For those of you who have forgotten or blotted out the memory of Garbage Pail Kids, let me take a moment to remind you of them in all their disgusting glory. In 1985 the Topps Company began selling trading card stickers that were a parody of the hugely popular Cabbage Patch Kids. Each trading card featured a different Garbage Pail Kid with some kind of amusing wordplay name like ‘Adam Bomb’ accompanied by an illustration of the character usually in some kind of revolting scenario involving bodily functions or untimely deaths. The aforementioned example, Adam Bomb, was pictured sat on the floor pressing a detonator button as the top of his head exploded, revealing a mushroom cloud emanating from his skull. The Garbage Pail Kids gained enormous popularity very quickly and were traded in the playground for swapsies, for other toys or even for hard cash. Within a short space of time the craze had become an epidemic that swept the country and was ultimately banned from many schools because of both its unpleasant nature and the distraction it was causing.
Another short-lived playground craze saw nearly every child in the school practising their yo-yo skills with Coca-Cola-branded Russell Spinners, performing special tricks such as the Round the World, Walk the Dog and Rock the Baby. Coca-Cola had been using yo-yos, or spinners as they were otherwise known, as part of a worldwide advertising campaign for many years, but in 1989 a ten-week campaign in the UK resulted in sales of over 4 million Coca-Cola spinners. Red blazer-wearing spinner demonstrators started appearing in schools and shopping centres showing off their skills to the children, sometimes using two spinners simultaneously for extra coolness. Strangely, as children, we thought the demonstrators were cool despite the fact that they were often bearded, overweight, middle-aged men wearing dodgy-looking Butlinesque nylon blazers.
Every newsagent in the country now had at least one big promotional bin full of spinners and spare spinner strings for sale with instruction books on how to perform various tricks and posters advertising the forthcoming Spinner Championships. Over 15,000 competitions were held in high streets and shopping centres in every major town in Great Britain, with over 250,000 children taking part and ending with the National Finals, hosted by Jeremy Beadle at Alton Towers on 8 July 1989.
The yo-yo/spinner craze was short-lived and before long we went back to our traditional games of chasing people, kicking balls, chasing balls and kicking people. The playground games were usually punctuated with messages sent to and from the girls asking the boys who they fancied and if they wanted to ‘go out with them’. Sadly, I spent a lot more time being the messenger telling the girls who the boys fancied than being asked out myself. Dating for most of the children was a relatively new concept and I think few of us understood what was required or expected of us and so the majority of ‘couples’ just expressed their admiration for each other through a messenger, such as me, and then giggled when they saw each other. This would usually continue for a period of several weeks without any actual date taking place and, in most cases, without the ‘couple’ even speaking to each other. The relationship would often end in tears when one party decided they fancied someone else and would use the messenger (me again) to tell them they were now dumped.
Gradually, we started to get the hang of the dating game and before long some of the boys were holding hands with the girls and the girls began making the boys friendship bracelets. I wanted to get myself a girlfriend and so I worked on making myself more presentable. I began to wash myself more frequently using my Christmas gift soap-on-a-rope, added a liberal dusting of Hai Karate talcum powder and splashed on some of my dad’s Old Spice aftershave. I instantly became irresistible to women and attracted the interest of the prettiest girl in the class who agreed to go out with me after a lot of persuasion. The relationship was beautiful while it lasted, but alas, our love was short-lived and after just ten seconds, with no explanation, she said, ‘You’re dumped.’ Still, I could tell all my friends that I had dated the most popular girl in school and, no matter how brief the relationship, that was enough to put a very happy ending on my school days in the eighties.
As I look back at my experience of school in the eighties and compare it to the experiences of my two daughters today, I realise that there are a lot of similarities. Schools in any decade will have eccentric teachers, playground crazes and glockenspiel lessons. Children will always write 58008 on their calculators and then turn them upside down and giggle, and teachers will always know less about new technology than the pupils they are trying to teach it to. But there was something very special and distinctive about school in the eighties; something that cannot ever be recreated, cannot be preserved and can only be remembered by those who were actually there. It was a potent mix of the music, the movies and the fashions of the decade that influenced the way we thought, behaved and dressed. The atmosphere of the time was charged with politics and world events that we’ll never see the likes of again, and the technologies we thought were so advanced at the time have disappeared into history forever, replaced by new technologies we could never have dreamed would be possible.
Nowadays, when I play that old ZX Spectrum game ‘Skool Daze’ on my super-fast modern PC, I still have no idea what I’m doing, where I’m meant to be or what the point of the game is. But, you know what I realised? It doesn’t matter because I made it through the real thing.
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First published in 2012
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© Michael A. Johnson, 2012
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A 1980s Childhood Page 16