What is the biggest media event you can remember from your childhood??

[K1092902]

Mine is the death of the Princess of Wales. I was 12 at the time- Mum came and woke me and my sister up (much to her annoyance as she had been on a night out the night before) and told us it was important we watched as it was a huge deal. I can still remember sitting there that morning watching the news coverage. The next day mum took us to London for the day and we went to put flowers outside Kensington palace.

I didn't get it at the time but I was the same age as harry and honestly can't imagine having to live through my teens, getting married and having DD without my mum by my side never mind dealing with the pressure of royal life..

Fergie & Andrew
Berlin wall
Nelson Mandela
Dunblane
Diana death
9/11

All stick out for me

Jessica wells and holy chapman. I was 11 at the time and remembering hearing and watching the news about it and feeling upset. I don't remember much about how I felt just that it upset me then and it still upsets me now.

Remember*

Well this thread has aged me by quite a few years.

The first newsworthy event I remember was a bomb going off in Ankara, Turkey in the early 70's. No real idea why that has stuck in my mind but it has. After that I'd say the death of Franco in Spain in 1975.

I come from a news family so foreign stuff was discussed a lot.

I distinctly remember Gennette Tate dominating the news and also British Leyland workers taking sleeping bags into work.
c1970s

The first one that really struck me was the Bradford Fire Disaster. We were watching live at the time and the image of the man on fire being rolled to the ground and the policeman putting the fire out on his head stayed with me for a very long time.

Charles and Diana's wedding. I was 5. Then the HIV and AIDS awareness adverts. Does anyone remember the what to do if a nuclear bomb drops advert? (Not strictly media events but they terrified me at the time).

Miners strike.

Bradford city stadium fire.

Hillsborough.

I can remember the Moon Landing, I'm a 1965 baby. The first thing I can remember impacting me as a semi adult is an IRA bombing (sorry can't remember which, there were so bloody many of them ) and a sudden realisation that This Isn't Actually Normal. I think it was because the footage had a bog standard red pillar box in the background.

I think most of us who were born in the late fifties and through the sixties grew up with Bombing In Northern Ireland as such a normal thing to be on the news that we didn't actually notice it.

I think the one that finally hit was Omagh btw. Very late on. Sorry to all NI MNetters. But it really didn't come properly onto our radar. We'd been desensitised.

As I got older I remember Bernadette Devlin and Ian Paisley too.

And the Winter of Discontent.

And the first "test tube baby".

@MakeItStopNeville

Was he elderly? I still think of a man with white hair on fire and running.

9/11 I was 10 and in after school club, I remember the teaching assistants crying

Probably the King's Cross fire, Clapham Junction train crash when I was a kid.

I've just had another memory that I should have included:-

The girl running down the road in Vietnam with napalm burns

Oh - and a hideous documentary about Vietnam maybe made by USA? I remember a serviceman talking to US school children and referring to the Vietnamese as "gooks"?
I seem to remember the word "Rose" was in the title of the documentary?

I remember being outraged by this programme even though I was quite young.

Falklands Conflict.
Charles and Diana's wedding.
Thatcher coming to power.
First Space Shuttle flight.
Challenger disaster.
Chernobyl nuclear accident.
Many IRA bombings.

Since I have been an adult there has been :

Dumb lane.
Death of Diana.
9/11 Attacks.
7/7 Attacks.

Plenty more. Old gimmer here too.

Oh, the Zeebrugge Ferry Disaster.

I was a student, so no longer a child, but I was on part of my year abroad in Germany. I had crossed from Dover to Zeebrugge on the same ferry, Herald of Free Enterprise, just a week beforehand, so that one made a massive impression on me. I will never forget.

I remember Sarah Payne going missing. I was around the same age as her, so very young and I had a clock radio which woke me up in the morning with the news, followed by a parody show called 'X-Fools' featuring Mully and Sculder.

I remember asking my mum how people could be denying the existence of aliens when a little girl had been abducted.

I think that was the first time I realised that bad things happened in the world, particularly to children.

I'm quite old so I remember most of these. However at primary school my earliest memory was the Queen's trip to the Caribbean. We had to do a project on it.
Also the era when Scotland did well at football.
I also remember that although our family were interested in world events there was not the sense of gloom and doom that pervades our lives now. Hard to explain.

I also remember 9/11, watching the footage on TV between school and Brownies. I'd been on a family holiday to New York a few months before and gone up the World Trade Centre.

Shortly afterwards it was announced we were going to war. We'd been learning about WW2 that term, so war to me meant concentration camps, blitz and evacuation. I was terrified.

The lifting of the Mary Rose. We all had to sit in the school hall to watch it. The most boring event imaginable for an 8 year old, but apparently, according to the teachers and the TV, a very important event.

apart from they wouldn't let me buy a pony Well I remember that too.

Jamie Bulger's murder....we talked about it in school. Also remember Lockerbie, the Falklands, Zeebruge, Princess Diana dying.

OMG- this!!

I was a fairly young adult and working outside the UK when she died and couldn't understand why an American colleague expected me to be devastated by the news when he thoughtfully phoned me to tell me... I know its fashionable now to think she was wonderful, but meh - Queen of Hearts? How full of yourself do you have to be to come out with that, and that ridiculous interview with the theatrically staged runny eye liner... Presumably she wouldn't have been around much for her kids anyway - its easy to be sentimental...

When Diana died it was no more or no less sad than whenever anyone dies and leaves children. As a nation we lost the plot when it came to her death

Hillsborough is the earliest I remember- I was 9. A few days later, we queued for hours up and down the terraced streets of Anfield to pay our respects. The whole of Merseyside was in shock.

Then the Berlin Wall coming down and the Gulf War.

Watching the second tower get hit in the 9/11 attacks. And thinking it would be the start of WW3.