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?

The 80s were a very dangerous time to be a child.

I was 8 in 1980. The music was brilliant, we actually bought albums, didn't have mobile phones and wrote letters. I much preferred the 80s to now if I'm honest.

I was a teenager in the 80’s and when I look back it was flippin brilliant.
You could get jobs easily. Everyone seemed more laid back and not obsessed with their appearance. You could easily go clubbing two three times a week with not a lot of money in your purse.

Sundays were quiet, no cars on the road, no shops open.
Less 'choice' - everyone had similar gadgets/toys/bikes/clothes.
Fun! Children didn't have pressure put on them at school the way they do now.

'Dallas' was on the telly and we were influenced fashion-wise by that - shoulder pads, blingy jewellery - even for everyday wear in the office. It was a 'smart' decade - people made the effort to look good. Big hair was all the rage and very flattering - much more so than the usual long, straight, sleek look which is often the 'go-to' style for teenagers. For the first time in my life I felt glamorous as my curly hair went into this style easily.

Whether the decade was kind to you depended on your work though. DH and I were lucky enough to never get made redundant - we may have got fed up with our jobs and sometimes longed to get the boot but they never got rid of us. We got on the housing ladder through hard work and saving and saw the value of our house soar. Others really weren't so lucky.

I wasn't keen on the music though - the 1960's/70's was really my time and I still don't like punk to this day, though I can understand disaffected youth being angry about their situation. They had a rotten time of it.

I was a teen in the 80s and I loved it. Everyone watched the same TV on Saturday nights, The A Team, Knightrider (& one with Lee Majors I can’t remember name of) and TOTPs on Thursdays. I was also a brosette and wore DMs, jeans, short black leather jacket. My Mum still has the note I wrote begging her to queue to get concert tickets for them and promising I would be her best friend forever! I was working at Tesco on the checkouts on Saturdays but no scanners, if the price label had fallen off the product I used to go running round the shop to find the item, so funny now.
Loved Madonna and wanted to be like her, used to go ice skating Sat nights with fluorescent mixed socks.
Did have a perm and Rara skirt.

Life seemed so less complicated/pressured back then. Am so glad I grew up in 80s...

DH used to go backwards and forwards to America for work. At one stage he worked in the building used for the Ewing offices in Dallas. Our kids got a lot of kudos from that. 😀

The fall guy!

Don’t forget the uproar of channel 4 and the Saturday comedians, black adder and the Brat Pack films

Chopin
I agree. Being 'out' and Gay wasn't a thing unless you lived in a big city.
I knew no openly gay people until I was about 20.

Is that not down to TVs and take aways being relatively cheaper than the 80s rather than people on benefits being wealthy?
Perhaps. I think people felt justified because benefit claimants couldn’t afford the luxuries that working people had, like takeaways, alcohol, household appliances and holidays. There was (still is) a notion that benefits should only fund the absolute minimum. There’s a lot of righteous indignation nowadays because people on benefits often have the same as working people (even if that’s because stuff is cheaper).

For many people, benefits were a way of life in the 80s. There were a lot of long term claimants because of job losses in heavy industry and mining which left large numbers of middle aged adults with no job, no alternative jobs available in their communities and no experience or skills to do anything else. The DWP was much less stringent at booting people off benefits and it was feasible to claim unemployment for 20 years or more.

Freddy Laker would disagree. And Dan air AKA Dan Dare airlines.

Ooh, I forgot Laker Airlines - he did go bust though.

Many workplaces were heavily unionised in the early 80s, and you couldn't get a job there unless you joined the union. Strikes could be called without ballots of the workers and were quite frequent. Most jobs offered a pension based on half final salary.

The green movement was just getting started.

Disabled kids were rarely in mainstream schools, although that was something which changed over the decade.

People became more aware of child abuse. Childline was set up in the mid 80s.

I can remember a ch4 program called ‘minipops’ It was children mostly girls aged 5-10 ish dressed up in short skirts and adult style make up and dancing very suggestively to the latest pop records - still amazed that was allowed
But ch4 was considered ‘racy’ at its beginning
Smoking was allowed almost everywhere
No one worried about kids being out all day No one had a mobile phone- you had to ask to use the landline and risk speaking to a your friends parent first!
In our primary school we had one computer on a trolley which only the year 6 children ( were called 4th year primary then) were allowed to use- it was shared between both classes!

It was more that credit was less freely available.

I had to see a bank manager for a car loan of £1000 with bank statements savings and outgoings. We were there a good hour going over repayments etc

Bank cards for ATMs were just available for cash at the bank rather than payments in shops.

People didn’t get approved for catalogues or loans etc unless it was a big item like a TV in HP repayment plan

My parents were lentil munchers so the eighties for me were a decade of sosmix, chickpea curry and weird salads combining watercress and oranges.

I used to read the Delia Smith book every day.

No treats or days out as such, but we did go on a foreign holiday in the late 80s to Greece, an experience I'll never forget.

Each night on holiday me and my sister would have souvlaki and chips and coke, and my parents had vegetarian mains with a selection of sides and a carafe of wine. Mum said it cost ten quid each night.

She said it was cheaper to fly us to Greece for a week than to run the house at home!

Couple of random shopping facts, Marks and Spencer didn't used to have changing rooms, so 'taking things back to Markies' was a standard pastime. John Lewis was closed on Mondays and didn't accept credit cards.

January and July sales were properly exciting because there weren't sales all year round. No such thing as fast fashion, supermarkets only sold food not clothes.

And when you left primary school at the end of p7 nobody cared or said anything! I just went home, had some toast and watched my VHS tape of Calamity Jane for the eight thousandth time.

When I was 16 in the mid eighties a teacher told us our generation would never know steady employment.
This was a steady uncontroversial RE teacher.
So shoulder pads and bright lipstick didn't really compensate for that.

Thinking about today, I still want to know how we found things out!!

For uni, I went to the university course brochures in the school careers room.

We used encyclopedias. Rang up companies to get train times.
Dad used to book his foreign caravan sites from a number in a foreign camping book.

I did a lot of research through a US trade directory and contacts to get a summer job abroad.

It took a lot of effort to do research.

I left University in 1981 and got a really good job straight away.

If you lived in an industrial area and working as, say, a miner, you were stuffed. Thatcherism bit really hard for many.

The Big Bang opened up the economy and made lots of people rich. Home ownership was around 70% and rose due to Right to Buy.

Music was fab. We had Duran, Spandau, Boy George, Bananarama, Adam Ant, Shaky, Police and groups inspired by reggae such as UB40 (the name of the card you presented to collect your dole).

I thought I was cool and wore lots of jumpsuits and dungarees in bright colours.

I went to the then Soviet Union a couple of times which was very exotic indeed.

I became a house owner n 1987. DP had bought his first house at the age of 20.

Most people left school at 16. It was still quite unusual to go to University. Apprenticeships started to be replaced by the YTS.

To me, it felt optimistic and fun.

To others...mm..not so much.

Couple of random shopping facts, Marks and Spencer didn't used to have changing rooms, so 'taking things back to Markies' was a standard pastime. John Lewis was closed on Mondays and didn't accept credit cards.

Oh yes, I'd forgotten that. And there were very few size 8s, 6s didn't exist, but I was 5'5" and weighed 8 and a half stone and never had a single problem buying clothes as I was mostly a size 10.

The January sales didn't start until January (and shops were shut on 1 Jan as it was a bank holiday). They lasted the whole of the month.

M&S food was branded St Michael and they only sold their own brand.

No coins needed for supermarket trolleys.

Sunday lunch was a roast meal.

Angel Delight was a popular pudding for children - it came in a packet and you whisked it up with milk. Strawberry, chocolate and butterscotch flavours.

No one I knew had tattoos.

We believed the tabloid stories about Princess Diana being unhappy in her marriage were made up to sell papers ;)

My dad had a computer for business, and the printer used big sheets of thin paper with holes at the edges and green stripes on the back.

Showers were rubbish - it was so hard to get the temperature consistent and water pressure was poor.

I seem to remember that M&S didn't accept debit cards until the 90s? Or was it credit cards? I remember having to pay by cheque or cash.

The 80s were my teenage years and uni years and, on the whole, I'm glad they were then and not nowadays.

During my school years I don't remember the pressure that todays youngsters face. There was no mention of minimum grades, the school hitting targets etc.

The only drugs I came across during my school 6th form years was the occasional person smoking a spliff at a party (one of them being our music teacher but that's a whole other story!!) and even at uni it was still only cannabis.

Foreign travel wasn't as common as it is now. My 18yo daughter will have been abroad 3 times this year alone yet at her age I'd only been abroad twice in my life !

The food was crap back then and I'd much rather have the variety and healthier options we have today. The only curry I had as a teen was the nasty Vesta ones from a pack, everything seemed to be for convenience or terribly unhealthy.

It wasn't easy to grab something when you were out and about like it is today when every high street has numerous food outlets. Back then our little town had a bakery that sold takeaway sandwiches but the options were only cheese, ham or egg. Forget your paninis, quinoa salads or sushi!

On passing your driving test nobody had their own car, it was a case of borrowing your parents car (and in fact most families only had one car). No need for a Sixth form car park back then like they have nowadays!

I can honestly say I started school in the early 1980s, left at the start of the 90s, and learned nothing in that time.

We did maths from textbooks. I vaguely remember that purple was the top and hardest textbook and we just worked our way through them, asking the teacher for help if needed but because we were all on different pages and books, there was no teaching of concepts or how to do things. My mathematical knowledge is still awful because of this.

We did no literacy to speak of other than being read a story sometimes or being told to write our own. Art was literally ‘paint a picture.’ PE was dire and we had to get changed in front of boys even in year 6. Teachers were sarcastic, showed blatant favouritism and could be downright unpleasant.

Playing out was dangerous. Two of my classmates were run over, thankfully not fatally. Child abductions and murders were obviously rare but they did happen. Drowning, railway fatalities, electricity pylons, accidents on farms ... videos showed us what happened to silly children. Never any mention that maybe kids of seven shouldn’t be playing out alone.

Sexual abuse was rife.

Racism was rife.

Smacked backside and/or legs was damn good parenting.

I spent a lot of the 80s writing letters to friends, relatives and even the BBC asking them when they were going to be showing certain films! (I was very into 1940s films but couldn't find the ones I wanted to rent so spent a lot of time asking for them to be shown ). I always got a letter back. Also wrote to my friend a lot when I went on holiday- and even when I was at home. She only lived 5 miles away but her family had a party line so could never get through on the phone and if I did calls had to be kept short or their neighbour complained.

Terrible hair. Diary of an Edwardian Lady decor everywhere. Laura Ashley. Knickers blinds and curtains. Frills, flounces and probably furbelows, whatever they are. Thatcher. Riots. Miners Strike. Double glazing salesmen.

Oh yes the sales
I remember people would que for days out side shops between Christmas and new year waiting for the January sales