[Closed] 80s Nostalgia: Films & TV

This is England.  Not sure it's going to trigger the romanticised view of English urban life though.

I guess Grange Hill was also sort of iconic for the time.

Thinking about it, film / TV portrayal of growing up in Britain in the 80s is pretty bleak!

Zammo off his tits on heroin.

Edit: This was a glib one liner but it's actually indicative of the bleak existence of teenage life in the 80's. If you want a snapshot of my youth then watch Just Another Saturday a 1975 BBC Play for Today starring Billy Connolly. Thats what I grew up seeing.
Watch news coverage of the Miners strike. Watch news coverage of the The famine in Ethiopa. Watch Threads ( you probabbly shouldn't, it's harrowing) that was the paranoia we lived with.

We watched American TV shows becasue they were sanitised, idealised and safe.

Thinking about it, film / TV portrayal of growing up in Britain in the 80s is pretty bleak!

That's kind of what I was assuming. In light of my thread yesterday on the greyness of the British urban landscape and Perchy's reference to Zammo, above, am I alone in thinking that a bit of sun and innocence wouldn't have gone amiss on British screens? 😉

EDIT: I am not actually trying to make a 'point'; I really am just wondering a whole bunch of things at once...

Are there any films with teenagers sat in their cupboard sized bedroom listening to Joy Division records?

Threads.

This

Threads - nothing like growing up thinking you could be killed anyday!

Repo Man

On a lighter note - there was Tiswas!...

I can't recall much programming aimed directly at teenagers - "Why Don't You" didn't really cut it! 🙂

am I alone in thinking that a bit of sun and innocence wouldn’t have gone amiss on British screens?

Yes, you probably are alone in thinking that. As we also had a steady diet of sun and innocence from the US. Lots of A-Team, Knight Rider, Dukes of Hazard, etc etc. (OK, not 100% innocent but certainly not the grim of Kes, for example...)

Sally James and the threat of nuclear war!

I actually grew up in Sydney - I lived there from '81 to '89.

At the time, as well as obviously its own domestic culture, Australia drew heavily on both Britain and America culturally.

The built landscape very looked like North America, sprawling suburbs, shopping malls and big cars. The America I saw on TV felt like a superior version of life in the western suburbs of Sydney.

Britsh TV I saw at the time just seemed unremittingly grim. Grange Hill made me terrified about the prospect of ever attending a British school. Eastenders was just grey and boring. The Professionals was quite good fun though.

Interesting perspective, @richmtb. Your perspective on British life as portrayed through TV is along the lines of my suspicion.

But when you say

The built landscape very looked like North America, sprawling suburbs, shopping malls and big cars. The America I saw on TV felt like a superior version of life in the western suburbs of Sydney

why superior? What is it about the portrayal of American life that seemed better than Australian?

why superior? What is it about the portrayal of American life that seemed better than Australian?

Because it was a shiny facsimile built for TV. Everyone in the sitcoms like Family Ties, Growing Pain and Who's the Boss lived in a great big house. Magnum had a Ferrari!

Kids went to sprawling high schools with basketball courts, football fields, cheerleaders and lockers! I was fascinated by lockers for some reason. The idea that a school would give you your own storage space you could decorate and keep your stuff in rather than dragging round a school bag just seemed impossibly decadent.

I know now that US TV and US reality were probably a bit different and that Australia was probably a better place to grow up in the 80's the Reagan's America, but when i was 10 it looked amazing on TV

Kids went to sprawling high schools with basketball courts, football fields, cheerleaders and lockers! I was fascinated by lockers for some reason. The idea that a school would give you your own storage space you could decorate and keep your stuff in rather than dragging round a school bag just seemed impossibly decadent.

This much is true of all North American high schools as far as I know. Whether we're talking about an inner city or a suburb, I have never seen or been in a high school that wasn't like this... until I moved to the UK. I didn't realise that Australian schools weren't the same as their American counterparts.

To be fair - the 70s and 80s were good times for me to grow up as a kid.

I think most UK kids at the time were also latch-key kids. We came in from school - dropped our bags - then went out playing with a big gang of mates until tea-time. And in summer you'd go out again after tea until the sun went down. 20-a-side football matches where common! 🙂

I grew up on a council estate in Sunderland.

We spent all of our time playing in burned out cars, jumping into the North Sea from the sewer pipe on the beach, running around disused railway lines and dodging white dog crap. I spent my whole time at school trying not to catch a beating from some of the absolute animals we were locked in with.

Funnily enough nothing on telly really reflected anything I recognised from real life.

I was obsessed with Knight Rider and the A-Team. I'll still stop and watch it now if it's on. I ache for blue skies and wide open spaces. Unfortunately I'm still somehow living in the North of England.

I don't think any of the programme include the eternal hunt for hedge porn.

I spent my whole time at school trying not to catch a beating from some of the absolute animals we were locked in with.

I often wonder whether our current attitudes to teachers and their profession are grounded in the fact that OUR teachers used ridicule, sarcasm and occasional actual physical force to control us? (Never mind the nutter kids that were in the same class!)

Growing up in the north west of England in the 80's, this was pretty accurate

My journey to school too me past the picket lines at Parkside colliery that Fatcha closed down. It was ****ing grim!

Thanks god for Sally James

What was that programme about a girl who lived in a B&B at the seaside? For a land-locked country lad that seemed so exotic. People really lived by the sea!!? 🙂

Seaview. The girl was Yvette Fielding

Britsh TV I saw at the time just seemed unremittingly grim. Grange Hill made me terrified about the prospect of ever attending a British school. Eastenders was just grey and boring. 

I don't to sound like a drama queen but 'unremittingly grim' is how I would describe large parts of my life in the northeast. All the adults I knew used to watch Eastenders. It looked light hearted escapism from where we were sitting.

I often wonder whether our current attitudes to teachers and their profession are grounded in the fact that OUR teachers used ridicule, sarcasm and occasional actual physical force to control us? (Never mind the nutter kids that were in the same class!)

I was er, 'man handled' by a teacher in primary school but only once. The nutter kids were the real problem. It ramped up dramatically when I went to secondary school which was halfway between 2 rough areas and the hardest kids from each area battled for supremacy. I saw some pretty wild stuff at school. Didn't get much lurning dun.

I don’t think any of the programme include the eternal hunt for hedge porn.

The old blokes who used to race pigeons on the local allotments used to keep us very well stocked! Find a fresh one that wasn't too soiled and it was like currency.

Did kids here romanticise or envy us North Americans based on what you saw on the screen?

what’s not to like? Lots of TV channels, big wide concrete streets, huge houses, sunshine, blue skies, ...

while here it was 3 TV channels until 1982 when we got a fourth. Narrow asphalt/grit streets, where it wasn’t setts, that were terrible for skateboarding on. Fairly small houses with tiny rooms unless you were wealthy or lived in some old Victorian pile. Sunshine, well there was 1976. Blue skies, sometimes visible between the clouds.

as folks have suggested aside from a few relative highlights the portrayal on TV was often grimmer than IRL. It was usually more dramatic at least.

Does Dr Who count as giving some impression of life in the UK at the time? I’d suggest that the cheapness of production might be indicative of some aspects of life here at the time.

Can't believe nobody has mentioned Rita, Sue and Bob too yet!

Did kids here romanticise or envy us North Americans based on what you saw on the screen?

Envy? You're not bloody kidding! It seemed like another planet. A very, very unattainable other world that bore absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to life as we knew it.

As a kid into BMXing and skating buying magazines and seeing the pictures of sunlit half-pipes in Califronia, it seemed like some mythical Nirvana.

Grew up in the North West, Maghull and then Southport. The 80's were class..
Playing on skateboards, football in the park ( oooo isn't it, marvellous....)
TV was great in the 80's A Team, Knight rider, Airwolf, He Man, Thundercats, always a cartoon after school (Thank you Hanna Barbera)
I can remember the 70's tho, they were really bad...
Strikes, Blackouts, Unemployment, Bad clothes, bad Cars...

But I still had a Chopper...

Biggest movie influence ..
1970's - Batman
1980's Quadrophenia

As a kid into BMXing and skating buying magazines and seeing the pictures of sunlit half-pipes in Califronia, it seemed like some mythical Nirvana.

Used to love the old Bones Brigade and other skate videos with endless smooth asphalt, school yards, huge concrete blocks, banked water channels etc.  Our reality was a few pallets and bits of ply in Gateways car park, a reasonably sized hill with no road at the bottom that we could coffin down, and a newly built estate which had an area of reasonably smooth curb (but also lots of pinecones which got jammed under wheels).

I think most UK kids at the time were also latch-key kids. We came in from school – dropped our bags – then went out playing with a big gang of mates until tea-time.

Yep, weekends were usually wake-up - out to knock on your mates, off to the woods/jumps/skate-areas/lad with the latest computer or console's house - back home for cheese on toast - repeat morning's activity - back home for tea - if light evenings repeat morning's activity or watch some TV and marvel at the good times on offer in the USA - home at dark.

I think most UK kids at the time were also latch-key kids. We came in from school – dropped our bags – then went out playing with a big gang of mates until tea-time. And in summer you’d go out again after tea until the sun went down. 20-a-side football matches where common!

Spot on. Also, summer holidays, both parents working all day. We were out all the time, never got bored. Popped in at lunch for Finders Crispy Pancakes or a Pot Noodle. Back out to fire Dutch Arrows on the green, or shitty stick fights in the clay pits. Setting fire to plastic milk crates hung in a tree was another fave - zzt zzts we used to call em cos of the noise the molten plastic falling to the ground made.
Nope, never seen my 70s childhood on film or TV.

Nope, never seen my 70s childhood on film or TV.

Apart from that public information film where the kid gets electrocuted for a frisbee or the one where they drown in a quarry or that horrific one where they all get brutally killed in various farm yard accidents.

As a Forces Brat I had a weird part-time fantasy relationship with the UK in general and England in particular. I left the UK with my family when I was very small, maybe 3-4 and didn't return until my early teens. We left Hong Kong (my dad's last far eastern posting for Lossiemouth of all places (I think the RAF were into their sick jokes) and then a year later we drove back over the border back into England. My parents were quite emotional in a way I'd never really seen before, for my brother and I, it was "just another Married Quarters"

Weirdly The telly that I remember most was the fact that the UK seemed to have the same cartoons we'd watched in Hong Kong about a year before hand, and all the voices were wrong...

The telly that I remember most was the fact that the UK seemed to have the same cartoons we’d watched in Hong Kong about a year before hand, and all the voices were wrong…

Except Hong Kong Phooey presumably?

Apart from that public information film where the kid gets electrocuted for a frisbee or the one where they drown in a quarry or that horrific one where they all get brutally killed in various farm yard accidents.

Us Leigh Parkers used to laugh and sneer at that crap 😀
We did have a kid in school, went absent for a year or so, came back with (sorry to say!) Freddie Kruger type burns all over his face... had sawed through a live cable near Havant station. If you weren't living dangerously, you weren't living.

Agree with most posts so far. Grew up in West Yorkshire and just remember being out all the time. Whether that be on a skateboard, bike or on foot building rope swings, climbing trees, playing footy or building dens. When the weather turned shit it was Lego, He-Man figures or waiting an hour for a game to load on the Spectrum 48k.

The only thing that gets remotely close to showing my childhood circa aged seven to twelve are parts of Peter Kay’s stand up routines.

The scariest public information film is the drowning one with the grim reaper. Scared the shit out of me as a child, but didn’t stop me playing near water or on train tracks.

The scariest public information film with hindsight was Rolf Harris in a swimming pool full of kids.

"Can you guess what it is yet?"

15 year olds driving cars; not having to wear a school uniform; school lockers; always sunny; everything being big......I loved the image of the US as a kid, it just seemed so much more exotic, aspirational and cool. British life just seemed so low budget - I still feel that way

For an idea of British youth culture in the 80s, you might be best watching some old episodes of Going Live, Number 73, Motormouth etc

One Summer.

Taggart was a good depiction of Glasgow, more murders than in real life but bar that pretty accurate.

But like most my pre teen tv was dominated by american shows. A team, airwolf, street hawk, blue thunder, knight rider and even stuff like saved by the bell and MASH which were opposite ends of the spectrum but still vivd in ky mind.

Loads of cartoons like He Man, Pole Position, Ulysses 31, G force/battle of the planets, transformers, amazing spider man, x men, MASK, tmht etc. All not uk in origin

I grew up in an semi-rural East Anglian village that grew quickly between the late 1970s and mid 1980s. Beige brick Broseley homes abounded, but access to green open spaces was a given. Panda pops, 10p bags of sweets, hedgerow bongo magazines, white dog turds, boil in the bag curries, playing on building sites, summer street football games that lasted until dusk and Raleigh Strikas/Grifters were de-rigueur.

Aged thirteen, I was uprooted and despatched to Apartheid-era Cape Town with my parents as my father was offered a job there. Being Apartheid era South Africa in the 1980s there was a great deal of poverty and destitution amongst the majority population, who if fortunate were transient and working in insecure jobs. I'd never really seen homelessness before until then, but it was terrifyingly rife. The road from DF Malan Airport was a straight carriageway carved through the Cape Flats. High walls were on either side of it, behind them lay the townships built by the displaced residents of District Six.

Even in our safe, Rondebosch suburban bubble, things were unfamiliar. Television would be in Afrikaans until 8pm then would switch to English and would switch back to Afrikaans at 8pm the following day. We had lots of American TV - McGuyver, Knight Rider (dubbed into Afrikaans), but no A-Team. I recalled a Saturday evening music show called "No Jacket Required", fronted by grey suited white men featuring grey suited white men. There were two other commercial TV channels, for the Xhosa and Zulu populations accordingly. We'd see these familiar TV adverts from home, remember Brooke Bond D? In SA we had Three Trees Tea, with the same advert shot for shot except that on one channel the people in the ad were all white and the other all black:

Although I can't find the Three Trees ad, here's what I'm talking about - Same advert, same product but Apartheid.

My school had a very strict uniform policy which included khaki shorts/socks in the summer, there were no baggy shirts or chinos to be seen anywhere. Schools were segregated, so some of my classmates back home would've had to be sent to a different school to me, something I didn't fully understand but felt kind of weird about even then. Corporal punishment was the default means of discipline too, weirdly the homogenous kids at my school in SA got up to much worse high-jinks that we did at home, baiting the prefects was seen as a sport, accordingly they wielded power by virtue of a yellow stripe on their uniform which seemed to me indicated accomplishment on the sports field, lack of imagination off the sports field and sadism everywhere.

We had a school disco in the summer of '87 (remember this is the southern hemisphere). All the kids looked a little out of time to me, 50s retro fashion was in evidence at home too, but more so in Cape Town. We bopped away to two year old English pop songs, I danced with a girl in my class to A-Ha and Duran Duran, but being somewhat progressive, the DJ played La Bamba twice. The cool kids played Bob Marley on their walkmans. Just over the threshold of the school gates there were a row of young black lads, patiently sat waiting. As soon as the clock struck nine and the disco ended, they came in to mix with their mates among our number, Apartheid temporarily forgotten at exactly 21:01. Teachers too weren't in the slightest bit fazed at this social mixing, even though it was made clear that our new friends weren't welcome at 20:59.

We returned in May '88, we returned from our South African adventure to Top of the Pops, swearing on TV, a more liberal attitude to music and I took away lessons from SA that took a while for me to fully understand. Even in those short few months of absence, things had changed. Frank Bough was unexplainably missing from TV, this girl I liked was dating my best friend who was a full year older than me. Twee 1950s throwback fashion and pastel shades had given way to bold fluorescent Acid House shades, my hitherto regionally appropriate South African threads were a subject of derision.

That’s kind of what I was assuming. In light of my thread yesterday on the greyness of the British urban landscape and Perchy’s reference to Zammo, above, am I alone in thinking that a bit of sun and innocence wouldn’t have gone amiss on British screens? 😉

Ahh the good old days,fear of Nuclear Apocalypse on a Tuesday, "just say no” on a Wednesday a smatter of "Gis us a job on Thursday" and Fridays “Don’t die of Ignorance” and a smattering of a cat telling you to avoid kiddie fiddlers around this.

I suppose the fact that they liked to put the odd stripper gratuitously on Minder made up for it all 🙂

I also met Darth Vader so life was good 🙂

Looking back, the UK media I remember from my youth suggested the world was populated almost entirely by glue sniffers, every adult you didn't know was a paedophile with a packet of sweets and if the glue or paedos didn't get you first, you were almost certainly guaranteed to be killed crossing railway tracks

Zammo chased the dragon and got a smack on the nose.

Looking back, the UK media I remember from my youth suggested the world was populated almost entirely by glue sniffers, every adult you didn’t know was a paedophile with a packet of sweets and if the glue or paedos didn’t get you first, you were almost certainly guaranteed to be killed crossing railway tracks

We've come a long way. Er, oh.

I was born in the early 70s so was a 'child of the 80s'. We had a lot to be scared about. On one side you had the death throes of the Cold War and to paraphrase Billy Connelly, a man with his finger on the nuclear button who was the same age as my grandad and he couldn't be trusted with the TV remote control. On the other, the AIDS explosion, a huge "don't die of ignorance" campaign and b-list celebrities rolling condoms onto bananas. Better get laid before the bomb drops except you're not allowed.

But really, you're right, we got so much better at not shoving dodgy behaviour under the carpet. We criticise social media today for fearmongering but this is where it started, stranger danger and by extension being empowered to call out Uncle Brian for being a creepy ****, and I'm not convinced that's a bad thing.

One Summer?

Bloody hell I’d forgotten about that. It was utter genius. I remember it having a massive impact at the time

When I started going to pubs in the UK I was so disappointed they weren't like Cheers. When I started going to bars in the US I as disappointed they weren't all like Cheers.

Kes, Billy Elliot and Our Friends in the North will give you an idea of some of the bleakness but also the good times too.  Back when miners still thought they could hold a country to ransom for a dying unprofitable industry.

One Summer?

Bloody hell I’d forgotten about that. It was utter genius. I remember it having a massive impact at the time

Might've been NW specific. As a kid the age of the protagonists growing up in Merseyside, it hit us all. Willy Russell disowned it because he didn't like the casting and some of the script edits.

British life just seemed so low budget – I still feel that way

Ditto. As a nation we do a cracking job of portraying our country as a grim little shithole.

Ditto. As a nation we do a cracking job of portraying our country as a grim little shithole.

Isn't it an ‘English’ thing thou, look at the success of Eastenders/Cornation St/Emerdale,people seem to like wallowing in grimmness.

Seem to like seeing people in worse circumstances than their own as opposed to better ones.

I used to like Capital City,Chancer and Spender which were mostly up beat, normal lad done good type of things.

When I started going to pubs in the UK I was so disappointed they weren’t like Cheers

When I started going into pubs in the UK I was disappointed that they were exactly like the Slaughtered Lamb in American Werewolf.

Well this is an interesting topic, discussed at length in the Grips house.

American TV is aspirational, whereas British TV is representational. Americans (for the most part) seem to want to be shown wonderful stuff, big houses/cars etc, that they wish they owned. But in the UK we want to see ourselves represented on-screen. The reasons for this are pretty complex I suspect, but perhaps linked into the resentment Brits often feel towards the rich, which may be related to historical concepts of class, I'm not sure. Or the American style might be linked to the way the whole of US life is aspirational - the pursuit of success and money, and the fantasy of the American Dream being sold at every opportunity.

One of the most irritating examples of this is Friends. The title song talks about how crappy their lives are then they end up living in huge apartments and somehow managing to have money all the time. Although to be fair, part of the reason the apartments are huge is because they are stage sets for live filming with a large audience.

Anyway we watched loads of US TV in the 80s (and still do), so we thought all of the US was big houses, cars, phones and TVs in your own bedroom etc. And for a while I really thought people in the US actually grew faster, because all the school kids look like young adults. And the men were all much more muscular. I think a lot of people still think that tbh.

Back when miners still thought they could hold a country to ransom for a dying unprofitable industry.

I think it was more about the way it was being done, and how it was being turned into a weapon for class warfare...

I turned 18 in 1980 and didn't have a TV through most of the decade* but I don't recall any ambition to live on the set of Happy Days or ET or whatever, or the set of Neighbours come to that, it just looked a bit shite. Also, days of Reagan, Bush #1, iran/contra etc (why no impeachment there?) and I was pretty anti US. Europe had an appeal. Still does.

My childhood was similarly hanging round friends' houses, the park which shaded into countryside, the long hike to town, adults distant features of the landscape. Pretty comfortable really. My kids lives were pretty similar which apparently is rarer these days.

*Okay there was a TV in a couple of shared houses but I was out literally every night. I'm knackered now just thinking about it.

We all wanted your life saxonrider.
I used to dream about my parents movign to california every day, where there were skate bowls and empty pools everywhere for my skate/bmx fantasies.
That's why we all loved Et, Goonies etc, those kids lived the life we could only dream of.

American TV is aspirational,

Even when it tries not to be.

How many shows / films portray the loser kid living in mom's basement? We all thought that would be AWESOME!

Or the fully stocked cabin in the woods? Or the long-abandoned family home that no-one has been in for half a century yet is completely free of graffiti and syringes, in fact is otherwise perfect besides a couple of dust sheets, and is the size of Balmoral?

American TV is aspirational

Yep, just getting into one little brawl in Philadelphia and BOOM! You're in Bel Air.

We all wanted your life saxonrider.
I used to dream about my parents movign to california every day, where there were skate bowls and empty pools everywhere for my skate/bmx fantasies.

Oddly enough my dad used to drink with a bloke who’s son did freestyle BMX back in the 80’s
,who moved to the USA with dad to do just that.
He used to go to St George park in Bristol but had the big ramps in his back garden.

I just can’t remember his name.
(Funny enough JLC's dad use to also drink in the same pub)

Remember Entertainment USA selling the dream to us 🙂

That talking cat wasn’t wrong thou.

"Charlie says, always tell your mummy before you go out."