To think it literally was a different planet ?

[Stifle]

I’m exactly the same age today as my mum was in January 1984.

I can’t get my head round this.

January 1984 seems like a different planet from today - anyone agree? I’m nostalgic for the TV programmes and general lifestyle around then

Incredible, right ? Hold on, there is more.
Next month, you will be exactly the same age as your mom was in February 1984!

No need to be rude, @ThisIsItNowOrNever .

Yes!! They just felt like such different times from now

I get it. Lifestyles have changed dramatically thanks to technology.....I wonder if people felt the same way when the Spinning Jenny was invented!😄

A whole world away.
Life was much less complicated.
People were better-mannered.
Less self-entitlement.
3 channels only on the TV (or was Channel 4 already on the scene)?
Far less media hype.
Seasons were seasons, no Christmas or Easter creep!

Yes there was channel 4 - but - let’s face it - Channel 4 and BBC2 weren’t popular viewing so you could argue only 2 channels !

Great post. I think about this kind of thing a lot. Many political things that seemed so controversial at the time would be considered quite tame today - although some things (e.g. Middle East) sadly familiar.

I miss a lot of the TV from the 70s and 80s. Also, with only 3 or 4 channels, everyone watched the same things, so everyone had a shared experience and something to talk about.

On the other hand, it's really hard to imagine a time before the internet. How did we find information, plan things, etc.? I know we did, of course, but how we did all these things is a faint memory.

Plus - you stuck to arrangements in a way that youngsters would find bizarre today, e.g. "I'll meet you at 8pm outside M&S two weeks next Saturday" was normal, no text messages, you just turned up!

Perhaps not the happy, simple days that I now remember, but I guess that's just part of getting older!

I don’t agree - there’s more to being on a ‘literal different planet’ than some different TV programmes, mobile phones and computers. For my mother the only change that is not age-related is that she has a tumble dryer (available in the late 80s).

Technology always evolved fast - my grandfather was born around 1905, well before Ford popularised cars and around the time of the invention of the aeroplane. People still met and married, raised their children, focused on home food friends and family.

It’s easy to think of people in the past as being completely different but they weren’t. We just have more stuff.

I think you don’t understand the word literally…

And as far as change goes, don’t you thing in 1984 we thought the same about 1944?

The music was definitely better!

Yes fair enough FWIW I totally agree with you

I was quite young in 1984. I lived in an abusive household so I definitely don't yearn to return to that time and don't have the same nostalgia you do. I do sometimes wonder if people who romanticise their childhood years and who yearn for the 'good old days' must have grown up in happy secure households, and maybe part of the nostalgia is related to the feeling of being loved and nurtured and the carefree happy times of being a child from a good enough home.

Anyway, yes there are aspects of the 80s that were good. I enjoyed riding my bike around our village from a really young age unsupervised. I enjoyed building dens and making catapults with my brother's. But lots of kids do these things today.

I don't think the TV was better. Ours was black and white and impossible to tune in.

Apart from the TV, lack of a mobile phone and spending a bit more time outdoors as a kid, I don't really feel the 80s were that much different to today. We still have the same old issues in society.

The rate of change is pretty fast these days.

I miss the old pop charts. I haven't had a clue who is #1 for years. Maybe it doesn't even exist any more.

I went to see The Smiths in 1984.

Happy days.

Indie music, spikey hair, Levi 501’s and Dr Martens. We us to queue up to get the tickets. No Ticketmaster angst.

Lots different, lots the same. But the 80s is much more accessible to us now than the 1940s were to us then. We'd have had to read history books. Now you can listen to the music all day on dedicated radio stations, watch tv or footage from then on YouTube, wear the fashions. Technology has brought the past closer.

We ve lived through a technological revolution a d we are living through the AI revolution.

Human beings have experienced more change in the last 80/100 years, than they did in the previous 500.the rate of change has ramped up dramatically.

I was 26 in 1984.

I loved 80's music, fashion (except Ha Ha skirts as mt Dad misnamed them ) And the whole scene.

There was an innocence then that is twisted and horrible these days. I feel like Pandoras Box has been opened and the Bad Shit can never be locked up again.

I’m not getting the nostalgia. The mid-eighties were recession-filled, high unemployment, Thatcherite, dreadful for women’s rights and equality, the Troubles were raging, the miners’ strike etc.

They exist, but the music scene is really different. You don't really get bands that write and develop their own music to a high level. It's all record companies producing singers as products. So it's a bit like Marvel movies, all very samey. Country music and rap are a little better, people really play instruments in country and there are some big alt country acts that write their own songs, and in rap of course they don't use writers (except Drake) so you are getting a kind of authentic voice.

Yeah, there was no choking or dating apps for a start.

You met a friend of a friend. Checked them out before going off with them. Then you were ‘seeing’ them. No set times for relationships etc.

l think it was an easier time socially for young people. Thatcher was crap, youth unemployment was high, but you could sign on with no questions. And form a band if you were unemployed.

And the nhs was fully functioning.

I agree that the technological revolution and now the AI revolution means how we do things has changed very rapidly, more so than previous changes. Eg my mother, born in 1938, spent her early childhood in a house with no electric lights and an outside loo. Now she orders her groceries online, messages her friends on WhatsApp and listens to the radio on a smart speaker.

Isn't that the nature of technology though? All advances are quantum, so the rate of change is incredibly fast.

In other ways not much has changed. If you watch any of the old Yes, Minister programmes (and I recommend you do, because they're very funny), they are actually discussing the same things, dealing with the same events, as are in the papers now. Western Europe including the UK isn't so very much altered since then, or since 1945. Eastern Europe yes, has been through huge changes since 1984. But western Europe, the big changes were in the nineteenth century.

I miss this too.

Charts do exist - but it’s Friday to Friday now not a Sunday countdown on Radio 1.

Charts are from around 4pm - 5.45om every Friday evening

Sorry meant to say Radio 1

I also grew up in an abusive household and can agree it’s totally shit