night before Christmas when my dad would take us out into the garden and we’d all look up at the sky to see if we could see Santa flying around on his sleigh. We never saw anything, of course, but we always managed to convince ourselves that we had. We would leave out milk and a cookie for Santa and a carrot for the reindeer and place a plastic ‘Santa sack’ at the foot of our beds in the hope that we would find it filled in the morning. After trying to stay awake for as long as possible, we eventually drifted off to sleep and would awake the next morning at some ridiculously early time to noisily wake up our parents and take our Santa sacks into the living room to unpack them, as my dad filmed our reactions with his cine camera.
We knelt on the floor in our picture pyjamas (mine was He-Man) and rummaged through the sacks excitedly, chattering to each other about what gifts we had received. We would usually get a mix of the exciting and the slightly more mundane gifts that ranged from something cool like a Rubik’s Cube to something practical like a new pair of socks, or on one occasion a jar of pickled onions. Whatever it was we were given, we would gleefully exclaim, ‘just what I always wanted!’ and while we were generally very grateful for our gifts, I do remember causing a scene one Christmas after counting up the gifts to discover my brother had been given one more present than me.
On Christmas day 1980 a heavy snowfall covered the country and my dad took the opportunity to add a little magic to the day by sneaking outside and making some reindeer ‘hoof prints’ in the snow to show us evidence of Santa’s nocturnal activity. A little piece of nibbled carrot lay on the ground next to the hoof prints and a set of boot prints led from the flying-sleigh landing area to the back door of the house.
After the presents had been opened, a celebratory breakfast would be prepared which was essentially the same as a normal breakfast but included a glass of Corona Cherryade or Limeade. Suitably refreshed we would begin playing with our new toys as mum busied herself in the kitchen preparing a veritable feast for the Christmas lunch. Sometimes our grandparents would join us, or maybe our great-aunt, and we’d all get together and exchange yet more gifts.
My mum would usually be given some kind of soap, body cream or other beauty lotion, and maybe a sweet treat like a box of Turkish delight or a Walnut Whip. My dad would be given a bottle of Old Spice aftershave and a pack of handkerchiefs. My gran would get a calendar and would always exclaim, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have!’ at which point the present was jokingly retrieved. My older brother would get a soap-on-a-rope and a Hai Karate talcum powder.
After the presents had been opened, we’d sit up for a spectacular lunch of roast turkey with all the trimmings and the adults would drink Blue Nun, Babycham and egg nog, while the children drank more Corona. We would pull crackers, share jokes and wear silly party hats and then retire in front of the television to watch the Queen’s speech. The afternoon would be spent playing with our new toys as the grown-ups talked about boring, grown-up stuff, and by teatime we would all be so worn out from the festivities and excessive sugar consumption that we would happily settle down to watch the Christmas specials of Morecambe and Wise, Only Fools and Horses or The Two Ronnies at the end of a perfect day.
Nine
STREET LIFE
I’m sure you’ve heard it said before, but whatever happened to white dog poo? Back in the 1980s, every pavement in the country was littered with neat little piles of chalky-white dog poo that was dry and brittle and crunched when you rode over it on your Raleigh Grifter. In those days people fed their dogs bones which contained a high dose of calcium, causing the dogs’ poos to be white. Today’s dog poos aren’t white and neither are they crunchy and brittle. They’re brown and stinky and, quite frankly, they’re just not the same. I miss white dog poo.
But it’s not just the white dog poos I miss, because virtually every area of our lives was different back in the eighties – some things for the better and some for the worse. Apart from fashion, music and TV, we drove different cars, ate different food, shopped at different shops and even decorated our houses differently. The way we spent our leisure time was different, the way we worked was different and even the way we thought was different. I miss it all but I’m not sure I want it all back since I quite like the future, too. If only there was some way of time-travelling so we could go and visit the eighties from time to time.
Well, just imagine for a moment that we’ve managed to borrow Doc Brown’s time-travelling DeLorean from Back to the Future because we’re going to take a trip back in time to see how different life really was in the 1980s. I’ve set the flux capacitor to 3 July 1985 (the date Back to the Future was released) and I’m going to take you back to the town where I grew up.
On arriving in a blaze of fire in the sleepy Dorset town where I spent my childhood, probably the first difference you would notice is the other cars on the road around you. The majority of cars being driven in the eighties were angular in design and, in my opinion, singularly unattractive having lost some of the pioneering passion and charm of earlier motoring years and now embraced utilitarian and cost-saving designs well suited to modern mass production. This was a time when Skoda was the laughing stock of the automotive world and some of the most popular car colours included rust-brown, mustard-yellow and just plain old beige. And, of course, not everyone had new cars so there was also a significant proportion of clapped-out 1970s cars still on the road.
Not all the cars were hideous and there were a number of notable exceptions such as the lovely Lamborghini Countach, the fabulous Ferrari Testarossa and the pretty Porsche 959. These cars were so outstandingly beautiful that virtually every young boy in the country had a poster of at least one of them on his bedroom wall; and in extreme cases of limited space, people actually removed their ‘tennis girl scratching her bum’ poster and replaced it with a picture of a red Ferrari Testarossa. In a rather serendipitous turn of events, the designs of the most popular super cars at the time perfectly complimented the eighties decor of many boys’ bedrooms, with their use of striking colours (mainly red, yellow, black or white) and geometric designs that reflected the angular shapes found in the wallpaper patterns.
A splendid example of a Ford Capri S coupe. (Courtesy of OSX/Wikimedia Commons)
While some truly astounding cars were being made and sold to yuppies in the eighties, it was actually very rare to see one in the flesh. In everyday driving you were much more likely to pass a slurry-brown Rover 2000 driven by an old man with just his hat visible above the steering wheel than you were to encounter a James Bond type driving an amphibious Lotus Esprit like the one in The Spy Who Loved Me.
If you could see the cars my neighbours drove in the eighties you would see a motley collection of Montegos, Ford Cortinas, Austin Metros, one red Triumph Dolomite and a Rover Princess. In my parents’ driveway you would see a sky-blue Datsun Cherry that smelled funny and made me feel carsick, and if my medallion-wearing, hairy-chested next-door neighbour was at home, you would see a bright orange Ford Capri complete with furry dice and a musical Dixie horn like they had in the Dukes of Hazzard.
One of our elderly neighbours decided that, instead of having a car, he would join the 17,000 other people in the country who had bought a Sinclair C5, believing it to be a practical and cost-efficient alternative for short journeys. In reality, the C5 was nothing more than a battery-assisted recumbent tricycle dressed with a futuristic-looking plastic outer case; but Clive Sinclair
, the inventor, declared that it was going to revolutionise transport around the world. Since Mr Sinclair was seen as something of a visionary after having brought us the ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum home computers, many people believed the C5 was the next big thing.
The C5, however, was a commercial disaster and was abandoned just months after its initial launch due to poor sales and design problems. Since the C5 was so low to the ground with an open cockpit, it was badly exposed to the weather and was unusable for much of the year thanks to the good old British weather; and it quickly became apparent that the motor was completely useless on even the slightest incline meaning that it had to be pedalled up hills to avoid the motor overheating. Quite aside from all of this, the C5 looked ridiculous and made you look even more ridiculous as you pedalled it furiously up a hill on a busy main road with a stream of angry motorists stuck behind you shouting abuse.
A Sinclair C5 from 1985, just like the one I used to borrow from my elderly neighbour to cruise around the streets in. (Courtesy of Grant Mitchell/Wikimedia Commons)
Every cloud has a silver lining, though, and my brothers and I were delighted when our disappointed neighbour decided that he wasn’t going to use his C5 after all and offered it to us to play with as a kind of fancy go-kart. Since the C5 had a maximum speed of 15mph, we didn’t need a licence to drive it, so we would spend many happy minutes (not hours, because the battery never lasted that long) whizzing around the quiet residential roads nearby trying in vain to get the C5 to do a wheelie.
On the subject of electric vehicles, a time-traveller to the eighties might also notice what would appear to be a uniformed naval officer driving an open-sided, three-wheeled, battery-powered van, precariously laden with hundreds of bottles of milk. This would be, of course, our local milkman, Barry, who diligently fulfilled the stereotype assigned to milkmen by delivering more than just a bottle of milk to the homes of numerous lonely housewives. Quite why milkmen used to wear uniforms I don’t know, but I suspect it may have been at the request of the housewives.
A 1980s Childhood Page 13