The Baby Boomer Generation (17 page)

There was a lot of good stuff to watch on television in the 1980s; many excellent writers, producers and directors came to the fore, and there was now little evidence of scenery wobbling about as there had been in the early days of television soap operas. The one exception was of course
Acorn Antiques
, Victoria Wood's wonderful mid-1980s spoof TV soap opera. The choice of television programmes had never been greater; our screens were awash with a multitude of good quality television series and it would be amiss not to highlight some of these wonderful British comedy TV shows, like
'Allo 'Allo!
,
Auf Wiedersehen
,
Pet, Blackadder
,
Bread, Hi-de-Hi!
,
Only Fools and Horses
and
Yes, Minister
. We were also spoilt with an abundance of British crime and whodunit TV dramas, like
Bergerac
,
The Bill
,
C.A.T.S. Eyes
,
The Gentle Touch
,
Inspector Morse
,
Juliet Bravo
,
Rumpole of the Bailey
and
Taggart
(with Mark McManus). There were scores of good American police and detective TV series, including
Cagney and Lacey
,
Hill Street Blues
,
L.A. Law
,
Magnum, P.I.
,
Miami Vice
and
Quincy, M.E.
. Other popular British-made TV shows included
Blankety Blank
,
Blind Date
,
Bread
,
Brush Strokes
,
Butterflies
,
Casualty
,
Doctor Who
,
Ever Decreasing Circles
,
A Fine Romance
,
Just Good Friends
,
London's Burning
,
Lovejoy
,
Minder
,
Robin's Nest
,
Shelley
,
Surprise Surprise
,
Tenko
,
To the Manor Born
and
Wogan
, the chat show that was on three nights a week in the late 1980s. Television chat shows were very popular but the choice of guest was sometimes questionable, especially when the guests included glove puppets such as Spit the Dog, Basil Brush and Rod Hull's Emu. The big British-made TV soaps of the day were
Coronation Street
,
Crossroads
,
Eastenders
and
Emmerdale Farm
(as it was called back then). The notable American imports included
Knight Rider
,
The Fall Guy
,
Knots Landing
,
Lou Grant
,
The Cosby Show
,
Moonlighting
,
Mission Impossible
,
Remington Steele
,
Roseanne
,
T. J. Hooker
,
Taxi
,
Fame
,
Hart to Hart
,
Cheers
and of course, the two big ones,
Dallas
and
Dynasty.

Apart from the 1981 wedding of Charles and Diana, the most-watched television shows of the decade were all episodes from either soaps or situation comedies. The 1986 Christmas episode of
Eastenders
topped the list; the royal wedding was next and then came
Coronation Street
,
Dallas
,
To The Manor Born
,
Bread
,
Neighbours
and
Just Good Friends
. The BBC1 News broadcast from 25 November 1984 managed to sneak in at number nine most watched, and the 1989 Christmas Day episode of
Only Fools and Horses
reached number ten in the ratings. Overall, there were an enormous number of memorable 1980s television shows and it is difficult to choose which ones to mention and which to leave out as any omissions are bound to include someone's favourite. The same goes for films; there was a whole raft of good ones released during the 1980s, far too many to mention individually. Notable British ones include
Chariots of Fire
,
Gandhi
,
Educating Rita
,
Mona Lisa
,
Hope and Glory
,
The Last Emperor
,
My Left Foot
,
Scandal
and
Shirley Valentine
; not to mention the five
James Bond
films that were released in the 1980s. There was an exceptionally large number of big box-office American films of the day and these included
Airplane!
,
The Blues Brothers
,
Fame
,
E.T.
,
Beverly Hills Cop
,
Back to the Future
,
Top Gun
,
Crocodile Dundee
,
Fatal Attraction
,
Batman
,
Ghostbusters
,
Dirty Dancing
,
Die Hard
and of course the
Indiana Jones
films. Whether on television at home or at the cinema, we were certainly not short of good stuff to watch. Unfortunately, we had to wait until the end of the 1990s before we could buy and rent films on DVD.

The popularity of big venue rock and pop concerts of the 1960s and 1970s continued to grow in the 1980s and it was no surprise that Bob Geldof and Midge Ure chose this type of money-making event as the best way to raise money to aid the Ethiopian famine relief. The event they organised was held on 13 July 1985 and it was called Live Aid, which consisted of two huge, dual-venue live concerts. The main concert was held at London's Wembley Stadium and the other was held at the John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, USA. These pop/rock concerts were staged as a follow-up to the successful multi-artist charity single that Geldof and Ure had produced for sale over the Christmas period of 1984; a very catchy tune with an extremely moving message, the song was called ‘Do They Know It's Christmas?'. On that memorable day in July 1985, Live Aid became a global event with other smaller concerts being held in such places as Australia, Germany, Russia, the Netherlands and Yugoslavia. Prince Charles and Princess Diana officially opened the worldwide charity rock concert from the stage at Wembley Stadium and the BBC television pictures were beamed around the world, to be viewed by 1.5 billion people in 160 countries in the biggest broadcast ever known. The two main concerts at the Wembley and JFK Stadiums featured most of what was considered to be the royalty of pop and rock music, including members of the British baby boomer generation within the line-up of bands, such as The Boomtown Rats, Dire Straits, Queen, Status Quo and Ultravox, and solo artist baby boomers such as David Bowie, Phil Collins, Elton John and Sting. The Who were also there but only the drummer, Kenney Jones, can be classed as a post-war baby boomer; Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend are too old, having been born during the Second World War, as was Paul McCartney who appeared in the Wembley finale, and Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger who both featured in the JFK concert. It should make all baby boomers feel quite sprightly to be reminded that they are in fact younger than these rock superstars, many of whom were still performing in 2012. Amazingly, Phil Collins managed to perform live in the two main Live Aid concerts on either side of the Atlantic. He did this by boarding a supersonic Concorde flight from the London to New York straight after his performance at Wembley Stadium. Live Aid raised a total of £40 million with half the money spent on food and the other half on long-term development. In those days of high unemployment and job insecurity the spirit of British generosity was clear to see, as whole families queued one after the other to use the house phone (few people had mobiles then) to give their credit card details to volunteers tending special Live Aid donation phone lines at call centres around the country.

But we weren't just watching television every minute of our spare time. In the home, we were busy sanding the varnish from our floors and stripping paint from the woodwork to reveal real pine floorboards, doors and stair rails. We bought loads of solid pine furniture and decorated our rooms with Laura Ashley-style miniature floral-patterned wallpapers and fabrics. We ripped out all of those 1970s coloured bathroom suites and damp bathroom carpets and replaced them with classic white suites and ceramic floor tiles. Those of us lucky enough to have a garage painted over the purple garage doors using more subtle colours. At last, we were bringing style and good taste back into our homes. By the end of the decade our homes had been completely restyled to resemble times gone by but in a very bright and cheery fashion with country cottage kitchens, dado rails and pretty patterned wallpapers. To add to our satisfaction, we were doing it all ourselves. The do-it-yourself (DIY) home improvement craze was now approaching its peak and the companies that had opened high street DIY stores in the early 1970s, many in old cinemas, were now opening huge shed-like DIY superstores in the retail parks, and they usually occupied the largest and most prominent sites available. More and more new-style business and retail parks and shopping malls were being built on out-of-town sites and in inner city disused industrial areas, and DIY stores always featured prominently. There were lots of successful DIY companies around at the time and many became household names. They included B&Q, Do It All, Dodge City, Fads, Focus, Great Mills, Home Charm, Homebase, LCP, Payless, Texas and Wickes. Most of these old names have long since disappeared, having been taken over or shut down over the years, but these were all big retailing names of the 1980s and we spent lots of our money in these stores buying all sorts of DIY products to improve our homes. In some cases it was less of a do-up and more of a botch-up, as many a homebuyer has discovered to their cost since those daft days when thousands of DIY fanatics all across the country could be heard practising their amateur skills late into the night during every weekend and holiday period. They were ever-ready with their electric drill in hand, like a coiled spring waiting to burst into action.

It was during the 1980s that we first began to feel some level of hostility towards our friendly neighbourhood postman. As each year went by we found more and more junk mail littering our doormats, promoting everything from double glazing to foreign holidays, and a lot of it was being delivered by the postman in personally addresses envelopes. It was a fairly new experience for us, something we were not used to, and certainly not on this scale. We regularly got letters telling us that we had won a fortune – we just had to phone a special number to make our claim. Credit card companies bombarded us with part-filled application forms with letters advising us that we had been specially selected to receive one of their credit cards – even gold and platinum cards. We ended up with so many different credit cards that we had to buy special purses and wallets to accommodate them all. Unknown to us, we were becoming targeted consumers. Large companies were gathering information about us and using it to target us for all sorts of consumer products and services. They also began to phone us and use high-pressure sales techniques to sell us their specially priced offers. And guess what? These offers were exclusive for you, and you had to commit to buy them there and then to get the special exclusive prices. These telemarketing companies even sold on our personal information to other marketing companies so that they too could send us mountains of junk mail. We were categorised by these marketing companies and these target categories were given acronym names like Dinky (short for a couple with ‘double income no kids yet'). This was certainly the age of consumerism. Each and every one of us was fitted into one category or another and there was a special name to describe every section of society from Tweenies (between 5 and 12 years old) to Empty Nesters (couples whose children have grown up and gone). We weren't very happy with the amount of junk mail and telemarketing phone calls we were getting in the 1980s but we had no idea how bad it was going to get – and we were yet to experience the wonders of the Internet and all the junk mail that would create. In the early 1980s, we in Britain had seen the arrival of the first home computers with such makes as Apple, Apricot, Amstrad, Commodore, IBM and Sinclair, who made the ZX Spectrum, Britain's best-selling computer, but we would have to wait until the 1990s to experience the Internet and email messaging.

The 1980s was the decade in which we saw the birth of young upwardly mobile professionals, or yuppies as they were more commonly known. These were high-earning young professionals who were totally absorbed in their own world of opulent living and completely out of touch with ordinary life. City traders working on the financial markets in London's financial Square Mile were earning huge salaries and bonuses and they characterised the British yuppie image to the extreme. They were mostly under 30 with fully loaded gold and platinum credit cards that were burning holes in their pockets. They developed a reputation for being shameless in their unbounded spending on lavish champagne lunches costing hundreds of pounds a time, and for leaving tips that were large enough to feed an average family for a week. They bought all of the expensive trappings that you associate with ostentatious rich people (or flash gits, as many less-privileged mortals were inclined to call them). They spent money like there was no tomorrow. Top of the range Porsches and gold Rolex watches seemed to be among the essential parts of their kit. They took to wearing wide-striped braces in a style that was perfectly portrayed by Gordon Gekko's character in the 1987 film,
Wall Street
. They used the ‘work hard and play hard' ethic to explain their brash overspending, but the whole culture was generally viewed as being an unbridled feast of self-indulgence. Many young people were attracted to the yuppie image and the desire for such a lifestyle became contagious. Soon other young professionals were imitating the city high flyers, albeit to a lesser extent. Business executives throughout the land bought leather-bound Filofax personal organiser wallets, the must-have yuppie accessory before the days of electronic organisers. They stuffed their Filofax wallets with as many loose-leaf pages as they could possibly fit in; the bulgier the Filofax the more important they looked. As with any fashion trend, there were a lot of wannabes: less-wealthy young people who couldn't afford to keep pace with the true yuppies but still wanted to be seen as part of the yuppie set. Many were willing to get themselves into debt just so they could hang around expensive wine bars and at least look the part. Fortunately, by then most of us baby boomers were a little too old to be cast as stereotypical, young, upwardly mobile professionals, and so perhaps we can rest easy in the knowledge that we played no part in the culture of extreme greed and self-indulgence that was linked to the yuppie lifestyle of the 1980s. Well, at least some of us can.