TERM 2: Week 0
Tuesday January 1st
WELCOME TO THE EIGHTIES!
A new decade. I am only
eight years old so this is my
first. I don’t know if it’s just
my imagination, but I
remember everyone thinking
the 1980s would bring about
a new era of technological
wonders. The future had
finally arrived and it was all
going to be amazing. Hover
cars and jet packs by the year
2000!
BBC1, 7.30 pm: the first ever
episode of Hi-de-Hi, a sitcom
set in a holiday camp in the
1950s. It will run for nine
years. The first episode is
available to watch on Britbox,
but if you can’t stomach that,
here’s a clip.
BBC News & Continuity
ITV New Programmes Trailer
Sunday January 6th
ITV, 5.30 pm: Series 2 of Worzel Gummidge begins
with an episode called Worzel and the Saucy Nancy
(starring Jon Pertwee as Worzel, Una Stubbs as Aunt
Sally and Barbara Windsor as the eponymous ship’s
masthead). Now available to watch on Britbox and
much, much better than you remember.
ITV, 7.15 pm: The first ever episode of quiz show
Family Fortunes, presented by Bob Monkhouse. You
can watch the whole thing here.
UK SINGLES CHART
No 1: Another Brick in the Wall Pink Floyd
No 50: It’s Different for Girls Joe Jackson
No 72: Escape (The Pina Colada Song) Rupert Holmes
UK ALBUMS CHART
No 1: Greatest Hits Vol. 2 ABBA
Friday January 4th
President Jimmy Carter orders
a grain embargo against the
USSR, in protest at their
invasion of Afghanistan. He
also expresses a desire that the
US should boycott the Olympic
games, to be held in Moscow
later in the year.
7.10pm: Top of the Pops - for
all Peter Powell’s immense
enthusiasm for “the sound of
the eighties,” we’re mainly
treated to the same sound
we’ve been hearing for some
time now. But some of it’s still
really rather good:
•
My Girl Madness
•
Brass in Pocket Pretenders
•
I’m Born Again Boney M
•
Tears of a Clown The Beat
•
Day Trip to Bangor Fiddler’s
Dram
•
Christmas Rappin’ Kurtis
Blow
•
My Feet Keep Dancing Chic
(via Legs & Co)
•
Better Love Next Time Dr
Hook
By the way, there’s a great blog
here detailing every
performance from every
edition of Top of the Pops in
1980, with a far wittier
commentary than I could ever
give it. Here’s the entry for
January 3. I’ll link to the others
as we go.
Wednesday January 2nd
In the first major British political event of the 1980s, a
national steel strike is called by the Iron and Steel
Trades Confederation, which lasts until April 1st. It
forms another milestone in the grand battle between
the government and the trade unions and should
probably affect me very deeply, what with me living
in Yorkshire where much of the steel industry is
located. But I don’t know anyone who works in steel
and, being eight years old, not only do I not notice
there is a strike, but Sheffield seems so far away it
might as well be Mars.
ITV, 4.45 pm: Tom Baker presents The Book Tower, a
show about books, now in its second year. Here’s a
clip from one of his episodes.
BBC2, 9.05pm: Play for Today - The Black Stuff: Alan
Bleasdale’s feature-length drama about a gang of
Liverpudlians laying tarmac in Middlesbrough. Its
warm reception encourages the BBC to commission a
sequel, which airs in 1982 to an even warmer
reception.
Thursday January 3rd
69-year-old naturalist Joy Adamson, writer of Born
Free, is found dead near her home in Kenya,
apparently mauled to death by lions. The autopsy,
however, reveals it to be murder, apparently at the
human hands of a disgruntled employee. Before his
trial, Paul Nakware Ekai confesses that he stabbed
her to death because she had not paid him for 14
days’ work. But many years later, he retracts the
confession, claiming that Adamson was a tyrant who
often violently mistreated her workers. On this
occasion, he says, she shot him in the foot for
disobeying orders and, in retaliation, he retrieved his
own gun and shot her three times, contradicting the
autopsy report. He also claims his earlier confession
was elicited by torture. Whatever the truth, in 2020
he changes his story again and says he didn’t kill her
at all. At the time of writing, Ekai is, presumably, still
in prison.
St Pauls
Riots
Apr 2, 1980
Mugabe
Elected
Mar 4, 1980
Echo Beach
Martha and the
Muffins
Tuesday January 1st -
Sunday January 6th, 1980
TERM 2 IN LINK FORM
Look-in No 2: in a staggering editorial, Ed ‘Stewpot’
Stewart (or whoever writes this column for him)
looks forward to the technological advances of the
1980s, heralding the advent of flat-screen TVs,
internet shopping, DVDs, smartphones, virtual voice
synthesisers and the ascendance of China. The only
problem being he’s several decades too early.
There’s also an article about Manchester United
goalkeeper Gary Bailey. My wife (who I won’t meet
for another 17 years) tells me her older brother
Mark used to make her play a game called Gary
Bailey, in which she played the role of Gary Bailey
and had to kneel down by the radiator while he
threw things for her to catch. She thought for a long
time that her job was to stop the things hitting the
radiator, until it slowly dawned on her that it was
just an excuse to throw things at her. Needless to
say, she was very good at it.
BBC1, 6.45pm: Tomorrow’s World - “A new decade
and a new look for the programme,” featuring a
swanky new electronic 1980s theme tune and a title
sequence which appears to take us on a trip through
the cortex of a gigantic spherical brain.