What is the first news story you remember?

[AmbsPhillps]

I think for me it was the 1999 champions league final

Hillsborough. I was 4 and watched football with my Dad. I remember seeing it unfold on Grandstand (I think we’d been watching a different match originally) then it switched and not really understanding what was happening. Football was meant to be fun and everyone was looking scared and being stretchered onto the pitch. I didn’t understand that they were dead or dying .

I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall too, the same year.

Have skimmed through the first three pages and am feeling like Methuselah. I think the first news I remember noticing was Princess Margaret's wedding and honeymoon (newsreel at cinema), which would have been 1960. Subsequent to that, noticed parents listening to radio very tense and then later very thankful and relieved, which must have been Bay of Pigs (1961). Likewise, 1963, coming home with the family from swimming lessons at local pool and turning on the radio to hear about JFK assassination.

Summer of 76
Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 77

No specific one but as a kid in the 70s I remember a lot about Northern Ireland in the news, not that I knew what it was about then

Yes and possibly because, by 1973, the IRA had extended their bombing campaign to London. I was working at John Lewis (first job) in Oxford Street - the tube stations were regularly closed for bomb scares and it was hard to get to work as whole streets could be closed at the drop of a hat. When we did get in, we had hardly any customers. John Lewis appeared to be the only big department store that had not been reported to have any fire bombs planted in it. That was not true - we did have several but the partnership managers decided to keep it out of the news and swore us all to secrecy. (There was a public announcement in the store about a time check, which meant we had to all get onto the shop floor from wherever we were at the time and search for bombs - when it was found to be clear, there was another announcement saying the clocks had been reset). The policy was difficult for us staff because several customers asked us why we had not been "bombed" like other stores and at least one suspected John Lewis Partnership of being IRA sympathisers.

Dunblane. I was in year 6 and just couldn't comprehend why any one would do this. Also, remember have special assembly about it and our teacher spending time reassuring us that it wouldn't happen at our school.

The poll tax riots. I have really vices memories of watching the coverage with my grandad while he ranted about Thatcher a lot.

Challenger explosion (I was a toddler and vividly remember the rocket ship blowing up)

Miners Strike maybe.

Actually the Falklands War was before that, so probably that.

Apollo 11 moon landing

Dunblane

I was the same age as the victims and remember it being on the 6 o'clock news every day

I've found it very interesting to see which stories people have remembered, and the context and all sorts of details.

Mine was Sophie Hook as my first stand out story but I also have vague memories of the Bosnian war going on and the IRA being on the news- presumably as part of coverage of the NI situation. I was absolutely terrified of the stock IRA member photo of a man in a balaclava that the news often used as a backdrop pic to studio links before they went into story footage. The lack of face really unnerved me at 4/5 and I lived in a huge dark house- I was convinced "the man" was hiding in every shadow.

Apollo 11 Moon landing .

9/11 two. Towers - I was 6

Bhopal chemical explosion in India

The moon landings in 1969

1978, I was 7 I used to look at my dad's newspaper when he came home.

A 2 year old boy fell down a narrow well in Australia. They reported the story for days about how his cries got weaker. They couldn't get to him before he died.

It still really upsets me.

Murder of Louis Mountbatten, mainly because I was in the general area at the time.

9/11

The Cod War. In fact, I think I have just found the very clip on You Tube that I remembered all this time.

The news report I remember most though was the killing of the two off duty corporals in Northern Ireland filmed as their abduction happened. You did not see the killing thank God, which was done in a taxi on some business premised but the cameras conveyed the proximity of it all. Such a monumental fuck up.

I remember watching the news and a report about how there were fears that Sadamn Hussein would target people using poisons in perfumes. I think. Also 9/11. I was 15, can still remember where I was when it was reported on the radio. Watching Sadamn's statue being pulled down is another one. Foot & Mouth crisis.

John Lennon being shot

Michael Buerk on the famine in Ethiopia and the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Both were around the same time, I believe.

@HarryLimeFoxtrot

SAS storming the Iranian embassy (I was 4 at the time)

This was the first news item I remember too, but I was 8!

Actually, I think it was the disappearance of Genette Tate, which I think was in 1979 so I was 7.

Lockerbie