Steve Remembers

Things that an almost a 40 year old man who grew up in the west of England can remember. That's all there is to it. His name is Steve, and he remembers.

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I've updated the intro text...

... because I'm no longer almost 40.

I have a great photo of my grandfather in a striped deckchair when he was around my age. Unlike me, channeling punk in a Lego hoodie, he was in knitted swimming trunks and smoking a pipe. (He was in Spain, not Cardiff Bay.)

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The Anglia TV Logo

Back in the day this preposterous knick-knack was the Anglia TV logo. The first 45 seconds was what Norfolk types would've had to put up with when it started the day's broadcast, I believe - the second one in this video is what I remember being on before all of their output to network ITV. (Sale of the Century, basically, which was as low rent as Anglia's logo.)

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Reebok Pumps

(Picture credit) A bizarre trainer from about 1990. They were like the other basketball shoes that had become fashionable around the time but cost way more because of the weird inflating thing they did to clamp them to your foot (and the premium for being weird). The orange Pump logo was the pump itself; you could give it a couple of squeezes to top up the air. Bonkers. In the UK worn solely by spoilt kids, who might get wrestled to the ground and have their footwear over-inflated until the bladders popped (I believe that was exactly what happened at my school).

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Paternoster Lifts

Paternoster lifts are weird and (mostly) consigned to the scrapheap of history. I only ever saw one once, in what I think was the DHSS building in Gloucester, when I was very small. They are lifts with no doors on a continuous loop - like rosary beads, which is why they're so named ("Paternoster" is Latin for "Our Father", I believe). They never stop, they just move slowly all the time; one side going up, the other down. Apparently you can ride over the top or bottom if you feel so inclined. The Wikipedia article linked to just now has an animation so you can see how they roll.

(Picture credit) There's still one in action in Sheffield University, where this photo was taken, but virtually all the ones installed when they were in vogue in the 1960s have gone now.

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Fleetway Annuals

At Christmas you'd normally get annuals for the comics you liked (back in the days when there was a decent kids comic selection, unlike nowadays, grumble grumble). Any comics from IPC - Whizzer and Chips, Whoopee, 2000AD, Dan Dare and so on - had their annuals come under the Fleetway name.

(Photo credit) Note the logo in the corner - if you didn't see it at Christmas you were missing out.

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Threads

In the early 80s there was a creeping, foreboding sensation that a nuclear attack by (probably) the USSR would wipe us all out. Given that I'm typing this 30 years later, clearly this didn't happen.

As well as the government doing all the things governments do (install fear, produce pamphlets etc) the BBC didn't help much with Threads, a documentary-style drama embedded above. If you've never seen it, please, please do. It's an amazing piece of work that put the shit up everyone when it was on (or at school in the years that followed as it was shown to kids as they got old enough to understand it). It's an epic snapshot of early 80s life in industrial England (Sheffield) as well, without going into the nuclear fallout and breakdown of society.

Threads also provides the most tragic IMDB entry ever.

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The Queen's Silver Jubilee

I remember the Silver Jubilee in 1977, or rather I remember a street party type thing at my playgroup for said jubilee.

In the summer of 1977 I was 2 years old and my brother Ian about 10 months old. He was in the pram (a massive old 1970s pram) and I had a seat that bolted over the top. There was red, white and blue bunting up and the normal kids party sort of food.

My orange squash had flies in it. That's what I remember most vividly. They could've had fire eating Cossack dancers and I'd have been oblivious because flies had got into my orange squash. 

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Normal service will resume

Due to being on holiday I've not had a chance to refresh my memory queue yet. Got a few things lined up in drafts to flesh out before posting but it's too much of a hassle from a phone (I've tried a couple of times in the past). Normal service will resume soon!

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Currah Microspeech

I had one of these - still do, actually! No idea if it still works but there we go.

The Currah µSpeech (or Microspeech if you're not being pretentious) plugged into your Spectrum and let you make it talk in a really unnatural way. I suspect most kids used it to make their computer swear. The cassette it came with had a game (written in BASIC) with the unforgettable lines THE BANSHEE WAILS AT YOU AND NOTHING HAPPENS. YOU ZAP THE BANSHEE AND HIT IT. THE MONSTER IS DEAD-UH.

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Stars on 45

This one came at me out of nowhere. Well, not strictly nowhere, more like Poundworld (where I was buying XXX Extra Strong Mints in the most frugal way possible), where it was being played over the speakers.

A bizarre proposition, Stars on 45 was (apparently) a Dutch creation which employed session performers to 'do' snippets of Beatles songs in a Disco megamix. Nothing is more early 80s than this, musically speaking.

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Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster

My mother buys The Sun. I don't know why. I rib her about her newspaper choice quite often. Anyway, back in 1986 they printed this legendary front page, which I read, horrified, because I was a naive 11 year old. It turned out that it was a story planted by former PR man and now noted nonce Max Clifford.

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Manhattan Cable

Tucked into the Friday night Channel 4 schedule circa 1991-92 was Manhattan Cable, presented by journalist Laurie Pike. The decidedly weird world of public access TV in New York City was delivered to the eyes of teenagers like me, either before or after The Word had been on (come on, we're talking 23 years ago!).

Notably Manhattan Cable was responsible for RuPaul's introduction to the British consciousness.

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Shop scales with price graduations

(Picture credit) These were simple genius. Put something in to weigh, find the price per lb on the arm, and read off the price where the red line is. The owner of the scales shown here has another lovely picture of the whole thing, which I'm not going to be cheeky and derive her of hits for.

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BBC2 Neon ident

My favourite of the 'classic' BBC2 idents, mainly because it was used so often before Twin Peaks.

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The first time I saw Super Mario Kart

It was 1992 and I couldn't believe how quickly the track moved.

(Picture credit) The SNES had some super nifty hardware that could flip and scale graphics incredibly quickly, which Super Mario Kart used to great effect for the track in this sprite-based racing game. I saw this for the first time on a portable TV in the basement of Boots in Gloucester in 1993 (because Boots used to sell music and video and computer gubbins as well as hair dye and medicine and compression socks). It was absolutely unbelievable.

However, Sonic the Hedgehog > Mario (just so that my loyalties are clear).

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My first Lego set

691 Rescue Helicopter. First Lego set I got. Although it was released in 1974 (like me, lol lol lol lol lol) I would've got it in about 1978. Instructions here. The odd thing about this model is the windscreen, it's really rare - only ever being used in this set (and its US version) and another set from the same year, an achingly 70s car and caravan set.

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Taking a couple of days off

I've not had a chance to recharge my memory queue on Tumblr and updating it from a phone is a nightmare, so I'm going to skive off for a couple of days.