It was all right in the 80s: things that were normal but now seem mad

A random nostalgic flashback caused me to consider the kinds of things we took for granted when I was, say, 10 years old (in 1987) but are now utterly outlandish

I am neither old nor young, in the grand scheme of things, and mostly I accept that with middling grace. I will turn 47 in October, if I am spared, and although the list of achievements I can be the youngest person to reach is now very short, there is a lot still to do.

It is likely that most people think this, but the world seems to have changed enormously in a huge number of ways since I was a child. On balance, it’s probably more good than bad, and you have to be prepared to accept a lot of changes whether they meet with your approval or not; at the same time, the world in which you grow up inevitably shapes your assumptions about the world and your mental frame of reference.

Without rhyme or reason, I was prompted to think about all of this recently by Russ Abbot, a man whose very name may mean nothing to some readers but who was a very considerable figure in British light entertainment in my childhood: Russ Abbot’s Madhouse, which ran on London Weekend Television from 1980 to 1985, regularly attracted 12 million viewers (that scale of audience would have made it the second most watched television show of 2023, behind only the coronation of Charles III). The man even had a top 10 single, Atmosphere, in 1984/85.

I digress. Abbot prompted me not in person, which would make a great, if niche, anecdote, but by popping unbidden into my mind, in the particular manifestation of a television advert he made for Castella Classic cigars in the late 1980s. As a piece of advertising, it is ho-hum, depending on what even then was a tired joke about Des O’Connor’s talents—or otherwise—as a singer, but what struck me as it came unexpectedly to the forefront of my mind was its nature: it was an advert for cigars. On the television. To many people that would seem inconceivable now, but in my childhood cigar adverts were common, the best known being those for Hamlet, which used the strapline “Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet” and Johann Sebastian Bach’s calming, reflective Air on a G String.

In fairness, tobacco advertising even 30 or 40 years ago was contentious. Television adverts for cigarettes had been banned as long ago as August 1965 under powers granted by the Television Act 1964, so belonged firmly to my parents’ childhood; although from my father I seemed to absorb by osmosis (or rather frequent reference) the tale of the disastrous advertising campaign for Strand cigarettes which had promoted them under the slogan “You’re never alone with a Strand” and the image of a man who was, well, alone. Equally, time was being called: while cigars and loose tobacco had escaped the ban which applied to cigarettes, they ceased to be advertised on television in 1991.

My point is that as an adolescent I thought nothing was odd about a television advert for smoking, whereas someone of the same age now would likely be horrified, as well as plain baffled. I am aware that this is a seam which has been mined by low-cost, cut-and-paste television nostalgia shows like It Was Alright In The 70s, and this essay is not intended to be sonorously profound or perspective-altering, but it made me think: what aspects of life when I was, say, 10 years old (which age I achieved in October 1987) were regarded as relatively normal or at least accepted and seem outlandish, outrageous or impossibly distant today?

Staying with tobacco for a moment, smoking was much more prevalent than it is today. Both my parents were smokers, though both gave up in the 1980s and never returned to it (though my father took up cigar-smoking late in life), and I suppose some of my childhood was in a “smoking household”, though it never struck me as noteworthy because I had no comparator. In 1980, roughly 40 per cent of adults smoked, which had fallen to 30 per cent by 1990. It is now just over 12 per cent, so you can calculate for yourself the kind of difference that prevalence made to everyday life. Moreover, there was far less provision made for non-smokers when I was young, the assumption being, I suppose, that they should be tolerant despite being even then the majority.

Here are two things that seem unimaginable now, however. When I turned 10 in October 1987, the date which I am using as a convenient but arbitrary measure, you could smoke on aeroplanes and at the back of the top deck of London buses. British Airways introduced a trial smoking ban on trans-Atlantic flights in 1990 but did not proscribe smoking completely until 29 March 1998 (which is why some current aircraft still have ashtrays). London Transport made buses smoke-free in February 1991.

Even the London Underground was not categorically non-smoking. The practice had been banned on Tube trains themselves in July 1984 and stations below the surface in February 1985, although the latter was frequently flouted. It was only in the summer of 1987 that a trial six-month ban across the network was introduced, which was still in force at my birthday. No-one knew at the time, of course, but everything was about to change in dramatic and tragic circumstances: on 18 November 1987, a fire started underneath a Piccadilly line escalator at King’s Cross St Pancras Underground station, started by a discarded match, and spread viciously and rapidly into the ticket hall. Thirty-one people were killed and another 100 injured, and it caused London Underground to review many aspects of its safety and conditions of carriage. Only five days after the fire, on 23 November, the temporary smoking ban was made permanent.

A factor in the King’s Cross fire which may also seem weirdly antique: the escalator under which the discarded match fell burned so quickly because it was made of wood, as were many escalators in Tube stations (the first had been installed at Earl’s Court in 1911). In the aftermath of the fire, it was realised that wooden escalators were a glaring fire hazard and they began to be phased out, though it was a decades-long process, and the last such escalator was removed from Greenford station on the Central line on 11 March 2014. (There is still a wooden escalator at Alperton on the Uxbridge branch of the Piccadilly line but it is bricked up behind a wall.)

What else seems weird now? Schoolchildren could still, under certain circumstances, be beaten. Corporal punishment had been banned in state schools on 22 July 1986, following a 1982 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that it could only be administered with parental consent, but it was still permissable, though increasingly rare, in independent schools. The favoured instrument was a cane, applied to the palms of the hands, buttocks or bare legs, but a slipper or gym shoe were also used. Scottish state schools, by contrast, had generally used a leather strap called the tawse or belt. Physical chastisement would not be banned outright until 1998 in England and Wales, 2000 in Scotland and 2003 in Northern Ireland.

The reach of the state was very different, although changing fast. While public ownership seems to be coming back into vogue under some circumstances, when I was 10 the government owned its own car manufacturer, the Rover Group (formerly British Leyland). It had been nationalised as a matter of financial salvation in 1975 but Margaret Thatcher’s free-market monetarist government was enthusiastic about divesting itself of state-owned industries and it was plainly mad in a Western liberal democracy for the government to make its own cars. The Rover Group was eventually sold to British Aerospace—itself only fully privatised in 1985—for £150 million in 1988.

Coach operator National Express was also state-owned. It was a subsidiary of the National Bus Company, a nationalised transport group formed from 65 separate operators by Harold Wilson’s Labour administration under the provisions of the Transport Act 1968, but in 1986 the government began the process of breaking up and selling off the state-run behemoth. By late 1987 some 22 operators were still in the government’s hands but the sale of London Country Bus (North East) to Parkdale Holdings in April 1988 represented the last privatisation. National Express had been subject to a management buy-out in March 1988.

The government also made butter. Seriously; well, sort of. In 1981, the milk processing arm of the Milk Marketing Board, which controlled the production and distribution of milk, had been transformed into a separate commercial division as Dairy Crest and was the buyer of last resort for British farmers’ raw milk. In September 1983, it launched a butter-like spread called Clover, still available today. Again, the government was keen to divest itself of this function: Dairy Crest was incorporated on 23 December 1986 and changed its name to Dairy Crest Limited on 21 May 1987. Its chairman and board were still agreed with the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. The company was eventually floated on the stock exchange in August 1996. So on my 10th birthday you could, technically, buy state-manufactured pseudo-butter.

I was lucky—I mean that profoundly and am constantly aware of it—to have been provided with a fabulous female role model by my late mother. She was successful in her chosen field of education and I suspect took most challenges including institutional sexism head on. But in 1987 there were still a lot of glass ceilings to be broken.

Although the 1980s were dominated by the United Kingdom’s first woman Prime Minister, in 1987 no woman had ever occupied any of the other so-called great offices of state. Nor would that change for some time: Margaret Beckett was the first woman to become Foreign Secretary in 2006, Jacqui Smith became the first female Home Secretary in 2007 and the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer had never been held by a woman until Rachel Reeves was appointed in July.

There had never been a female law lord nor a woman sitting in the Court of Appeal. Baroness Hale of Richmond was the first woman appointed to be a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary in January 2004, while Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss was promoted to the Court of Appeal just after my birthday, in January 1988.

Chief constables and their deputies were universally male. It was only four years since a woman, Alison Halford, had risen to Assistant Chief Constable in Merseyside Police. The first woman to run a police force was Pauline Clare, who became Chief Constable of Lancashire Constabulary in June 1995. Sue Davies had been appointed the first female Deputy Chief Constable, of Dorset Police, the year before.

In some ways there was very little religious diversity. In 1987 there had never been a Muslim, Hindu, Sikh or Buddhist MP. There had been a handful of Members of Parliament from mixed ethnic backgrounds since the 18th century, and the first Jewish MP, Baron Lionel de Rothschild, had taken his seat in 1858, but the general election of June 1987 had seen the high-profile arrival of four ethnic-minority Labour MPs: Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington), Paul Boateng (Brent South), Bernie Grant (Tottenham) and Keith Vaz (Leicester East). The first Sikh to be elected was Piara Khabra (Labour, Ealing Southall, 1992), the first Muslim was Mohammed Sarwar (Labour, Glasgow Central, 1997), the first Hindu Shailesh Vara (Conservative, North West Cambridgeshire, 2005) and the first Buddhist Suella Fernandes (now Braverman; Conservative, Fareham, 2015).

There were no women priests in the Church of England, of course. The first would not be ordained until 1994. There were, however, female rabbis in Reform Judaism: Dublin-born Jackie Tabick had become Britain’s first female rabbi in 1975, followed by Julia Neuberger in 1977, while in 1984 Barbara Borts became the first woman rabbi in the UK to have her own pulpit at Radlett Reform Synagogue in Hertfordshire.

A grim fact of life in 1987 was that it was legally impossible in the United Kingdom for a man to rape his wife, since marriage was regarded as having deemed consent to sexual intercourse. Indeed, in 1990, a judge even ruled that a woman who had obtained a family protection order against her husband would still be engaged in consensual sex because of the fact of her marriage: “it cannot be inferred that by obtaining the order in these terms the wife had withdrawn her consent to sexual intercourse”. It was not until 1991 that the judgement in R v R determined that a man was committing a crime in raping his wife.

On a lighter note—the only way is up, as Yazz and the Plastic Population would advise us a year later, in 1988—entertainment seems in some ways quaint, looking back. There were only four generally available television channels, BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4, the last of which had launched five years before in November 1982. The first satellite TV service, Sky Television, would not be available until 1989, and Channel 5, the fifth terrestrial channel, was a full decade in the future.

The schedules were more limited too. It was only the year before my 10th birthday, that the BBC began broadcasting all day, with BBC1’s schedule running from 6.00 am till midnight; previously there had been times in the afternoon when there was simply no programming. But even then, programming came to an end, and, if you were still awake, it did so in a marvellously elaborate way. Closedown on BBC1 went as follows: the continuity announcer would give details of the following evening’s schedule then a national weather forecast, there would sometimes be a short public information film, then, with the screen showing a clock, a final announcement would wish viewers a good night and remind them of BBC radio services available through the night. After that, the national anthem would be played, and the channel would shut down until the next morning. A kinder, simpler age.

All-day service was still not a universal concept. Pubs in England and Wales were governed by the Licensing Act 1964, but opening hours had been laid down by the Licensing Act 1921 and at that point remained unchanged. In urban areas, pubs could open between 11.30 am and 3.00 pm and between 6.30 pm and 11.00 pm; elsewhere they were required to close at 10.00 pm. On Sundays, licensed premises in England could open for a maximum of five hours between 12 noon and 3.00 pm, and between 6.00 pm and 10.00 pm (dealer’s choice, as it were), but they were prohibited from opening at all in Wales and Monmouthshire. It was only the following year, with the passage of the Licensing Act 1988, that premises could open at 11.00 am and remain open until 11.00 pm.

Scotland, with a bibulous reputation to uphold, had adopted a more liberal regime. The Licensing (Scotland) Act 1976 allowed local authorities to determine opening times, although in fact the result was much the same, with most pubs opening from 11.00 am to 2.30 pm and 5.00 pm to 11.00 pm (Sundays were generally more restrictive, typically 12.30 pm to 2.30 pm and 6.30 pm to 11.00 pm). Essentially, however, when I was 10 years old, the country was operating licensing restrictions which had been introduced as a temporary measure during the First World War.

It was not all bad: the Royal Mail delivered letters twice a day (until 2003), and the first post usually arrived by around 9.00 am, in urban areas at least. Certainly I remember it arriving before I left for school as a child. Customers are now told they should expect their only delivery of the day to have arrived by 3.00 pm in cities and towns, and 4.00 pm in rural areas. Mail trains (Travelling Post Offices, properly) were still in use, on which letters and parcels were sorted while being transported around the country, though their use was declining and they went out of service in September 1996. They had given W.H. Auden the inspiration, arguably, to invent rap for the 1936 documentary Night Mail.

None of this is intended to make a very profound social or cultural point, and it is no doubt a widespread feeling. If I had been writing it at my current age in October 1987, I would have been looking back to the Britain of 1950, I suppose, with rationing still partially in place; the National Health Service only two years old; a single (BBC) television channel (only 350,000 homes had a set in any case); male homosexuality a criminal offence; 800,000 people employed in mining by the state-owned National Coal Board; in a United Kingdom with a population of 50.4 million which was 99.9 per cent white.

It does, however, reflect two things, for me at least: first, that I am getting older (I know, we all are); but second, the rate of change is becoming more and more rapid. To look forward to 2061 is to peer into a future unimaginably distant. A Mars colony? Nuclear fusion in widespread use? Hammersmith Bridge reopened for traffic? Who knows? If I get to find out, I’ll be riding the actuarial odds. But I shall give it a go.