Time for the second part of our epic trawl through the official list of The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER!, and due to an R Tape Loading Error on our Nostalgia Supercomputer The Commodore BoglinTM, we'll have to phone this conveniently-named 'Dial-A-Retro' line for the next five...
345. Dial-A-Disc
![]( "Buzby 'mixing' his album.")
Premium Line Telephone Services are, it has to be said, one of the less celebrated of the creakingly prehistoric antecedents to the internet age. Whether you were wanting to stay one step ahead of the day's weather, catch up on missed-due-to-phone-call - oh the irony - soap opera storylines, or just be read a ropey bedtime story by Bernard Cribbins masquerading as 'Buzby', there was a heftily-charging phone-in service just for you, many of them fulfilling much the same role as the most popular apps do today. Top of the list for historically-challenged what-the-fuck-was-that-actually-FOR-ness was Dial-A-Disc, a bafflingly popular service which allowed you to hear Love And Pride by King in crackling tinny mono speaker quality for about three times what it would have cost you to buy the single once it dropped out of the top forty. Still probably sonically superior to those prats playing 'choons' on their phones on the bus, though.
344. School Trips To The Local Wildfowl Centre (With Sheets To Fill In During The Visit)
![]( "E: Demonseed")
Presumably the nostalgia here is for feelings of stultifying tedium, as even by the already pretty low standards of school trips, the regimented trudge around the bird sanctuary where you couldn't actually see any birds invariably left you feeling as though you might even have had a more entertaining time staying in the classroom. While John Craven-led features on 'Britain's disappearing wildlife' on Saturday Morning TV felt like extra school outside of school hours, this somehow managed to feel like extra school within school hours. Still, those badly photocopied sheets where you couldn't make out what the smudgy woodblock-esque images were actually supposed to be probably do have some retro-nostalgic value. Of sorts.
343. Watching Cricket Scores Change On Ceefax
![]( "They'll take any opportunity to hype up Hervaid.")
A somewhat specific Teletext-related memory here, and it's not the last one either. For the benefit of anyone who doesn't know what it was, Ceefax was the BBC's teletext service, launched in 1972 and only very recently retired, which provided all manner of Prokaryotic Diversification-level 'interactivity' for people watching Marty Back Together Again. Time was that it was the absolute height of cutting-edge technology that enabled Ceefax's 'Sport' pages - introduced, as ever, by an aesthetically-challenging collage featuring a four-sided cricket bat, the world’s smallest FA Cup, a giant tennis ball (helpfully rendered in green and white so you knew it was 'tennis'), and what experts believe to be an elongated multicoloured fly swat - to self-update the scores in something that might have passed for 'real time' as percieved by Flash from Fingerbobs on a particularly stress-free day. Google takes all the fun out of it, frankly.
342. Ray Alan
![]( "\"I hope it's chips for tea\" - \"Shut it you\"")
Llaconic dinner-jacketed sidekick to sherry-sozzled monocle-sporting upper-crust ventriloquist dummy Lord Charles (and formerly the historically impenetrable 'Tich' and 'Quackers'), usually to be found shoring up the quick-get-a-variety-act-on bit in the middle of every Light Entertainment show ever, who in truth never really went away despite being one of those 'olden days' acts wheeled out pseudo-ironically by Peter Kay et al going "yer thought yer'd forgotten him, remember him? with 'is little puppet, eh? eh?". Primarily remembered, however, as a source of Royal Variety Performance-ruining confusion with Ray Charles.
341. The Oxo Family
![]( "\"It IS chips for tea\" - \"Shut it me\"")
It's a fair bet that nobody is actually properly nostalgic for the 'heartwarming' (translation: unfunny) powdered meat-plugging escapades of Lynda Bellingham and her imaginary brood, who were prone to turning into 'punks' only to abandon their Lydonesque posturing at the first whiff of reconstituted beef stock. It probably just feels nosalgia-worthy as it's an emblematic and indeed now outmoded form of product-pushing that's just too understated and indeed good-natured for the cut and thrust of today's level of inter-show advertising. Still, that one with the drumming gorilla was good. Oh well, let's hope for something moderately less twee next time...
345. Dial-A-Disc
Premium Line Telephone Services are, it has to be said, one of the less celebrated of the creakingly prehistoric antecedents to the internet age. Whether you were wanting to stay one step ahead of the day's weather, catch up on missed-due-to-phone-call - oh the irony - soap opera storylines, or just be read a ropey bedtime story by Bernard Cribbins masquerading as 'Buzby', there was a heftily-charging phone-in service just for you, many of them fulfilling much the same role as the most popular apps do today. Top of the list for historically-challenged what-the-fuck-was-that-actually-FOR-ness was Dial-A-Disc, a bafflingly popular service which allowed you to hear Love And Pride by King in crackling tinny mono speaker quality for about three times what it would have cost you to buy the single once it dropped out of the top forty. Still probably sonically superior to those prats playing 'choons' on their phones on the bus, though.
344. School Trips To The Local Wildfowl Centre (With Sheets To Fill In During The Visit)
Presumably the nostalgia here is for feelings of stultifying tedium, as even by the already pretty low standards of school trips, the regimented trudge around the bird sanctuary where you couldn't actually see any birds invariably left you feeling as though you might even have had a more entertaining time staying in the classroom. While John Craven-led features on 'Britain's disappearing wildlife' on Saturday Morning TV felt like extra school outside of school hours, this somehow managed to feel like extra school within school hours. Still, those badly photocopied sheets where you couldn't make out what the smudgy woodblock-esque images were actually supposed to be probably do have some retro-nostalgic value. Of sorts.
343. Watching Cricket Scores Change On Ceefax
A somewhat specific Teletext-related memory here, and it's not the last one either. For the benefit of anyone who doesn't know what it was, Ceefax was the BBC's teletext service, launched in 1972 and only very recently retired, which provided all manner of Prokaryotic Diversification-level 'interactivity' for people watching Marty Back Together Again. Time was that it was the absolute height of cutting-edge technology that enabled Ceefax's 'Sport' pages - introduced, as ever, by an aesthetically-challenging collage featuring a four-sided cricket bat, the world’s smallest FA Cup, a giant tennis ball (helpfully rendered in green and white so you knew it was 'tennis'), and what experts believe to be an elongated multicoloured fly swat - to self-update the scores in something that might have passed for 'real time' as percieved by Flash from Fingerbobs on a particularly stress-free day. Google takes all the fun out of it, frankly.
342. Ray Alan
Llaconic dinner-jacketed sidekick to sherry-sozzled monocle-sporting upper-crust ventriloquist dummy Lord Charles (and formerly the historically impenetrable 'Tich' and 'Quackers'), usually to be found shoring up the quick-get-a-variety-act-on bit in the middle of every Light Entertainment show ever, who in truth never really went away despite being one of those 'olden days' acts wheeled out pseudo-ironically by Peter Kay et al going "yer thought yer'd forgotten him, remember him? with 'is little puppet, eh? eh?". Primarily remembered, however, as a source of Royal Variety Performance-ruining confusion with Ray Charles.
341. The Oxo Family
It's a fair bet that nobody is actually properly nostalgic for the 'heartwarming' (translation: unfunny) powdered meat-plugging escapades of Lynda Bellingham and her imaginary brood, who were prone to turning into 'punks' only to abandon their Lydonesque posturing at the first whiff of reconstituted beef stock. It probably just feels nosalgia-worthy as it's an emblematic and indeed now outmoded form of product-pushing that's just too understated and indeed good-natured for the cut and thrust of today's level of inter-show advertising. Still, that one with the drumming gorilla was good. Oh well, let's hope for something moderately less twee next time...