It was acceptable at the time.

Oh, you bothered coming back did you? I imagine it wasn’t as fucking awful as I thought it was when I was writing it then. Jolly good. More arguments for and against the 80s follow. This might prove difficult as the only things I liked from the 80s were Transformers and sci fi films so it’ll get a bit vague…

Childrens TV

Let’s face it, kids TV is shit these days. ITV doesn’t even bother broadcasting the stuff any more and the BBCs output isn’t a patch on what it was. Let’s consider what used to be on telly for kids in the 80s, shall we?

Wide Awake Club/Wacaday

Inevitable comments about Michaela Strachan being lovely aside, this was proper saturday morning telly. A bunch of people who’d barely been on telly before (and Tommy Boyd) arsing about, live. Educational bits, Mike Myers, cartoons… what more did you want? The only thing recently on ITV to have been as good was SM:TV. DON’T talk to me about fucking Ministry of Mayhem. Just don’t.

Grange Hill

Oh shut up, it was great. Back in the 80s that is, before they introduced that horrible noise of a theme tune and made a point of including pupils with disabilities so they could take the moral high ground. In the 80s you had Zammo killing himself with drugs, Danny Kendall stealing a car and dying, and a character called Scruffy McGuffy. Let’s not forget everyone’s favorite hate figure as well, Mr Bronson – Michael Sheard clearly enjoying himself massively playing an utterly loathable and dislikable teacher who we were all adamant was EXACTLY LIKE at least one of our teachers.

Any Toy Based Cartoon

See yesterday’s post – they were all shit. No, they were. No, shut up with your fucking Thundercats T-shirt, they stank to high heaven. Don’t even try to defend the shoddy animation and the phoned-in voice acting. And don’t even START about Bravestarr.

Look and Read

Derek Griffiths singing wins all. FACT. Dark Towers, Georgie Racer and Through the Dragon’s Eye were all great kids serials that were sadly ruined by all that education they tried to fit in there. Wordie was, of course, a terrifying monster that shouldn’t have been allowed to exist…

Pob’s Program

I can’t decide if this was excellent or just plain weird. A strange puppet speaking pidgin english blowing raspberries at celebreties as they wander around a garden which, to me, looked more like some sort of graveyard. And let’s look at that celebrety guest list: Roy Castle, Spike Milligan… Madhur Jaffrey?! What? Well, anyway, it was frankly mindbending stuff and spoke volumes of the stuff that got tried back in the 80s before everything was focus grouped to death.

I think I’ve burned myself out a little here. More later, but kids TV goes down as a win for the 80s, so there.