What was life like in the 80s?

[Strangerthanadeadting]

As a recent fan of Stranger Things and having only been four years old at the end of the eighties, I'm fascinated to know what life was like for teens & adults back then.

It's depicted as being so much fun on TV. So colourful, the music is brilliant, the fashion so vivid. It was a time before the Internet, social media, plastic surgery, the Kardashians.

I'm fascinated. I'd love to hear what life was like. What people did for fun, what they ate, how different a working day was, if it really was as glamorous as it looks, if the hairstyles took forever, what people thought the future would be like? Was it a better life? A better time?

I was a teenager in the 80's. I read so many books. 3 TV channels and no computers. (A few local families had computers when they started out, which came with a handful of very basic games and no internet of course!)
Teachers were horrible verging on abusive at times. Children had to shut up and listen, had no rights really.
Lots of girls/women had short hair (don't see much of that today)
No GHDs, lots of frizzy, curly, wavy hair.
No Trans students. A couple of gay students. When they came out, it was viewed as quite shocking.
Simon Le Bon, Nik Kershaw, Wet Wet Wet, early Madonna, Culture Club, Debbie Harry, Bowie, early Prince and Michael Jackson at the height of his fame.
We went out all day from a young age and nobody knew where we were.
Building dens, reading magazines, chatting with friends all night on sleepovers, with no phones or computers to record.
Acid House and House music.
Cold War fear, planning what to do when they dropped the bomb (very real fear)
Olive Oil instead of sun lotion.
Being considered mature enough to babysit neighbour's baby when I was 12 (when many Mumsnetters won't leave their 12 year old home alone at 12 in the evening)
Constance Carroll makeup, candy floss lipstick.
Jackie magazine, Suzie Sioux, taping the charts every Sunday, coming home and playing out every night.
No fear of knife crime or suicide bombers.

I lost my 9 year old cousin from Leukeamia in the early 80s. Maybe now she would have a better chance of survival?

Doing homework on Sunday night listening to Annie Nightingale on the radio.

There were still lots of tiny village shops. I'd go out for a bike ride (no helmet, no mobile) and stop off at one and buy a bottle of Panda Pops.

I did fruit picking piece work for a couple of summers. You were doing well if you made more than £1 an hour.

I still have a record case with coal not dole stickers.

I was 16 in 1980, so this was my freedom decade, but also scary times. Live music was great and relatively cheap. We seemed to be able to afford any gig we wanted to see. Fashion for me was mohair jumpers, picture knits (my mum made me a New York skyscraper jumper that I wore constantly through uni) plus boho embroidered skirts and petticoats worn with slouch boots. I had the classic bad perm and sun-in highlights combo. And dark grey combat trousers from Chelsea Girl.

But it was still scary. The Regan/Thatcher poster expressing fear of nuclear war was in most uni rooms. CND was very important and the drama Threads petrified me.

My first job in 1985 as a public sector accountant had a salary of £4600 which was untold ritches. My first work skirt (pleated, with opening buttons up one side) came from newly-opened Next. Having lived through the three day week and blackouts of the 1970s, I never trusted that the good times would last. And I could never quite get the conspicuous consumption. I had a pretty bad book habit though.

There was a lot of DV, Child abuse/neglect about that nobody, including the Police reacted to.

I had a half sister who was mixed heritage and the Racism went unchecked. We lost good black Teachers because they'd had enough. If you were Gay were i lived you'd have to leave after a few kickings.

My friend's Mum finally left her Dad when he put her face through the window and she was lucky that she lived. She had to flee without her children and eventually the youngest girl went to live with her. They lived in real poverty and fear, as did a lot of Women.

Children's bruuses would be ignored at school, so would absenteeism. The Jamie Bulger murder changed the law, on absenteeism.

Schoolgirls were seen as fair game and we were sexually harassed and assaulted. Bill Wyman was with a 14 year old and celebrated for it in the press.

Teenagers were dying doing dangerous things on Youth Training Schemes. That started the H&S we have today.

Not having the Internet etc meant you relied on those around you to guide you and if they didn't, then life didn't go well.

Women were still having to give up their children due to poverty. 17 year old Mothers weren't entitled to benefits and had to get on with it.

In some places the Magdalena Laundries type places were still open and bavues taken away.

Institutions were still going and children who were in wheelchairs but had no intelligence issues would be sent to an inadequate special needs school.

So it really depends on where you were from and how your Family was.

It was the girls abducted in 1999 that changed the law on school absence, I think.

If you want to feel really old, this thread is like someone in 1980 asking people what life was like in 1940!

No fear of knife crime or suicide bombers.

Maybe not, be we had the IRA, with bombs in London, Birmingham and Manchester that caused similar levels of a feeling of fright and terror not knowing where the next would be.

I was 13 in 1981....

Things that were better:

• The world was not as insanely fast as it is now. People's expectations of what one ordinary human person could do in a day were more realistic.
• You could buy a house, your own house, on one wage. (No, really. Unless you were unlucky enough to end up in negative equity.)
• Council houses still existed and was a viable option.
• Even poor kids like me could dream of going to university some day, knowing it would be funded if your parents earned under a certain amount. In my part of the world nursing or joining the Armed Forces or working as a holiday rep were all still pretty respectable and decently paid too.
• You could still get a joiner or a plumber or electrician without having to sell your soul to the bank to pay for it.
• Music, TV and films.
• There was less choice of food (yes, that can actually be a positive. You don't spend as much time faffing about on deciding things. It's either there or it's not, and you make do, or you don't. We're probably going to be rediscovering that 'less choice' thing in the not too distant future).
• Despite some of the awful things we now know were happening, amongst many people there was a sense of innocence and trust and a sense that hard work and education would still get you places even if you hadn't gone to the right schools/universities/knew the right handshakes; there was a hope for the future which has largely gone now, I feel.
• Spitting Image.

Things that were worse:

• Healthcare technology, although the staff had more time to care and having a sense of humour hadn't yet been outlawed.
• Cars were less reliable; TVs were less reliable. Many things were less reliable. Things kept blowing up or overheating. On the other hand clothes were made to last and even disposable fashion wasn't that disposable.
• How long everything could take (I was overseas in 1988 to 1989 in Europe and EVERYTHING, from getting messages home to being paid, took FOREVER).
• Having to conform more. If you didn't have the right "brands" woe betide you. Do not pass "Go", do not collect £200, go straight to Hell.
• AIDs.
• Fear of nuclear warfare.
• Smoking was still accepted.
• Attitudes in general were incredibly sexist, racist, and homophobic and no one saw anything wrong with this, seemingly....
• PE teachers were evil little monsters who all got rolled off a cookie cutter line somewhere in Loughborough....other teachers might have been strict or not my cup of tea or disliked you because you were crp at their subject, but PE teachers were just the spawn of the devil; things like dyslexia, autism and dyspraxia and eye conditions weren't even on the horizon for most of them. You were just sht at games, and they had deigned to come down to earth from the lofty heights of Mount Olympus because they were never going to be professional sportspeople or soldiers...
• The miners' strike. Shoulder pads. Yuppies. "Loadsamoney" and Alan B*stard types. (Though they're still around today.)
• The Internet and email were both still in their infancy and only a handful of people knew about them. (Though I sometimes think that was a good thing.)
• The fashions and the hairstyles and the neon makeup. The ludicrous bonkbusters writers kept churning out.
• The Troubles were still rampaging in Northern Ireland with occasional flare-ups in London, Manchester, Birmingham....
• Thatcher's government was in power for most of the 1980s. Though some people thought that was a good thing.
• If you think regional accents and the working class and disabled people and people of non-Caucasian ethnicity and LGBTetc are a rarity in public life now, just have a look at some genuine footage from the 1980s....there's plenty on Youtube!

Things that were the same

• Eejjits were in charge.
• Families were still dysfunctional.
• We still needed to breathe, drink, eat, sleep, and take shelter to survive. (In that order, mostly.)
• We still needed to get an education (though it's debatable how useful some of that education was), get work, find a suitable partner or other living arrangement, maybe have a family, and look after other family members. (Not necessarily in that order.)
• Love was still the answer. Ultimately. Or, dispassionate compassion might be a better way to describe it. ;)

Keynote of the 1980s for me?

Terminator (the first one), when she stops for gas on her way to Mexico, and the attendant says, "There's a storm coming". And she looks up at the sky and says, sadly, grimly, resignedly, "I know".... prophetic, eh?

Aaagh, "council houses still existed and WERE" a viable option, before the Grammar Police pick me up.

(Any chance of a spell checker and grammarly clone, Mumsnet?) Yes, I know, if I was using the right browser it would do it automatically for me... ;)

Everything changes, but everything stays the same.

For me, things aren't that different. I still drive to work, still work full time, doing the same job, still have the same hobbies, still holiday abroad a couple of times each year, still with the same partner.

Things are different around the edges, i.e. more channels on the TV, record TV on a hard drive rather than cassette tape video, more of my work is done by computer, I text friends/family instead of using the landline, but all that is really peripheral.

Sunday afternoons recording the charts from the radio and getting really annoyed if the dj spoke over any part of the song

Only making phones calls after 6pm, sitting in the hall on the stairs.

I was primary school aged in the 80s. I moved from my birth country to the UK and remember having English support sessions in primary school as I didn't know a word of English at all.
I remember coming home after school to watch children's ITV and my favourite program was Knightmare which looked so high tech and futuristic at the time. We would also watch Blockbusters as a family on a daily basis.

No YouTube or streaming of music meaning I would catch it in the radio on the Top 40 every Sunday if I wanted to hear my favourite song. My parents couldn't really afford to buy records or cassette tapes, so I had to save up and only started buying music in my teens, when I was allowed out without an adult.
I remember being off school during the hurricane in 1987.

Oh yes, only having 4 TV channels rather than the hundreds we have now.

School milk was rank. Why were the cartons always covered in black sweaty smelly stuff? Why did the teacher always put it in front of a radiator?

there was a sense of innocence and trust and a sense that hard work and education would still get you places
That idea persisted up to the turn of the century because parents passed it on to their own kids, who didn’t discover it was false until they got to their 20s and couldn’t get jobs.

- You could buy a house, your own house, on one wage. (No, really. Unless you were unlucky enough to end up in negative equity.) - you can still buy a house on one salary round here.

- Council houses still existed and was a viable option - you can still get a council house round here too. My friends son and his girlfriend have just got one.
*.

• Even poor kids like me could dream of going to university some day, knowing it would be funded if your parents earned under a certain amount. In my part of the world nursing or joining the Armed Forces or working as a holiday rep were all still pretty respectable and decently paid too.* - armed forces pay is decently paid after training and even better once you move up the ranks. It's still a respected job too, as is nursing. Not sure about holiday reps. Don't know a lot about them.

- You could still get a joiner or a plumber or electrician without having to sell your soul to the bank to pay for it.

• you still can. I've just had a plumber out to fix a part in my loo. £20.

Do you live in central London?

Ponoka. When I was about 12-15, several girls in my year at school got pregnant. One was sent to England to live with her aunt, a couple were kept at home by their parents (you weren't allowed to stay at school) but two were sent to special "homes for wayward girls"! None of them were allowed to keep their babies.
When I was 16, my best friend fell pregnant. She had to leave school but her parents let her keep her baby. As her bump grew, she was the talk of all the village old dears because she was out walking about where everyone could see her bump!
A lot of my family is Irish. The IRA, the Troubles and the whole regressiveness of NI loomed very large for us. I clearly remember Central Station and Waverley being shut on regular occasions because of bomb threats. And going to Belfast to see folk and their being soldiers with guns at all the shop doors and there being barbed wire and military vehicles everywhere.

First memory is around miner strikes, my brothers going to local welfare to get fed, being in union hut with my dad, walking in some of the more peaceful strikes. Had permed hair most of 80s, bright clothes that clashed, a fair bit of neon, music was ok but prefer 90s.

Bus holidays to spain, on bus for 2.5 days 🙁 first time in Florida, amazed by everything!

For fun played outside at 2 man hunt, hide and seak, chap door run, kirby (loved this), spectrum computer, watched the shite on tv. With fiver pocket money i went to town, bought a magazine,,pick n mix from woolies, small can juice and went back home to enjoy and watch saturday night film.

Was amazed that babies could grow in test tubes but thought it would need to be a big tube for a 9 month baby lol

Oh yes the markets, loved going there, got leather jackets, sweets, meat, net curtains, and something from burger van

The eighties (looking back through rose tinted glasses) were fab!

The music was brilliant for most of the decade, but especially mid to late eighties. By the end of the decade Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan were huge! On TV Neighbours and later on Home and, Away were massive. Used to sneak home from school at lunch when I could and watch neighbours mid eighties.

As a teen there was no Internet or social media. So you found out about teen stuff through the many teen girl magazines that were out at the time. Used to love getting J17, Look in, Smash Hits and Jackie. J17 was best of the mags though.

In a way I think it was good there wasn't any mobiles or social media. It was good to be able to escape bullying girls from school and not have to worry about them at home.

You listened to your mix tapes or charts that you had taped of the radio top 40 on a Sunday night on your boom box or if you were lucky your Sony Walkman.

I was very into The Brat pack mid eighties, but to watch a film you either had to go to the cinema or walk to the video library and rent the film you wanted to see. Hoping and praying the person behind the counter would believe you were really 15!

The hair and make up were hideous at the end of the eighties I sported a lovely bubble perm with sun in in it, before moving on to shaders and toners.

Heather shimmer lipstick totally rocked back then. Disney motif reversible jumpers were good, as were grey and pink le femme bags. Jump suits, jelly shoes, ra ra skirts, puffball skirts with braces, long socks and DM style shoes were not great. Clearisil for skin was harsh, but my teen self swore by it and harmony hair spray! Body shop did fuzzy peach range and Dewberry, which were fab, Boots original natural collection was also fab.

Food wise eating out was rare, prawn cocktail, pizza and triffle were real treats. In our house we had traditional meals that were rotated each week, with a very occasional curry or spag bol thrown in.

Sundays were the most boring day of the week. No shops opened.

The horrible bits of The1980s The Minners Strike was awful for all those involved. Thatcherism was rife and yuppieism / excess / loads of money was flaunted, which was distasteful. The Hillsborough disaster was awful and should never have happened. My Dad boycotted reading The Sun for the lies they printed after Hillsborough right up until his death.

Attitudes in 1980's if a person was gay, had special needs or had a disability were awful and discrimination. Racism and Sexisim were also rife in 1980s though towards the late eighties things were very slowly changing. Thank Goodness.

ooooohbetty I was completely sure there was an Adam Ant underage girls scandal but having googled I see there wasn't! I must have been thinking of someone else

Sorry Adam Ant!

@anothernotherone phew, thank goodness for that!

School comments....amazing a lot of what went on. In infant school, one teacher used to lock ‘naughty’ children in a cupboard. In my final year at primary, we had to sit in order of our intelligence! As the year went on, you would move up or down a desk depending on how well you were or weren’t doing! I also remember at secondary school doing PE, running, and the male PE teacher blatantly making a comment about my breasts (they’ve always been big) to some of the boys, and they all sniggered.

My DC don't fear knife crime or suicide bombers in the same way that we were taught in the 80s that nuclear war was an inevitability via public information films, drama and music.

It was a fear and considered a realistic threat that was woven into being.

Visit a 'secret' nuclear bunker and this will tell you how real the threat was perceived to be.