What was life like in the 80s?

Yes they terrified everyone i left school in 1990, people ( from my school.at least) either went on to college or did a YTS , s few had secured jobs but there was a soap factory and paper mill in my town that took on school leavers .

Oh, and she was scared of nuclear holocaust also. I just checked. 😂

We used to have lots little bowls of peanuts, crisps nuts in shell ,s you had to crack ,dates and them sugered lemon and orange slice things lying on the mantle piece between Xmas and new year .

It's funny, my mum always says it was a terrible time to be a teenager. She says none of them had a hope of getting a job and they were all terrified of AIDS. She remembers those tombstone ads really clearly.

We used to go to my paternal grandparents every boxing day my uncle ( who still lived at home as he was a young thing then ,just had his 65th birthday😳)Managed to get hold of a Pirate video of ET for all the kids to watch , it was really bad you couldn't make out anything but me and my sister and all our cousins were fascinated and very impressed !

I remember my Dad coming home on a Friday in the early 80s with his brown wage envelope and handing it straight to my mum to do all the ‘housekeeping’.

One Christmas they overspent and I remember my mum crying because they only had five pounds to get shopping in between Christmas and new year. No credit cards.

Imagine if you lost your wage packet of had it stolen ! Must have been awful.

At the age of 13/14 I was really into aerobics. My sister got a Jane Fonda vhs for xmas. The entire family watched it after xmas dinner instead of the BBC xmas film.

I was totally hooked, I used my Christmas money to go to m&S and brought some shiny aerobics wear. I had two all in one lyrca body suits, got some leg warmers and a pair of trainers from Freeman Hardy Willis and I was all set.

Every day after school i would do at least an hour of aerobics, months later I discovered a Kathy Smith vhs in WH Smith and spent twenty pounds on that.

My parents used to shout upstairs "bloody hell is that a herd of hippos in your room" 😂😂

I remember helping Dad count out the wages for all the farm workers - he had all the brown envelopes across the desk, wage slips on top, then lay out the notes and coins from the biggest denominations to the smallest, till each one had the right amount and was put into its envelope and sealed. Before he got to that pint, he'd done all the calculations and deductions on the wage slips. By the end of the '80s, most of them were on BACS, and there were far fewer farm workers anyway (mechanisation,) and I stopped helping as I gained homework, but probably more of an understanding of what wages really meant and the notes and so on were more meaningful than just untold riches (because farm workers don't actually get paid riches at all.)

My first proper boyfriend used to get a wage packet in a brown envelope too! This was early 90,s though, i.was asking dh how he got paid in various jobs ,some where cash ,some cheque and some by bank transfer he's 18 months younger than me so this would have been 90,s too ,I have only ever been paid by bank transfer but I worked first in a nursing home , and than in the NHS for 20+ years .

I was 14 in 1980, went to the local comprehensive, there wasn't all this choosing which secondary school you went to, you went where you were sent. We didn't have uniform, we went to school in what we wanted. Most of the teachers were rubbish, they didn't want to be there any more than the kids did, there were one or two good ones, I can remember one teacher sending me to the shop for his cigarettes & another that if you got him in an afternoon you knew he would have been in the pub all lunchtime & just let us do what we wanted as long as we left him alone. I left school in 1982, on the last day we were all herded in the dining hall & basically told to f off & don't come back, the only careers advice I got was to be told how to sign on the dole. I left school at 10.30 on a Friday morning & I signed on at the dole office at 11.30, I got £15.50 a week & when I was 18 it went up to £22.50 a week, I thought I was rich, I gave my mum £5 a week for my board & the rest was mine. I got a job at the Inland Revenue when I was 18 as a clerical assistant, I was only supposed to be a temp for 7 weeks but ended up staying 27 years. When I first started we didn't have computers, everything was done by hand on paper, everything was kept in big files, we wrote out all the tax returns & notices of coding, packed them all in envelopes, some times of the year you could be spending all day every day just copying details from record cards on to forms to be sent out. All post was sorted by hand & any letters were dictated to go to the typing pool to be typed. Twice a day the clerical assistants had to go round the whole office, collecting mugs to make tea & coffee, we had to boil up a big urn for the tea & a massive pan of milk for the coffee, it was unheard of for higher grades to make their own drinks. Temps got paid every week on a friday, we actually got cash in a brown envelope, my first wage was £64.50, when I got made permanent I went on to monthly paid, I got £216 a month after tax & national insurance.

How did i get so old so quickly

Eighties

One day in the late 80s i woke up on a sunny day and just did not feel like going to school . So i didnt Had a lie in and around 11am stuck a tape in my tape player. Years later i was trying to remember what this tape was that i had But i couldnt All i could remember was the first track was Burn It Up Also Superfly Guy Dont Make Me Wait and I Love My Radio. This past weekend i got a little help elsewhere online.

It was this.

www.discogs.com/Various-Beat-This-The-Hits-Of-Rhythm-King/release/388828

Anyone remember the US teen series 'Wizz Kids'? Must have been early mid eighty's, about a bunch of crime solving teens that were wizzes on computers

Graduated from TOTPs to the much cooler Tube in the eighty's, Paula Yates and Jools Holland

Great films, The Breakfast Club, St Elmo's Fire, Pretty in Pink... yes I had a thing for Andrew McCarthy

What a brilliant thread OP!! Well, I was 16 in 1980!

The thing that really stood out for me was the sense of community, that I think has maybe disappeared in the digital age. From about aged 20 me and my BF would go to various local pubs about four times a week and there would be about 15 people we knew in each place. At weekends we always went clubbing and there was always an after party at someone's house afterwards (clubs closed at 3am).

This may be outing but I lived in Brighton at the time. Such an amazing place to grow up. It was teeming with wealthy gangsters on the one hand plus loaded young Iranian men fresh from the Ayatollah taking over who'd fled with their family's money (both of whom who we avoided). It gave the city a real edge.

It's all gentrified now and the crime has all but disappeared and house prices have gone through the roof as Londoners have swarmed in. It's made it a nice place though bring up children though!

The 80s hold special memories for me growing up - I was 12 in 1980 & loved the music, totp, swapping cassettes, recording compilations.

Films were great, borrowing vhs, going to the cinema.

Loved the 80s

I was 13 in 1980. So many happy memories that many here have already mentioned - home perms, blue mascara, massive shoulder pads, lace tights, fingerless gloves, tons of blusher, Jackie magazine, Anais Anais, listening to the charts on a Sunday and the excitement of waiting to hear about that week’s number one. And going to the Hippodrome in Leicester Square and seeing Paul Young there. Good times.

Family life was good - my brothers playing Dungeons and Dragons, everyone watching Top of the Pops on a Thursday night and talking about it the next day at school. Swap Shop on Saturday mornings,

But also that terrible ongoing anxiety of thinking that we could all go up tomorrow in a massive mushroom cloud. I remember my mum talking about the Protect and Survive leaflet, and having a massive sobbing meltdown when I realised what she was talking about. It’s difficult to explain how incredibly real that fear was at the time.

Oh god, I was the lycra queen. I have a friend whose family business was manufacturing dance and exercise wear. I had so many different lycra outfits that I could have worn a different one every day for weeks and weeks. I was the envy of my rock chick pals
My biggest crush, apart from Fish, was Dave Lee Roth. God he was glorious. My late teens were spent at a different rock/metal gig in the playhouse nearly every weekend. It was the highlight of my life.

A Hammer double on a Friday night on BBC1

My memories of the 80s:
Wogan on tv
Waiting 3 years for films to be shown on tv
The national anthem at midnight
Twinkle magazine
Puffball party dresses
Velvet
Couches with extra covers on the arms
Lots of boarded up houses
Adults smoking everywhere
Men with moustaches
Cars having chokes and no seatbelts in the back
Young kids wandering the streets without parents knowing where they were
Sinclair computer with a green and black screen
Blondie
Kylie being an actress
Women not all having long straight hair
AIDS being a death sentence
Chernobyl challenger and the threat of nuclear war or IRA bombs
Going live

Im very very glad i grew up pre internet and pre social media

It doesn't look like the photo posted for some reason :(

Me in 1984, aged 16 :) The eighties were an amazing time to be a teenager and I feel so fortunate to have grown up when I did.

Not nearly as many adult cyclists on the roads - and none on the pavements.

Seatbelts weren't obligatory iirc, and no one bothered with car seats for children. If you went out with family friends half a dozen or more kids might cram into a car, even sitting in the boot of a hatchback.