Time for yet another instalment of The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER!, our laugh-a-minute look back at things that were big in the 'eighties', along with poverty-instigated inner-city unrest, privatisation of public services, institutionalised stigmatisation of minorities, and colluding on monumental cover-ups with your friends in the press and police. How's about that then, guys'n'gals?
320. Sealink Ferries With The Huge British Rail Logo On One Side Of The Funnel And A Back-To-Front British Rail Logo On The Other Side
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And speaking of privatised public services, erstwhile vendors of 'satire'-inviting sandwiches British Rail also used to operate a number of seabound services, most famously the short haul Sealink ferries. Said vessels handily signposted themselves as British Rail affiliates as described above, with the flipped-over logo incorporated just in case somebody needed to identify it quickly in their rear view mirror in the middle of the English Channel, though doubtless also causing many stricken rail passengers who'd somehow become lost at sea ("which is a normal journey... for British Rail!" - Rob Newman, 1989) to mistakenly assume they'd skipped dimensions into some sort of mirror reverse world where everything's backwards. Then somebody sold off the transport franchises and we got to enjoy paying eight million quid for the privilege being directed onto the wrong train by some disinterested high visibility jacketed jerk and then started on by some fucking snarling three year old in a uniform for having the wrong ticket and with even worse sandwiches to boot for ever more, and the Sealinks inevitably disappeared soon after. We contacted David Cameron's office for a quote, and were told that he had "certainly been on a ferry, quite relatively recently, in fact, and it went across the water from somewhere to somewhere like all ferries do, I can tell you, and I was on it, certainly, being on a ferry, which I have".
319. The BBC Schools Diamond
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Though the inadvertent interactivity element means that more people tend to reminisce about the later BBC Schools' Clock - in other words that not-particularly-clock-like circular assembly of dots that blinked down the remaining minute before W.A.L.R.U.S. whilst a small army of cross-legged children affected to 'shoot' the disappearing discs with their fingers to the strains of over-enthusiastic prog-AOR guitar soloing akin to an escaped bit of the Dazed And Confused soundtrack - it nonetheless remains the poor relation to its immediate predecessor, The BBC Schools' Diamond. Booting the stuffy black-and-white-ness of the oh so formal BBC Schools' Pie Chart (no, really) into archival oblivion with its riotous use of new-fangled 'colour' (initially Sam Tyler Blue on black, later yellow on Less Interesting Blue), pulsating mindbending meeting-point-between-psychedelia-and-Glam-Rock self-animation, and defiant deployment of sub-Soft Machine Prog Jazz, it was about as 'seventies' as it could possibly get without turning into Patrick Mower and making a getaway on a Spacehopper whilst scoffing some Spangles. Anyway, you can read more about it - and absolutely nothing about Parky - here.
318. Pocketeers
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In this age of smartphones and tablets, it's odd to think that not so long ago, the hi-est possible tech in portable entertainment involved catapulting ball bearings around a spinny-round-bit festooned 'maze' encased in eminently scuffable perspex. Launched in 1975, Palitoy's Pocketeers were originally strictly sport-themed and featured a Once Upon A Time... Man-esque cartoon 'everyman' figure on their packaging, and were an instant success, no doubt due to the perrennially frustration-engendering 'YER LIKE SPORT DON'T YER' relationship between child and distant relative. Later in the decade, Pocketeers diversified into such esoteric thematic realms as gambling, military strategy, time travel, organised crime, cat-versus-mouse rivalry, and the celebrated minimalist subreality of Cracked Crab. Oh, and about eighteen million Smurf-themed ones, but frankly they can fuck off. The fact that one of the last variants produced was a dismal Space Invaders ripoff confirms that by the early eighties, the writing was on the wall in 'calculator' font, and indeed the humble Pocketeer was quickly usurped as gadget game of choice by none other than Game And Watch, which was of course at Number 348...
317. Citrus Spring
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A no-nonsense, back to basics orange-skewed carbonated beverage launched into a sea of vogue-chasing designer-clad luridly-hued fizzy drinks with blunt dramatic one-word names, Citrus Spring was tailor made for late eighties adolescent malcontents who wanted to affect Robert Elms-level intellectual stylishness but in a way that reflected their growing feeling that rampant post-Live Aid consumerism had gone 'too far' (except of course for when it involved Kim Wilde in her pants) and watched French & Saunders, listened to The Smiths, and read The News On Sunday for all three minutes that it existed. And yet Citrus Spring had originally been deployed by Britvic as some sort of bafflingly misconstrued attempt to cash in on the short-lived post-Neighbours'Australia Being Cool' phenomenon, complete with a Hogan-infringing Fake Rod Hull-voiced bloke saying 'ripper!' in the adverts, though it soon became obvious that neither Charlene Fenn, Yahoo Serious nor Pseudo Echo were going to be snapped quaffing a can, upon which they ditched all of the INXS-surfing 'tinnie' iconography and went back to straight ahead more culturally acceptable advertising playing on its flavour-to-sparkling ratio against the inevitable footage of rolling vistas and expanses of crystal clear spring water. However, it remains best known as the favoured beverage of rubber-faced funnyman Phil Cool.
316. Waiting For TV To ‘Start’
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And it seems the unintentional theme of this particular entry is just how far and how quickly we've come in terms of round-the-clock on-demand home entertainment. Believe it or not - and it all changed so long ago that there might well be people reading who are young enough not to believe it - the number of hours of television it was possible to transmit in a single day used to be limited both by technology and by law. As a result there was nothing but a blank screen overnight, and for a good long while during the majority of the daytime too. The mechanics of the day-ending Closedown were a matter for those who had stayed up to watch the 'Late Film' or someone you've heard of but never heard performing live on BBC2, and indeed are a matter for another entry; what concerns us here is what used to greet the excitable youngsters who'd got up at one of those seven o'clocks in the morning they used to have at weekends back then, only to find that they'd got up before the TV stations themselves had. Thus it was that sitting through the IBA Colour Bars, stray glimpses of the Open University and its stentorian the-likes-of-you-have-no-business-watching-this shield and fanfare (which, of course, inevitably piped in at terrifying volume when you were least expecting it), blood-curdling extended blasts of Test Card F with weedy ragtime accompaniment, day-ruining Public Information Films, and the logic-taxing ITV regional startups with their cinematic sweeps through local areas of note and zooms in on cheapo station-identifying statuettes (and you can find more about them here), became just as much a part of the viewing experience as the piss-poor Ruby-Spears cartoons that inevitably followed. Except that anyone with half a brain now celebrates the gaudy laugh-depleted cartoons rather than making up some weirdness about how the grinding-into-gear broacast equipment warmup irrelevance that preceded them was masterminded by an evil scarecrow who had won Edward Heath's soul in a game of cards using pylons as the cards or something. And, what's more, if you were back soon enough after school, you got to enjoy the whole shebang on weekdays too, owing to the BBC's endearing habit of shutting down for the afternoon. But then came Breakfast Television, then Daytime On One, then ITV Night Network, then News 24, and so on and so on until cricket commentators amiably rambling "well we at BBC1 leave you there, and we'll see you again at 3.50 for the news from your region" as the action faded into a broadcasting void was but a distant memory. Here's to more Homes Under The Hammer!
320. Sealink Ferries With The Huge British Rail Logo On One Side Of The Funnel And A Back-To-Front British Rail Logo On The Other Side
And speaking of privatised public services, erstwhile vendors of 'satire'-inviting sandwiches British Rail also used to operate a number of seabound services, most famously the short haul Sealink ferries. Said vessels handily signposted themselves as British Rail affiliates as described above, with the flipped-over logo incorporated just in case somebody needed to identify it quickly in their rear view mirror in the middle of the English Channel, though doubtless also causing many stricken rail passengers who'd somehow become lost at sea ("which is a normal journey... for British Rail!" - Rob Newman, 1989) to mistakenly assume they'd skipped dimensions into some sort of mirror reverse world where everything's backwards. Then somebody sold off the transport franchises and we got to enjoy paying eight million quid for the privilege being directed onto the wrong train by some disinterested high visibility jacketed jerk and then started on by some fucking snarling three year old in a uniform for having the wrong ticket and with even worse sandwiches to boot for ever more, and the Sealinks inevitably disappeared soon after. We contacted David Cameron's office for a quote, and were told that he had "certainly been on a ferry, quite relatively recently, in fact, and it went across the water from somewhere to somewhere like all ferries do, I can tell you, and I was on it, certainly, being on a ferry, which I have".
319. The BBC Schools Diamond
Though the inadvertent interactivity element means that more people tend to reminisce about the later BBC Schools' Clock - in other words that not-particularly-clock-like circular assembly of dots that blinked down the remaining minute before W.A.L.R.U.S. whilst a small army of cross-legged children affected to 'shoot' the disappearing discs with their fingers to the strains of over-enthusiastic prog-AOR guitar soloing akin to an escaped bit of the Dazed And Confused soundtrack - it nonetheless remains the poor relation to its immediate predecessor, The BBC Schools' Diamond. Booting the stuffy black-and-white-ness of the oh so formal BBC Schools' Pie Chart (no, really) into archival oblivion with its riotous use of new-fangled 'colour' (initially Sam Tyler Blue on black, later yellow on Less Interesting Blue), pulsating mindbending meeting-point-between-psychedelia-and-Glam-Rock self-animation, and defiant deployment of sub-Soft Machine Prog Jazz, it was about as 'seventies' as it could possibly get without turning into Patrick Mower and making a getaway on a Spacehopper whilst scoffing some Spangles. Anyway, you can read more about it - and absolutely nothing about Parky - here.
318. Pocketeers
In this age of smartphones and tablets, it's odd to think that not so long ago, the hi-est possible tech in portable entertainment involved catapulting ball bearings around a spinny-round-bit festooned 'maze' encased in eminently scuffable perspex. Launched in 1975, Palitoy's Pocketeers were originally strictly sport-themed and featured a Once Upon A Time... Man-esque cartoon 'everyman' figure on their packaging, and were an instant success, no doubt due to the perrennially frustration-engendering 'YER LIKE SPORT DON'T YER' relationship between child and distant relative. Later in the decade, Pocketeers diversified into such esoteric thematic realms as gambling, military strategy, time travel, organised crime, cat-versus-mouse rivalry, and the celebrated minimalist subreality of Cracked Crab. Oh, and about eighteen million Smurf-themed ones, but frankly they can fuck off. The fact that one of the last variants produced was a dismal Space Invaders ripoff confirms that by the early eighties, the writing was on the wall in 'calculator' font, and indeed the humble Pocketeer was quickly usurped as gadget game of choice by none other than Game And Watch, which was of course at Number 348...
317. Citrus Spring
A no-nonsense, back to basics orange-skewed carbonated beverage launched into a sea of vogue-chasing designer-clad luridly-hued fizzy drinks with blunt dramatic one-word names, Citrus Spring was tailor made for late eighties adolescent malcontents who wanted to affect Robert Elms-level intellectual stylishness but in a way that reflected their growing feeling that rampant post-Live Aid consumerism had gone 'too far' (except of course for when it involved Kim Wilde in her pants) and watched French & Saunders, listened to The Smiths, and read The News On Sunday for all three minutes that it existed. And yet Citrus Spring had originally been deployed by Britvic as some sort of bafflingly misconstrued attempt to cash in on the short-lived post-Neighbours'Australia Being Cool' phenomenon, complete with a Hogan-infringing Fake Rod Hull-voiced bloke saying 'ripper!' in the adverts, though it soon became obvious that neither Charlene Fenn, Yahoo Serious nor Pseudo Echo were going to be snapped quaffing a can, upon which they ditched all of the INXS-surfing 'tinnie' iconography and went back to straight ahead more culturally acceptable advertising playing on its flavour-to-sparkling ratio against the inevitable footage of rolling vistas and expanses of crystal clear spring water. However, it remains best known as the favoured beverage of rubber-faced funnyman Phil Cool.
316. Waiting For TV To ‘Start’
And it seems the unintentional theme of this particular entry is just how far and how quickly we've come in terms of round-the-clock on-demand home entertainment. Believe it or not - and it all changed so long ago that there might well be people reading who are young enough not to believe it - the number of hours of television it was possible to transmit in a single day used to be limited both by technology and by law. As a result there was nothing but a blank screen overnight, and for a good long while during the majority of the daytime too. The mechanics of the day-ending Closedown were a matter for those who had stayed up to watch the 'Late Film' or someone you've heard of but never heard performing live on BBC2, and indeed are a matter for another entry; what concerns us here is what used to greet the excitable youngsters who'd got up at one of those seven o'clocks in the morning they used to have at weekends back then, only to find that they'd got up before the TV stations themselves had. Thus it was that sitting through the IBA Colour Bars, stray glimpses of the Open University and its stentorian the-likes-of-you-have-no-business-watching-this shield and fanfare (which, of course, inevitably piped in at terrifying volume when you were least expecting it), blood-curdling extended blasts of Test Card F with weedy ragtime accompaniment, day-ruining Public Information Films, and the logic-taxing ITV regional startups with their cinematic sweeps through local areas of note and zooms in on cheapo station-identifying statuettes (and you can find more about them here), became just as much a part of the viewing experience as the piss-poor Ruby-Spears cartoons that inevitably followed. Except that anyone with half a brain now celebrates the gaudy laugh-depleted cartoons rather than making up some weirdness about how the grinding-into-gear broacast equipment warmup irrelevance that preceded them was masterminded by an evil scarecrow who had won Edward Heath's soul in a game of cards using pylons as the cards or something. And, what's more, if you were back soon enough after school, you got to enjoy the whole shebang on weekdays too, owing to the BBC's endearing habit of shutting down for the afternoon. But then came Breakfast Television, then Daytime On One, then ITV Night Network, then News 24, and so on and so on until cricket commentators amiably rambling "well we at BBC1 leave you there, and we'll see you again at 3.50 for the news from your region" as the action faded into a broadcasting void was but a distant memory. Here's to more Homes Under The Hammer!