Hello, and welcome to the latest instalment of The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER!, and this time, before the witticisms about pre-cert videos and classroom crazes get underway, we're starting with an apology. Judging from reactions to recent posts, it seems that many of you do not take kindly to having blunt and unsubtle political satire intertwined with your past-remembering fun, especially when it involves threats of comic if inventive violence towards current cabinet members. The message, it's sad to say, is loud and clear - keep politics out of nostalgia. So to keep the peace and indeed to avoid offending people's sensitivities to the point where they will apparently avoid reading that post about Skiboy'just in case', from this point on The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER! will stick strictly to the gags and the reminiscences, and no space will be afforded to radical polemic. This is a cast-iron watertight guarantee that there will be no further political content. And now, on with the list...
290. Conservative Governments
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Well, when this list was first fed into The Commodore BoglinTM - it's not as fast as modern computers, you know - they did seem like archaic ancient cultural history, and they'd only been gone a couple of years as well. This is admittedly partly due to the transient, here today and, if I may say so, gone tomorrow nature of the entire John Major era, which sort of passed by in a relative blur of comparative sociopolitical mildness and now has been omitted from history as totally and misleadingly as The Noel Edmonds Saturday Roadshow, fashioning the Channel 4 Documentary-friendly illusion that we went straight from a shower of greasy tweedy self-important bigoted warmongering poor-punishing infrastructure-decimating Section 28-waving Hillsborough-covering-up blowhards to the Alcopop-fulled rise of everyone's favourite Noel Gallagher-cosying Pretty Straight Guy and his favourite band Wheeler 18, finally overturning eighteen years of Tory tyranny to the strains of I Like To Move It Move It by Reel 2 Reel Featuring The Mad Stuntman. Then your miseryguts friend who spoiled it for everyone pre-election by claiming that they 'just didn't trust him' was proved right when they started fucking about with dubious military intervention, mysterious deaths of implicated scientists, and allowing Rupert Bastard Murdoch a freer hand and greater influence than any previous regimes ever did, and then put a top hat on it and took the time to readjust it at a jaunty rakish angle by allowing a useless waste of space to become Prime Minister purely because he wanted to, which is why we're now stuck with the useless cross-party shower we have now, and indeed with this particular nostalgic item no longer being 'nostalgic' in any way, shape or form. For fuck's sake, couldn't we have had Pipkins back instead?
289. Eye-Wateringly-Coloured Leotard/Tights ‘Uniform’ For Anyone Into Aerobics/Keep-Fit
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Ocular irritation-occasioning collision of the eighties fad for all things 'designer', the eighties fad for ostentatious acts of 'self-improvement', and the eighties fad for making sure everyone paid attention to you and what you were doing all the time, resulting in all participants in the suspiciously indefinable pursuit of 'keep fit' being required by unwritten law to don clashing pastel shades, unnecessary headbands, unflattering leggings and the like. Sported by everyone from television fitness guru headcases to sitcom characters comically attempting a couple of star jumps, and sitting neatly with their Swatches and cans of 'Isotonic' sports drinks, until some bright spark realised that you could make even more money with exercise programmes that actually put exercise value above what to wear, and by the dawn of the nineties it was pretty much back to basics. Its most undesirable side-effect, however, was the BBC's game show for smug pillocks Go For It!.
288. Warming Up Your TV
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A phenomenon that, if not quite invented, has certainly been overplayed by history, with the popular reminiscence that in the pre-flat screen days you'd have to switch your set on a good three hours before intending to watch whilst a blurry colour-washed Test Card F slowly fizzled into view, as opposed to the reality that you'd have, say, twenty odd seconds of a blue Cheggers looking as though he was being reflected in a funfair mirror before things settled down to normality. It never got in the way of Captain Zep - Space Detective, and that's the important thing.
287. Fluorescent Socks
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Pretty much part and parcel of the 'keep fit'-ostentation noted above, intended as a fashion item in their own right but mostly used for providing trend-conscious types with a not-that-subtle-really way of keeping up the 'designer' leanings whilst forced by circumstance into their more sober day wear. Descent from fashionability to ridiculousness was alarmingly rapid, and within months they had fallen to the status of something that the school tearaway would turn up in and get in indefinable 'trouble' for wearing, as depressingly memory-imprintingly celebrated in song by Tony Slattery's schoolroom-based sketch show Behind The Bike Sheds.
286. The Swing-Door Wooden Cabinets That Housed Schools''Big' TVs
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There's a lot about Schools Television in this list, but this is actually about the Schools Televisions themselves, and in particular the security-conscious lockable housing for the oversized cathode ray-driven How We Used To Live-disseminators, which can't really have been much of a deterrent for burglars as they only really added a minor amount of weight and size to their overall purloinability, and thus must presumably have been in place as a deterrent against unauthorised viewing by Please-Sir-I-cannot-tell-a-lie-ERIC-is-not-here type stray pupils hoping to get a glimpse of Afternoon Plus, though they'd probably just have ended up getting a glimpse of Jimmiiiiieee and his frisbee instead. Ha ha, serves them right. Or, in Live At The Apollo-ese, "them big tellies with the cupboard... d'y'remember them, with the cupboard... what were they all about?".
290. Conservative Governments
Well, when this list was first fed into The Commodore BoglinTM - it's not as fast as modern computers, you know - they did seem like archaic ancient cultural history, and they'd only been gone a couple of years as well. This is admittedly partly due to the transient, here today and, if I may say so, gone tomorrow nature of the entire John Major era, which sort of passed by in a relative blur of comparative sociopolitical mildness and now has been omitted from history as totally and misleadingly as The Noel Edmonds Saturday Roadshow, fashioning the Channel 4 Documentary-friendly illusion that we went straight from a shower of greasy tweedy self-important bigoted warmongering poor-punishing infrastructure-decimating Section 28-waving Hillsborough-covering-up blowhards to the Alcopop-fulled rise of everyone's favourite Noel Gallagher-cosying Pretty Straight Guy and his favourite band Wheeler 18, finally overturning eighteen years of Tory tyranny to the strains of I Like To Move It Move It by Reel 2 Reel Featuring The Mad Stuntman. Then your miseryguts friend who spoiled it for everyone pre-election by claiming that they 'just didn't trust him' was proved right when they started fucking about with dubious military intervention, mysterious deaths of implicated scientists, and allowing Rupert Bastard Murdoch a freer hand and greater influence than any previous regimes ever did, and then put a top hat on it and took the time to readjust it at a jaunty rakish angle by allowing a useless waste of space to become Prime Minister purely because he wanted to, which is why we're now stuck with the useless cross-party shower we have now, and indeed with this particular nostalgic item no longer being 'nostalgic' in any way, shape or form. For fuck's sake, couldn't we have had Pipkins back instead?
289. Eye-Wateringly-Coloured Leotard/Tights ‘Uniform’ For Anyone Into Aerobics/Keep-Fit
Ocular irritation-occasioning collision of the eighties fad for all things 'designer', the eighties fad for ostentatious acts of 'self-improvement', and the eighties fad for making sure everyone paid attention to you and what you were doing all the time, resulting in all participants in the suspiciously indefinable pursuit of 'keep fit' being required by unwritten law to don clashing pastel shades, unnecessary headbands, unflattering leggings and the like. Sported by everyone from television fitness guru headcases to sitcom characters comically attempting a couple of star jumps, and sitting neatly with their Swatches and cans of 'Isotonic' sports drinks, until some bright spark realised that you could make even more money with exercise programmes that actually put exercise value above what to wear, and by the dawn of the nineties it was pretty much back to basics. Its most undesirable side-effect, however, was the BBC's game show for smug pillocks Go For It!.
288. Warming Up Your TV
A phenomenon that, if not quite invented, has certainly been overplayed by history, with the popular reminiscence that in the pre-flat screen days you'd have to switch your set on a good three hours before intending to watch whilst a blurry colour-washed Test Card F slowly fizzled into view, as opposed to the reality that you'd have, say, twenty odd seconds of a blue Cheggers looking as though he was being reflected in a funfair mirror before things settled down to normality. It never got in the way of Captain Zep - Space Detective, and that's the important thing.
287. Fluorescent Socks
Pretty much part and parcel of the 'keep fit'-ostentation noted above, intended as a fashion item in their own right but mostly used for providing trend-conscious types with a not-that-subtle-really way of keeping up the 'designer' leanings whilst forced by circumstance into their more sober day wear. Descent from fashionability to ridiculousness was alarmingly rapid, and within months they had fallen to the status of something that the school tearaway would turn up in and get in indefinable 'trouble' for wearing, as depressingly memory-imprintingly celebrated in song by Tony Slattery's schoolroom-based sketch show Behind The Bike Sheds.
286. The Swing-Door Wooden Cabinets That Housed Schools''Big' TVs
There's a lot about Schools Television in this list, but this is actually about the Schools Televisions themselves, and in particular the security-conscious lockable housing for the oversized cathode ray-driven How We Used To Live-disseminators, which can't really have been much of a deterrent for burglars as they only really added a minor amount of weight and size to their overall purloinability, and thus must presumably have been in place as a deterrent against unauthorised viewing by Please-Sir-I-cannot-tell-a-lie-ERIC-is-not-here type stray pupils hoping to get a glimpse of Afternoon Plus, though they'd probably just have ended up getting a glimpse of Jimmiiiiieee and his frisbee instead. Ha ha, serves them right. Or, in Live At The Apollo-ese, "them big tellies with the cupboard... d'y'remember them, with the cupboard... what were they all about?".