Remember when each of these instalments counting down the official list of The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER! used to start with a joke about Nostalgia Supercomputer The Commodore BoglinTM? Yes, of course you do, because they still do. And our lines are now open for...
330. 01 Or Other Old Telephone Dialling Codes
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Something of an uninspiring and predictable start to what is, frankly, a fairly uninspiring and predictable chunk of the list. It's debatable whether anyone actually feels any affection or nostalgia towards retired cross-country telephonic prefixes - which, lest we forget, were in existence way past the days of Buzby, Dial-A-Disc and those annoying Maureen Lipman adverts where people got all tetchy if you refused to concede that they were 'clever', not least because they were only occasionally deployed, usually when the time came around to make the contractually-obligated annual call to not-particularly-far-flung relatives. It's a fair bet that they were only really seared into people's memories in the first place because of all those TV shows that were constantly inviting you to call in to 01-prefixed hotlines; in which case, see also London W12 8QT and Manchester M60 9 Ee Aeh, neither of which appear to have found their way into this list. Or have they...?
329. School Buses
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There's a bit of an educational slant to this instalment - well, this and one other entry mention school - but even so there's not really much happening here that could do whatever the opposite of 'derail' is to the lack of momentum inspired by the previous entry. Either your Local Education Authority put on a 'school bus' - a uniform-only antique double-decker crammed to window-misting point with stereotypical pupils-in-transit hi-jinks - or you got the same bus as everyone else, indulging only in subdued glower-silenced minor horseplay akin to that seen in the infrequent commutational excursions of the pupils of Grange Hill, and equated 'school buses' with those yellow things full of fictional American schoolchildren complaining that they'd been given pastrami on rye again. And despite all the Telegraph scare stories about 'yummy mummies' blocking up the rush hour dual carriageways with school-bound People Carriers, they probably still have school buses too. So, evocative to some, abstract irrelevancy to others. And anyway, those of us who got 'proper' buses have our own stories about clashes with nutters claiming to be Ian Paisley in 'disguise' and stealing Christine Bibby's socks and so on, thank you very much.
328. Nutty Comic
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Now you're talking. In 1980, not content with an already huge share of the comic market courtesy of The Beano (for the straight ahead laugh-seekers), The Dandy (for those who wanted a bit of slow-moving mirth-scant square-jawed adventure thrown into the equation), The Topper (for those who had been thrown out of the adult section in the library for trying to read The Spectator) and The Beezer (for, frankly, the aspirant one-pill-makes-you-larger contingent), D.C. Thomson & Co Ltd. opted to launch a new title aimed at a more wild and lawless strain of scribble-favouring chortlers - Nutty. Famously - though it's now often forgotten - the original home to Bananaman, and less famously to Samuel Creeps, The Snobbs And The Slobbs, Pig Tales and the indescribably tedious Nip And Rrip, Nutty was notorious for giving away reader-enticing free gifts at the drop of a hat (including, probably, a hat to drop), but never quite managed to pull in a readership capable of elevating it above 'Fifth Beatle' status and it folded in 1985. Never the most riveting of comics, it nonetheless scores highly on the Nostalgia Value-O-Meter for being a high profile 'new launch' on a similar scale to that of Channel 4. Though it tended to dispense with the four-letter-words and artistic nudity in favour of 'Cuddles' throwing some clay at a baby who shouted 'WUGGLY BUGGLY'.
327. Ultra Quiz
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Whilst nowadays the key ingredients for a hit cerebral game show seem to be using a simple logistical poser to impressive effect and cramming as much blue into the studio set as possible, back in the eighties it was high concepts that pulled in the viewers, and concepts didn't come much higher than in Ultra Quiz. Devised by one Jeremy Beadle, this was an ITV teatime-hogging epic that sought to whittle five hundred contestants down to one over the course of a series, using such ambitious stunts as giving them a question with two possible answers, and asking them to board one of two trains headed in opposing directions depending on which they were opting for. And what's more they did this across several continents, which frankly makes The Cube look ever so slightly on the I Have A Horsey Neigh Neigh side. Variously presented by such unlikely duos as Michael Aspel/Russell Grant, David Frost/Willie Rushton and Jonathan King/Sally James, Ultra Quiz remains one of the ultimate examples of the mock-cerebral-meets-surreally-banal approach to Saturday evening television that's now seemingly gone forever. Just don't bring up Dame Edna's Neighbourhood Watch.
326. School Milk
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Another school-related entry, and indeed another that has an element of regional dependency for its relevancy, as some Local Education Authorities continued to dole out the geographical fact-festooned cartons for some years after then-Secretary Of State For Education Margaret Thatcher demanded the withdrawal of this extravagant drain on the nation's coffers, while others caved straight away and were therefore directly and personally accountable for the entire eighties, including The Promise You Made by Cock Robin. Meanwhile, as this was being typed, George Osborne was committing even more unfair and bewildering budgetary crimes from the perspective of an overprivileged, underqualified arrogant halfwit with more money than sense who deserves to have free school milk pumped into his sinuses until his head swells up and explodes in a shower of Bullingdon Club oxygen-wastage that has never heard a single Happy Mondays record. But as he's unlikely to be reading this, expect Graham Linehan, writer TV 'Paris', to be along in a minute to tell us how this is all a waste of time and there was no point to it ever having been written and it should be deleted at once and all you people reading it should unread it with immediate effect. He's reckoned without The Commodore BoglinTM, though...
330. 01 Or Other Old Telephone Dialling Codes
Something of an uninspiring and predictable start to what is, frankly, a fairly uninspiring and predictable chunk of the list. It's debatable whether anyone actually feels any affection or nostalgia towards retired cross-country telephonic prefixes - which, lest we forget, were in existence way past the days of Buzby, Dial-A-Disc and those annoying Maureen Lipman adverts where people got all tetchy if you refused to concede that they were 'clever', not least because they were only occasionally deployed, usually when the time came around to make the contractually-obligated annual call to not-particularly-far-flung relatives. It's a fair bet that they were only really seared into people's memories in the first place because of all those TV shows that were constantly inviting you to call in to 01-prefixed hotlines; in which case, see also London W12 8QT and Manchester M60 9 Ee Aeh, neither of which appear to have found their way into this list. Or have they...?
329. School Buses
There's a bit of an educational slant to this instalment - well, this and one other entry mention school - but even so there's not really much happening here that could do whatever the opposite of 'derail' is to the lack of momentum inspired by the previous entry. Either your Local Education Authority put on a 'school bus' - a uniform-only antique double-decker crammed to window-misting point with stereotypical pupils-in-transit hi-jinks - or you got the same bus as everyone else, indulging only in subdued glower-silenced minor horseplay akin to that seen in the infrequent commutational excursions of the pupils of Grange Hill, and equated 'school buses' with those yellow things full of fictional American schoolchildren complaining that they'd been given pastrami on rye again. And despite all the Telegraph scare stories about 'yummy mummies' blocking up the rush hour dual carriageways with school-bound People Carriers, they probably still have school buses too. So, evocative to some, abstract irrelevancy to others. And anyway, those of us who got 'proper' buses have our own stories about clashes with nutters claiming to be Ian Paisley in 'disguise' and stealing Christine Bibby's socks and so on, thank you very much.
328. Nutty Comic
Now you're talking. In 1980, not content with an already huge share of the comic market courtesy of The Beano (for the straight ahead laugh-seekers), The Dandy (for those who wanted a bit of slow-moving mirth-scant square-jawed adventure thrown into the equation), The Topper (for those who had been thrown out of the adult section in the library for trying to read The Spectator) and The Beezer (for, frankly, the aspirant one-pill-makes-you-larger contingent), D.C. Thomson & Co Ltd. opted to launch a new title aimed at a more wild and lawless strain of scribble-favouring chortlers - Nutty. Famously - though it's now often forgotten - the original home to Bananaman, and less famously to Samuel Creeps, The Snobbs And The Slobbs, Pig Tales and the indescribably tedious Nip And Rrip, Nutty was notorious for giving away reader-enticing free gifts at the drop of a hat (including, probably, a hat to drop), but never quite managed to pull in a readership capable of elevating it above 'Fifth Beatle' status and it folded in 1985. Never the most riveting of comics, it nonetheless scores highly on the Nostalgia Value-O-Meter for being a high profile 'new launch' on a similar scale to that of Channel 4. Though it tended to dispense with the four-letter-words and artistic nudity in favour of 'Cuddles' throwing some clay at a baby who shouted 'WUGGLY BUGGLY'.
327. Ultra Quiz
Whilst nowadays the key ingredients for a hit cerebral game show seem to be using a simple logistical poser to impressive effect and cramming as much blue into the studio set as possible, back in the eighties it was high concepts that pulled in the viewers, and concepts didn't come much higher than in Ultra Quiz. Devised by one Jeremy Beadle, this was an ITV teatime-hogging epic that sought to whittle five hundred contestants down to one over the course of a series, using such ambitious stunts as giving them a question with two possible answers, and asking them to board one of two trains headed in opposing directions depending on which they were opting for. And what's more they did this across several continents, which frankly makes The Cube look ever so slightly on the I Have A Horsey Neigh Neigh side. Variously presented by such unlikely duos as Michael Aspel/Russell Grant, David Frost/Willie Rushton and Jonathan King/Sally James, Ultra Quiz remains one of the ultimate examples of the mock-cerebral-meets-surreally-banal approach to Saturday evening television that's now seemingly gone forever. Just don't bring up Dame Edna's Neighbourhood Watch.
326. School Milk
Another school-related entry, and indeed another that has an element of regional dependency for its relevancy, as some Local Education Authorities continued to dole out the geographical fact-festooned cartons for some years after then-Secretary Of State For Education Margaret Thatcher demanded the withdrawal of this extravagant drain on the nation's coffers, while others caved straight away and were therefore directly and personally accountable for the entire eighties, including The Promise You Made by Cock Robin. Meanwhile, as this was being typed, George Osborne was committing even more unfair and bewildering budgetary crimes from the perspective of an overprivileged, underqualified arrogant halfwit with more money than sense who deserves to have free school milk pumped into his sinuses until his head swells up and explodes in a shower of Bullingdon Club oxygen-wastage that has never heard a single Happy Mondays record. But as he's unlikely to be reading this, expect Graham Linehan, writer TV 'Paris', to be along in a minute to tell us how this is all a waste of time and there was no point to it ever having been written and it should be deleted at once and all you people reading it should unread it with immediate effect. He's reckoned without The Commodore BoglinTM, though...