What was life like in the 80s?

Censorship of music.
Relax by Frankie goes to Hollywood. Banned.
Which was counterproductive as we all dashed out to buy it, sending it straight to number 1.
Any song which contained swearing or reference to sex got the BBC's knickers in a twist and was banned.😂

80' s weddings were mostly family affairs. Everyone invited from the babies to great aunt Gerti.
Wedding dresses were big flouncy crinoline style things.
The usual mode of wedding transport was a vintage rolls Royce or similar.
With a buffet at a pub for reception, unless you were posh and had a sit down meal.
Paid for by the bride's parents and the groom.
Looking back at my 80' s wedding pics, I can see the resemblance between me and my grannies loo roll cover in my flouncy crinoline dress 🤣

I remember watching Ken Hom on the TV and being utterly fascinated by Chinese food. It was so different to what we ate which was meat and two veg, occasionally fish and chips.

TV was sparse, so very powerful. One appearance on Top Of The Pops could launch your career, like Wham with Wham Rap. It was outside the top 40 so wasn't eligible to be shown but another act had to be replaced last minute and it launched their career.

I worked in retail and look back and loved that we didn't work Sundays.

I turned 13 in 1980, did my A Levels in 1985 and graduated in 1989.

I mainly have fairly negative memories TBH. Margaret Thatcher being elected, the miner's strike, high unemployment, being short of cash.

On the plus side, I did not have much difficulty in getting a good job at the end of 1989.

Oh and also remember my parents being over protective with me and my sister's due to the Yorkshire Ripper being around as we lived in Yorkshire.
If it was dark when I was coming or going to work, either my dad or brother would walk me to the bus stop and see me on the bus and wait for me getting off.
When I met my husband, he had a car and my dad demanded that he got out of the car and walked me through the front door before he left again

I was only 8 when the 80s ended but I do remember our local cinema had a smoking side!

Also, then the AIDS scare hit. Everyone was terrified. Durex advertised condoms for a very short time, but moral outrage at the ads caused the ads to be dropped.
Cos obviously it's far less outrageous to die of aids instead!!

It was fantastic. I was a teen and young adult in the 80's.
I worked a 45 hour week for £16.50 when I left school in 1981, which went up to £21.40 adult rate when I was 18, I thought I was loaded 😄
I spent time marching round London waving my ' ban the bomb ' plaquard and camping on greenham common for the same cause.
The fashion was amazing as was the music, basically anything went.
Thatcher came along and smashed the unions and industries, particularly the heavy ones, such as coal mining, anyone remember the ' coal not dole ' stickers?
Sexual harassment was rife, women typically worked in ' women's jobs ' such as hairdressing, secretaries etc. A few did make it big, but not many.
Most cars had a manual choke, which was a pain.
Shops closed for half day on Wednesday and all day on Sunday.
Pubs opened at 11-3, then 7-11, except for Sunday's when they closed at 10.30. nightclubs closed at 2 except for Sunday's when they didn't open at all due to music laws. It was great when the clocks went back and you got an extra hour 😆
Everywhere allowed smoking, including public transport, upstairs on a bus was like a fog. Smokers sat at the back of aircraft and puffed their way to Spain and back. Most smokers smoked in their homes too.
Babies were still parked outside shops in their prams and it wasn't unusual for a local teenager to babysit the neighbours baby. I spent literally every evening as a young teen babysitting for neighbours.
T.V usually closed down at around midnight. The BBC would say goodnight then play the national anthem, followed by a dot and a whining noise. That would be followed by the test card, which I believe was Leslie Ash on it.
We only had 3 t.v channels until 1984 iirc when channel 4 began. Then we were all addicted to Brookside.
Up until around the same time, we had no breakfast t.v, I think the programme's started at around 9 with some boring education programme.
I remember there was an uproar about breakfast t.v starting because everyone was going to be late for work and school. BBC compromised by putting a clock on the screen. Then the war of breakfast t.v began.
Food was usually a meat and two veg affair which was cooked by your mum when she came home from her part time work, most meals were finished up with a pudding.
Sanitary ware was usually a choice of either tampons or bulky pads. Wings hadn't been invented. When they were, they were advertised by an agony aunt called Clair Rayner. She was a large jolly lady who had a penchant for calling everyone ' lovey'
The first advertisment for sanitary ware was aired in 1986. I can remember me, my sister's and my mum staring at the t.v in a stunned silence, while my dad cleared his throat and buried himself in his daily mirror. 😂
When I got married I moved to Germany with my husband who was in the forces so I did the 80's from different countries 😄
I bloody loved my 80's.😁

My hair took SO much less time in the 80s. Washed, scrunched with mousse, and good to go.

My hair was made for the 80s - it takes a good half an hour to style now! 😩

I was in my thirties and had two primary age children at the start of the decade. We had moved from the industrial north to a prosperous town on the south coast and DH was away for weeks at a time travelling the world as an IT consultant. I was teaching full-time. We ran two cars, had holidays in the south of France and bought our first Apple computers and Betamax video recorders for home use.
We used to have a lot of dinner parties and it had become much easier to get more unusual ingredients. I loved the Madhur Jaffrey programmes on TV and cooked a lot of Indian food.
I hated the fashion for big shoulder pads and couldn't understand Diana worship at all.
We loathed Thatcher and all her works.

Smash Hits magazine was hilarious and had all the lyrics!

Tons of great pop and dodgy metal.

Grange Hill
Press Gang
Marmalade Atkins
Dallas
Dynasty
Neighbours with Kylie and Jason

I had some disastrous perms, and between times fried my hair to death with Sun-in.

I was a bit of a dweeb and never really managed to look cool or fashionable. School was ghastly.

Oh God, Kappa ski jackets!

Got my ears pierced at the Oasis in Brum, where they also sold loads of cool goth/metal type clothes. Ice skating at Silver Blades!
Bargain togs at Mark One.
The Bullring was a shithole though.

There was a fab local music scene. Saw Ned’s Atomic Dustbin play down the pub.

Dad worked at ATV/Central studios and later BBC Pebble Mill. Exciting buzzy iconic places, both no longer there, so sad.

Soap and talc. Shampoo for dry or normal or greasy hair.

Old style trains with all the doors.

No seatbelts in the back. In fact our old mini had none in the front either.

Video recorder with the remote attached by a long wire.

Green and yellow eye shadow.

Recession depression, but also times of ostentatious excess, eating out at lovely restaurants, super hols driving on the continent.

You lived with the constant threat of nuclear war.

Fashion was fun, but we thought the 70s was the decade with no taste.

Massive unemployment,the miners' strike and mass redundancy.

There seemed to be a disaster every other week, Lockerbie, King's Cross, Hillsborough, Herald of free enterprise...

Nothing to do on a Sunday unless you went to church. Even the TV was crap.There were only 3 channels, even when channel 4 started not everyone could get it.

Half day = a day in the week when all the shops closed at lunchtime.

Travellers, Gypsies, Irish and New Age, lots of places had 'their' Gypsies who would turn up, live for a month / 6 weeks and disappear again for the rest of the year, and what they were doing was legal.

The first condom ads, only allowed because of the fear of GRIDS that became AIDS.

No childline, there was an 'Incest crisis line' but it was not allowed to be listed in the phone book or the yellow pages so if you wanted to use it you had to a) know it existed and b) phone directory inquiries to get the number.

Things were a lot more sexixt, to the extent that the Yorkshire ripper might have been caught earlier had they listened to the survivors of the attacks instead of classing them as 'immoral'.

My school had 1 computer, it was used to teach computer studies. All school reports were hand written and when you did get a hand out it was purple and smelled because it had been copied using a 'bander' machine.

Ra ra skirts
Wham and other icons
No cds or computer other than pac man!
Landline only that your parents used to time you on
We owned a tv and went to private school
Adverts all the time for HIV called gay cancer - initially they didn’t know what caused it just that being gay meant to died to start with - a lot of homophobia as a result
A lot of very racist jokes were considered normal
Very very sexist
Lots of smoking
Very colourful

• princess Diana was followed everywhere and photographed x100 a day Lots of walks on Sunday Baywatch neighbours blue peter home and a way Grange Hill were popular The news depicted Northern Ireland as a war zone and put us off going to Ireland ever As did ‘the north’ And mining towns Free milk in schools and then it got taken away and thatcher was known as ‘the milk snatcher’ many children wanted that milk Time of great poverty Student digs were flee riddled pits although we had grants No internet no emails no mobiles you planned everything by mouth in advance Ahhh the eighties!

My family owned a TV. It was second or third hand, B&W. To tune in BBC2 and Channel 4 you had to sit on the floor beside it and hold the tuning knob.

No one owned a TV. Everyone rented and when yours started getting a bit old you could ring them up and they'd send a man round with a new one. You didn't get a choice, you just got the one they gave you.

watch Threads and Kes.
socialist worker
Massive unemployment
hIV
The four minute warning
the NHS starting to be turned into a business
No problem with school admissions but also no choice
Child abuse and drink driving being brushed under the carpet

I was 16 in 1980, living in Dublin. It was the beginning of a recession that lasted until the end of the decade.

The city was being demolished and what wasn't demolished was falling to ruin. Temple Bar was a rundown, forgotten section by the river, with a few little shops in Crown Alley near the Ha'penny Bridge. The streets of Temple Bar functioned as the terminus of several bus routes, with a few pubs, many still in existence, and a few restaurants among the seemingly abandoned old buildings. The BadAss Cafe was a nice place to eat, and there was a gorgeous tiny pizza place called the Pizzeria Italia across the street from the Auld Dubliner, where Ugo the chef used to send people to wait until a seat was available. He would send his waiter Eddie to fetch them. Ugo served up the best pizza and a few other fantastic Italian dishes. In a previous life the little restaurant had been a chipper and people waiting for a bus used to stick their faces in the hatch at the side of the kitchen and yell 'Any chips?' It's a very fancy coffee house now. There was a fantastic soup and sandwich place called Phillers where you could get the world's best cheesecake. I remember a lot of live theatre in ramshackle buildings in Temple Bar that probably generate millions every year now, and seeing rats scurrying along in the gutters on my way to the bus. Everyone took the bus or the Dart everywhere. Bikes disappeared and probably reappeared - no lock could stop the thieves.

There were Traveller kids in the streets sniffing glue and walking straight out into traffic. Petty crime was at a high level. Heroin had arrived. Jobs were very scarce. Taxation levels for those employed were very high. After graduating from university in 1985 about half of my classmates emigrated.

Violence in Northern Ireland dominated the news along with the terrible economy and there were radio phone ins about Ireland's divorce laws, abortion, contraception, and domestic abuse. It was all upheaval, all the time. There were marches in Dublin in support of the hunger strikers and long queues outside the American Embassy as would-be emigrants tried to get paperwork and interviews. The US Embassy did not answer the phone.

You might think we were all incredibly depressed, but I recall feeling a sense of great change afoot in Ireland's culture, and of unlimited possibility. I don't remember a lot of the 80s fashion that everyone talks about but the music was great.

U2 used to busk in Dublin - there were many, many fantastic street performers. I will never forget walking up Grafton Street at twilight one evening while someone played Someone to Watch Over Me on a clarinet.

@AriadneesWeb

Is that not down to TVs and take aways being relatively cheaper than the 80s rather than people on benefits being wealthy?

As an average family we would have a take away maybe once or twice a year and eating out was very rare.

Look at the drop in electrical prices. I bought my first washing machine for £300 around 20 years ago, you can buy a basic machine for half that these days. I've just looked and you can get a smart TV from Currys for £120, when in the 80s a lot of people still rented their TV.

If you look at this link you can see an average family TV would be £300+, no idea what that would be in today's money.

People on benefits still struggle.

Tv shows were massive. Like Dallas and the who shot JR storyline. Also loved prisoner cell block h.

If anyone is near Basingstoke, the Willis Museum currently has a small exhibition in ^I grew up 80s". It's all very familiar... (I was 8 in 1980.)

Growing up in a political family in the 80s in a coal mining area meant life was grim for many people. My dad wasn't a miner like his father had been so luckily not directly affected but it was all around.

The miners strike, some relatives with literally nothing, protests against Thatcher, my parents distributing EEC surplus cheese and butter, free school meals in the school holiday for kids of miners.

Scottish Nationalism was seen as a fringe movement, look how that has changed.

Tucka boots, jelly shoes, reversible jumpers, jeans, crimped hair, bad perms, ski pants, drawing a beauty spot on with eyeliner to be like Madonna. Appearance was just as important as now and you were bullied if you didn't fit in.

Society wasn't 24 hours, shops closed early, no 24 hour Mcdonalds or supermarkets, the TV went off at 11pm to midnight with the National Anthem being played.

Mums mostly stayed at home, when my parents divorced when I was 12 it was unheard of in my friendship group and I got bullied. The few kids of single mothers were really stigmatised.

Grim.

ITV had to stop their nightly tally of jobs lost vs jobs created, as there were always more job losses than jobs created.

Santa Claus is on the Dole was one of the highlights.

Pretty much the same as it is now just with massive hair, puff sleeves rah rah Skirts and better music.

I was 12 in 84 and stranger things makes me nostalgic for the 80's. The music was really good but I was into rock/70's progressive rock so I didn't appreciate it at the time.

Clothes were fab, nothing you could wear today. Same with make up/hair. We used to back comb our hair until it was massive, sometimes I'd just backcomb the fringe

I think it's realistic in terms of the kids heading out on their bikes for the day. We used to leave the house early and not get back til teatime - We could've been in the upside down for all our parents knew.

I got my first mortgage in about 1983. Interest rate was about 9%. By the end of the decade it was nearer 15%.

I owned my own flat but couldn’t afford a landline or furniture. Mum and dad gave me an old couch and bed. I used boxes for bedside tables. Couldn’t afford a washing machine, wardrobe or cooker. On the plus side it doubled in value in 6 years.