Hello, and welcome to a post that you probably won't get to read, as all signs point towards the likelihood that, by the end of the week, David Cameron's already worryingly amorphous 'opt-in' scheme (which at the time of writing had suddenly mysteriously started encompassing 'self-harm' websites out of nowhere) will have expanded to restrict access to any sites featuring explicit and malicious instances of remembering Spangles. Still, one of the inevitable consequences of such a hastily-concieved popular vote-courting move is that, at the same time as inadvertently restricting access to many legitimate and legal things, it will fail to have adequate powers to cover some areas that do need attention, and with a bit of luck we'll still be able to advocate the use of George Osborne's face to unblock drains that have already had an unsuccessful application of caustic soda without any fear of censorship. Wait, what do you mean it looks like this introduction was written some time ago? Shush, you'll interfere with The Commodore BoglinTM's coding. And now, on with the list...
265. Rainbow Brite
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Inexplicably gimmick-deficient gimmicky post-Care Bears cartoon tie-in novelty doll thingymajig, purportedly some sort of defender of 'color' against the forces of monochrominence, assisted in her quest by the nauseatingly eighties-American-pop-star-like song and dance-friendly 'Color Kids'. Originally unleashed on the world via a sickly advert with awestruck youngsters vomiting up a slow-motion toy-plugging rewrite of Over The Rainbow, but subsequently catapulted into animated ubiquity ensuring eventual ousting of the loathesome Cabbage Patch Kids as the ultimate icon of eighties tweeness. And unless we recieve five hundred pounds in used banknotes before next Thursday, we'll be posting a photo of a reader of this blog who once went to a fancy dress party as Rainbow Brite.
264. Simon Bates Explaining BBFC Certificates
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VHS-era closest evolutionary relative of The Unskippable Menu, featuring Radio 1's long-running 'Morning World'-spouting 'Golden Hour'-curating 'Our Tune'-proferring Voice Of The People (Though Mainly Voice Of Himself) taking time out from getting so worked up about the latest 'issue' that he audibly folded his arms and declared "nope... not got any more to say... bedda pudda record on" to helpfully explain the new post-The Beast In Heat home video certificates and what they meant for you. After all, chances are that most viewers wouldn't have taken any notice of the title, the cover art, the description on the back nor indeed the actual certificate as plastered all over the sleeve, and would have needed pop music's least influential yet most self-important personality to advise them of the likelihood of stumbling across 'partial nudity or sexual swear words'. An irritant at the time but now inexplicably fondly remembered, not least by legions of weeping truckdrivers. So successful was Bates in this role, in fact, that Radio 1 later employed him to issue a frowny finger-wagging warning all over the start of the radio edit of Prince's Sexy MF.
263. Marshall Cavendish
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'Partwork'-crazy publishing phenomenon, specialising in limited run limited interest TV-plugged titles that purportedly coalesced neatly into the free binder with issue one, though in all probability most punters only bought two or three thereafter with large gaps in between. Definitive offerings included dullard's bible How It Works, cassette-accompanied second-division-strip-strewn goody-two-shoes comic Story Teller, and playground sensation-causing guide to getting it on Face To Face, titles that now loom large in the memory in the sense of people saying 'what was that one where you got the free binder and it was about... something?'. Long since rendered irrelevant by the rise of the internet and indeed those partworks where you get a free vanilla DVD of one episode of a TV series per issue and end up paying two and a half times as much as you would for the box set, but since it's been under the financial stewardship of Murdoch since the early eighties anyway, we'll give the artform all the 'nostalgia' it deserves and move immediately on to the next entry.
262. Punks Being Scary
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Quite why they were any more deserving of this status than any other youth cult is something of a mystery - though those zany Sex Pistols saying 'barstard' at Bill Grundy might have had something to do with it - but punks loomed larger in the juvenile catalogue of terrifying peers than perhaps any other historical equivalent ever. Indeed, even well into the 'Punk's Not Dead' era, it was not unusual for school playgrounds to reverberate with distressed reports of 'a punk' on the rampage in the vicinity, usually accompanied by Godzilla-esque tales of them headbutting chunks out of buildings whilst a small army of police cowered helplessly behind riot shields. Then some time around Channel 4's celebration of the, erm, Fourteenth Anniversary of Punk, they suddenly lost all of their terror-generating cachet, and even the tabloid press started to view them as some sort of loveable friend-in-need in the fight against the 'dangerous' dogs, ecstasy-addled hordes and obvious hoaxes about 'live' ghost-hunting that had become the new public bete noires. Remember them this way: as a spiky-haired old-skool city smasher hurtling down the street shouting 'RAR RAR RADDL-A-RARR!' in the face of nobody in particular.
261. Monday Night 8:30pm World In Action/Panorama Smackdown
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So, will you be wanting your hard-hitting authorities-enraging corruption-exposing investigative journalism with an expanding and contracting globe and that music from out of Un Homme Et Une Femme, or with a circle-encased scary sullen hippy seen from every angle at once and a Joe Cocker-less Grease Band Vanilla Fudging their way through the inspiringly-titled Jam For World In Action? Yes, things were pretty much interchangeable a lot of the time, with more or less the same thing on two channels at a time when we only had four (or even, in fact, three). That was until 1985, when the first stirrings of the 'This Is The Newwwwwws' mindset saw Panorama moved to 9:30pm, kickstarting a long history of it being catapulted haphazardly around the schedules, while World In Action - 'the one with somebody's knackers on the start' according to Marc 'Lard' Riley (read Fun At One if you don't have the faintest idea what any of that's about) - stopped being in action altogether in 1998. Both should of course be reinstated into their slugging-it-out slot with immediate effect, if only because it would give Jeremy Hunt a weekly half-hour of genuine terror. Actually, let's just have one of those brought in anyway
265. Rainbow Brite
Inexplicably gimmick-deficient gimmicky post-Care Bears cartoon tie-in novelty doll thingymajig, purportedly some sort of defender of 'color' against the forces of monochrominence, assisted in her quest by the nauseatingly eighties-American-pop-star-like song and dance-friendly 'Color Kids'. Originally unleashed on the world via a sickly advert with awestruck youngsters vomiting up a slow-motion toy-plugging rewrite of Over The Rainbow, but subsequently catapulted into animated ubiquity ensuring eventual ousting of the loathesome Cabbage Patch Kids as the ultimate icon of eighties tweeness. And unless we recieve five hundred pounds in used banknotes before next Thursday, we'll be posting a photo of a reader of this blog who once went to a fancy dress party as Rainbow Brite.
264. Simon Bates Explaining BBFC Certificates
VHS-era closest evolutionary relative of The Unskippable Menu, featuring Radio 1's long-running 'Morning World'-spouting 'Golden Hour'-curating 'Our Tune'-proferring Voice Of The People (Though Mainly Voice Of Himself) taking time out from getting so worked up about the latest 'issue' that he audibly folded his arms and declared "nope... not got any more to say... bedda pudda record on" to helpfully explain the new post-The Beast In Heat home video certificates and what they meant for you. After all, chances are that most viewers wouldn't have taken any notice of the title, the cover art, the description on the back nor indeed the actual certificate as plastered all over the sleeve, and would have needed pop music's least influential yet most self-important personality to advise them of the likelihood of stumbling across 'partial nudity or sexual swear words'. An irritant at the time but now inexplicably fondly remembered, not least by legions of weeping truckdrivers. So successful was Bates in this role, in fact, that Radio 1 later employed him to issue a frowny finger-wagging warning all over the start of the radio edit of Prince's Sexy MF.
263. Marshall Cavendish
'Partwork'-crazy publishing phenomenon, specialising in limited run limited interest TV-plugged titles that purportedly coalesced neatly into the free binder with issue one, though in all probability most punters only bought two or three thereafter with large gaps in between. Definitive offerings included dullard's bible How It Works, cassette-accompanied second-division-strip-strewn goody-two-shoes comic Story Teller, and playground sensation-causing guide to getting it on Face To Face, titles that now loom large in the memory in the sense of people saying 'what was that one where you got the free binder and it was about... something?'. Long since rendered irrelevant by the rise of the internet and indeed those partworks where you get a free vanilla DVD of one episode of a TV series per issue and end up paying two and a half times as much as you would for the box set, but since it's been under the financial stewardship of Murdoch since the early eighties anyway, we'll give the artform all the 'nostalgia' it deserves and move immediately on to the next entry.
262. Punks Being Scary
Quite why they were any more deserving of this status than any other youth cult is something of a mystery - though those zany Sex Pistols saying 'barstard' at Bill Grundy might have had something to do with it - but punks loomed larger in the juvenile catalogue of terrifying peers than perhaps any other historical equivalent ever. Indeed, even well into the 'Punk's Not Dead' era, it was not unusual for school playgrounds to reverberate with distressed reports of 'a punk' on the rampage in the vicinity, usually accompanied by Godzilla-esque tales of them headbutting chunks out of buildings whilst a small army of police cowered helplessly behind riot shields. Then some time around Channel 4's celebration of the, erm, Fourteenth Anniversary of Punk, they suddenly lost all of their terror-generating cachet, and even the tabloid press started to view them as some sort of loveable friend-in-need in the fight against the 'dangerous' dogs, ecstasy-addled hordes and obvious hoaxes about 'live' ghost-hunting that had become the new public bete noires. Remember them this way: as a spiky-haired old-skool city smasher hurtling down the street shouting 'RAR RAR RADDL-A-RARR!' in the face of nobody in particular.
261. Monday Night 8:30pm World In Action/Panorama Smackdown
So, will you be wanting your hard-hitting authorities-enraging corruption-exposing investigative journalism with an expanding and contracting globe and that music from out of Un Homme Et Une Femme, or with a circle-encased scary sullen hippy seen from every angle at once and a Joe Cocker-less Grease Band Vanilla Fudging their way through the inspiringly-titled Jam For World In Action? Yes, things were pretty much interchangeable a lot of the time, with more or less the same thing on two channels at a time when we only had four (or even, in fact, three). That was until 1985, when the first stirrings of the 'This Is The Newwwwwws' mindset saw Panorama moved to 9:30pm, kickstarting a long history of it being catapulted haphazardly around the schedules, while World In Action - 'the one with somebody's knackers on the start' according to Marc 'Lard' Riley (read Fun At One if you don't have the faintest idea what any of that's about) - stopped being in action altogether in 1998. Both should of course be reinstated into their slugging-it-out slot with immediate effect, if only because it would give Jeremy Hunt a weekly half-hour of genuine terror. Actually, let's just have one of those brought in anyway