Nothing really special happened in 1989 until after it finished.

A couple of days into the new decade, two young writers whose names I’d seen mentioned increasingly often in the NME penned a spectacular 12 page tribute to the 1980s in that week’s edition. Besides paying homage to the era just ended – “In years to come, historians of pop culture will look up from their futuristic Gary Numan-style computer terminals and say, ‘The Eighties, they were living in The Eighties’” – this enthusiastic pair of hacks wrote up 1989 with such unashamed passion (“Halle-bloody-luyah indeed! … New heroes left, right and centre … Yes!”) that I instantly realised how fundamentally important and significant the previous 12 months were. How could I have missed this? How could I not have realised? Sure, I’d noted what was going on around me, the way the world was changing, the sounds, the looks, the TV … but hadn’t been bothered, or able, to sew it all together into an appropriate tapestry, or at least a passable shawl, so it all really made sense and stood for something. Hillsborough, the end of Blackadder, Band Aid II, News 39, Batman, Black Box, 20 years of Monty Python, Jive Bunny and The Stone Roses: of course! This was 1989! OK, what a seminal year. 11 years on, BBC Manchester say: oh no it wasn’t, though we’ll give you the Stone Roses, and how about those body suits, eh?

Let’s not be coy. I Love the Eighties has been great fun and one of the best TV series screened on a Saturday night for years. It could easily have become nightmare material: too browbeating, or fussy, or just dull. No, it had its facts straight (for the most part), superbly chosen clips, and research that – whether carefully planned, hastily executed or both – fetched in some well chosen guests and obscure or forgotten personnel responsible for this crowded catalogue of memorabilia.

It’s been entertaining, frequently funny and annoying but never inaccessible, bland or incapable of prompting some kind of response and reaction. One of its commanding successes was keeping the door bolted to fusty academics, uptight sociologists and the pop critique élite: no Jon Savage, thankfully, and – definitely a relief – no Simon Frith. The closest we came to pseudism was in the presence of Master Robert Elms, though Paul Morley the People’s Hero saw him off. Swapping half a dozen yelping alternative comedians for a Stuart Cosgrove or a Neil Tennant wouldn’t have hurt either.

Over-theorising programmes such as these ends up exposing little in the way of value concerning the subject but much in the character of the critic. Both I Love the Seventies andThe Eighties didn’t presume to be anything other than advertised; using them as collateral to pursue some holy war of revisionism (cheers Gareth McLean) seemed to miss the point. Earnest post-post-modernist re-re-readings of New Romanticism and the like just helps popular culture slip further into the hands of the few and the isolated dilettantes in their cuckolded towers. If these programmes have done nothing else than expose such a process then to an extent that is enough; the rest of us are all, hopefully, a bit older and wiser.

Sometimes though it became difficult not to end up in Wonder Years territory: where a piece of your own memory becomes so entangled with a retrospective re-telling of some tangential subject that the past ends up a sequence of cultural flashpoints each representing “a moment that I knew my life had changed – utterly!” In fact, those incidents only had resonance at all because you once recorded the theme music to Blockbusters on a portable cassette machine you held up against your parents’ telly.

With both series built around collections of vox pops, the balance between the useful and the pointless became more distracting as the weeks went by, compounded by the undesired helpings of random remarks shouted by jabbering pundits. The sheer number of contributors eventually seemed like an overload, a “throwing everything at the viewer in the hope something sticks” approach. This jamboree of personnel felt like it became more pronounced the later we moved through the series – but was this true, or imagined?

A quick consultation of the OTT Pundit-o-meter reveals some intriguing statistics. A select band of just 29 talking heads featured in I Love 1970; an average of one new pundit every two minutes. Here onwards the number of contributors rose to a peak of 52 in I Love 1975, before dipping again to 36 for I Love 1977 and back to 49 for I Love 1979. Despite this variation it quickly became evident at the time that a core group of people had been quizzed in advance on topics scheduled to appear right through the series. Each I Love the Seventies was also directed by a different person, albeit co-ordinated by series producer Alan Brown; but for I Love the Eighties Brown assumed an executive producer role, leaving Rebecca Papworth as series producer. Whether this made for a confusion over responsibilities or eased the completion of a series comprising episodes half as long again, the 1980s collection didn’t hang together or feel as unified as their forerunners (despite boasting the re-appearance of two 1970s directors, Marina Warsama and Liz Molyneux).

Also, I Love the Seventies featured the same archive producer (Will Bryant) and researcher (Ernest Stoddart) throughout. I Love the Eighties found Bryant present but Stoddart only occasionally involved, sometimes replaced with a variety of figures, sometimes no-one at all. The manner in which some of the 1980s items seemed randomly dropped into the mix, especially those not really tied to any particular year, implied less creative control.

Another glance at the Pundit-o-meter, meanwhile, shows the tally for I Love the Eighties leap up compared to its predecessor. I Love 1980 weighed in with 75 participants, less than one new pundit every 90 seconds. The total fell back slightly to 66 for 1983, but ballooned to a heaving 92 for both I Love 1985 and 1986, 96 for I Love 1987, 93 for 1988 and 90 for 1989 - all meaning roughly a new talking head every 60 seconds. Yikes!

This obsessive number-crunching has a striking relevance when related to the way these programmes were not merely created or developed but how we set about remembering them. Each separate episode was memorable, in the sense that it impressed upon the memory, for a seriously limited period – obviously while it was on air, but then only for maybe a couple of days afterwards. If you did remember aspects of the series in the long term then those recollections inevitably resolved into memories of people talking about the subjects rather than the subjects themselves: Stuart Maconie’s tribute to Gregory’s Girl or Bjorn Borg, Julie Burchill on yoghurts or Just Seventeen, Peter Kay on Rubik’s cubes or No Limits. Often the memory was simply of the pundits themselves: Stuart wincing, Peter singing, Ice T nodding.

In addition, those pundits who formed that core team, the First Eleven of the Vox Pop, invariably wielded more clout and authority than the rest; they’d been there from the start, so even if they turned up for only five seconds one week, those five seconds stuck in the brain far more than the 80 odd other soundbites from the pundit subs stuck on the bench.

In turn, perhaps just one or two longer contributions could have sustained the mood or a momentum, allowed an argument or observation to unfold and consequently stay in the memory a bit longer than 48 hours. But then would keeping to the low turnouts of I Love the Seventies led to maybe more testing, rambling, dreary monologues for the late 1980s? Would a culling of contributors still sustained interest, fitted the mood, or maybe killed the pace?

I Love the Seventies seemed to be party to some long term planning and well-executed over-arching grand plan which its sequel felt in need of. I Love the Eighties boasted features poorly sequenced, either on grounds of duration (too many short items early on, or lengthy ones later, and vice versa) or subject matter, and this was annoying because the topics themselves were usually worthwhile but ended up not getting the treatment you felt they should.

At times there was just so much cultural junk clattering around, the noise could be horrendous. Again, I Love the Seventies just felt more cohesive, whole, a tidy package; I Love the Eightieswas more magpie television, a bit of this, a bit of that, the 90 minute format never really completely mastered. There was always some weak link, a misjudged change of pace, an unexplained reference, a plain annoying pundit, even if you watched in as relaxed and uncritical manner as possible. Still, the programme never assumed or claimed a mission-to-explain status; neither did it bring us the likes of Melvyn Bragg brooding or Mark Lawson pouting, whose types would’ve killed the project stone dead.

So, we’ve watched Wayne Hemingway gradually lose his hair, leafed through the Peter Kay songbook, lobbed abuse at the mere glimpse of Jamie Theakston and revelled in the company of Mr Maconie. We’ve gained our own TV family of trendy fathers, snippy mothers, smartarse older brothers and preachy younger sisters, with a few wise old owls to boot.

Thanks to Channel 4′s sulky scheduling of their Top Tens against I Love the Eighties it’s felt of late like there’s been all too much reprocessed popular culture to go round. Maybe this series could have matured and rested until a post-Easter transmission? I Love the Nineties, due this summer, will nonetheless be just as interesting, exciting and controversial I’m sure; it’s going to be fascinating to see how the now-really-recent past comes out of the Alan Brown critical dishwasher. After all, access to footage won’t be a problem, Theakston might even remember something, and you know that Stuart and Peter will be well up for the Gulf War, Eldorado and The Mike Flowers Pops.

The authors of that 1980s NME special ended their admirable tribute with a keen, telling observation on what they and most people had spent the last few months doing: “The end of the year became one long over-the-shoulder look at the 10 years that had just passed – a repeat performance of Band Aid, featuring Bros, Lisa Stansfield and other such ‘now’ folk, lent the home straight something of a timeless air. Round and round or what?” Andrew, Stuart, you were dead right.

Alright, let’s start with that assumption. Do I love 1988?

Well, it means a lot to me in retrospect because it was my first full year out of college and the year I landed my first job in the media (Design Assistant at the NME). I was 23. It was a year of too much thinking – living alone in a studio flat in South London, sort-of-voluntarily celibate, making spaghetti Bolognese, drinking Kaliber at house parties, hanging around other people’s places of higher education to ease my own withdrawal from college, watching an inordinate amount of TV and renting a lot of videos.

As we have seen from previous editions of I Love the Eighties, the nostalgia offered is mostly specific to my own thirtysomething demographic, we who – eek! – stay in on a Saturday night (hence all the pencil cases and verucas in the early ’80s, when 36-year-olds were still at school), with a few crumbs thrown in for the twentysomethings who tape it and the good-looking TV presenters I have never heard of who appear on it.

So did the items selected for I Love 1988 say anything to me about my life? Loadsamoney, quiz machines, Acid House, Viz, Hitman & Her - yes. All the rest, no. Which is not to say that the programme-makers didn’t nail the zeitgeist. By casting their net beyond pop and kitsch telly to sport and fads, I Love 1988 presented a passable summation of the year.

Using the animated Ninja Turtles as “hosts” was technically clever, but laid the programme open, yet again, to charges of date-fixing. The series debuted in Britain in 1988, but am I going mad or wasn’t it on Sky? Turtlemania didn’t really happen here until 1989-1990 (the hit single and film certainly came in 1990). Perhaps it’s pedantic to fixate on dates, but when a programme seeks to define a calendar year, such “seasonal adjustment” whiffs of convenience.

No arguments about Bros vs Brother Beyond – an inspired start to the show. Both had their 15 minutes in ’88. By ’89 they were toast, which is why disposable pop sums up a year better than more substantial rock music. We had no testimony from the dim-witted Goss brothers, but preening Brother Beyond singer Nathan Barley was on hand to tragically state that his band had gone down “somewhere in history but not too indelibly”.

The Loadsamoney section was all too brief. (What a quiet man Charlie Higson is.) There was, however, very little new to learn about this much-discussed character. The dedicated Turtles bit was launched, in now-traditional style, with the magnificent Peter Kay (underused this week) remembering the theme tune. It’s a simple down-the-pub trick, but it works. What a shame we had Gail Porter asking, pointlessly, “Who thought that up?” Well, some comics writers you fool. Good gag from my close personal friend Maconie (“Donatella, Panatella, Jackson Pollock and Rolf Harris”), and hearing from both creators, two of the voice artists and a consultant biologist was no less than we have come to expect from the tireless I Love researchers.

On the subject of pundits, this week’s virgins were disappointing: pisspoor Guardian TV critic Gareth McLean, weight-obsessed posho columnist India Knight, Brendan Coogan (who seemed to be there solely to represent brother Steve re: Madeley/Partridge) and Patrick Kielty, who at least had something Northern Irish to add about novelty hands and bullet holes on cars. Thank heavens, once again, for Johnny Vegas (who imagined Hitman & Her dancer Wiggy working at a bureau de change: “I don’t trust you with currency”) and the aforementioned Maconie, who appears in two shirts because they asked him back to help fill out the apparently bereft later years. His pub machine reminiscence was up there with Gregory’s Girl.

I never watched Richard and Judy so this cult passed me by, but what is the point of Tara Palmer-Tompkinson saying “Oh I love Richard and Judy!” (likewise, Terry Alderton saying “Bill and Ted was a great film”) – this is not pop-nostalgia, it’s not even strictly comment or punditry. Bald statements have become more prevalent as the series has struggled to fill its insane brief week by week. I recall Dermot O Leary being on once in 1985 to say “I really like Bruce Springsteen.” Let’s hope they have a bit longer to edit together I Love the Nineties.

Nice section on “tragic” US sprinter Flo Jo, with good, relevant punditry (spoiled only by Michelle Gayle saying it was important to bring glamour to track and field – er, why?) and a tasteful obituary, with enough from Jim White to suggest that her heart attack at 48 may have been steroid-assisted. Fine telly. And keen use of backing track: I Know You Got Soul by Eric B and Rakim (Seoul Olympics, geddit?)

1988 was The Year Of Acid House. I was working at the NME when it all went off and so even though I didn’t step foot in a warehouse or take E in 1988, I felt this cultural flashpoint – well told by the pundits, especially erudite DJ Graeme Park, who made the religious point well (DJ in pulpit etc.), and we were allowed to laugh at the dancing, even though the movement had its serious side (nicely put by Miranda Sawyer). Bez summed it up with the old cliché: “Can’t really remember it, it must have been good!”

Being neither a lesbian or a football fan I can’t really remember Prisoner Cell Block H or inflatable bananas so they must have been good, but I enjoyed the sections, especially the comfortable-shoe-wearing woman who brought Bea over to meet the Mayor of Derby, and the footballer Imre Varadi, whose name started the banana craze. Good to see Bob Wilson having inflatables dropped on him. It’s these innocuous bits of TV that encapsulate a year: Bruno Brookes’ misjudged Top Gun jacket on TOTP, Mike Read lamely making a “Top of the Wads” crack about Harry Enfield, Josie Lawrence setting fire to her hair on This Morning and some sports reporter describing sumo legend Dumptruck as “576 lbs of fighting flab”.

The Viz part was slightly flat – again, perhaps it’s a story told too often. And Debbie Gibson vs Tiffany was too similar to Bros/Brother Beyond (apart from Mrs Gibson, telling us how Debbie wrote “eight, 10, 12 songs a day” – no good ones though, eh?)

Bill and Ted? Again, good work on booking the interviewees, but this needed more context, more about nascent slacker culture and where it went next (grunge, Wayne’s World, Wheatus) – maybe it’s too big for the slot.

To finish, The Hitman & Her, who should, of course, have hosted I Love 1988 from some Warrington fleshpot. I was fascinated by Pete Waterman’s comment about turning on the telly late at night and finding Elvis Costello talking about Irish politics – which is why he inventedHitman. And thus was brainless post-pub telly conceived. Me? I’d stay up any night to watch Elvis Costello talking about Irish politics, but there you go.

So, in I Love 1988 were we told that Acid House changed clubbing forever, and then we saw that clubbing hadn’t changed at all. You wonder if the overworked programme-makers even got time to watch the finished programme back before they deliver it to the Beeb. It’s like a dozen little programmes all stuck together, with no central theme and no overview whatsoever. This has been true all along. The only themes have been Stuart Maconie and Gina Yashere.

Still, lots of fun on the night: Brian Blessed, someone describing Bros as “Hitler youth”, Richard Madeley asking Neighbours actor Shane O’Brien if he felt “a bit of a poof” and a reminder of that Sun headline: “SHOOT THESE EVIL DRUG BARONS” I am a little tired of having to give up an hour and half of my Saturday night to this series now, but once I do, it never fails to tickle – more so now that I am not on it any more. Less anxiety.

And where was I in 1988? At a rave? Watching the Olympics? Waving a banana? No. Listening to George Best by The Wedding Present (1987), watching Broadway Danny Rose (1984) and reading Money by Martin Amis (1984). If only life were as neat as a pop-cultural documentary.

I thought about what 1987 meant to me – Rick Astley, house music, Hardwicke House. September onwards was my first year at “comprehensive” school, allowing me to confirm my images painted by Grange Hill (pity that show went off the boil around the same time). Three events jumped out from my memory immediately – Hungerford, Zeebrugge and King’s Cross. Don’t think they’ll focus on that, however. Still, a high number of public disasters is worth noting. Maybe not for this series though, although the Big Hurricane should get a mention. Surely.

Ah. Richard E Grant is hosting and it’s not long before it dawns that Withnail & I will get a mention. Shame. The can of Quatro slides through the pop world depicted in the title sequence, again, but I don’t think we ever get the full advert.

Whitney’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me) kicks off proceedings. Next, Richard and the familiar speedy selection box of tonight’s offerings, quick enough to be missed in the excitement but still (just) giving the viewer a chance to decide when to dip into the programme – if at all. The cuts are fast and before we know it there’s Terence Trent D’Arby in front of the wispy colours – he’s here! In 2001. Never liked him. Pete Waterman, then The Tubepop up, the latter with Paula Yates. She really likes Terence. He’s at the Grammys – the host looks like he’s from 25 years ago, not 15. Mike Smith is on voiceover.

Muriel Gray is an “author”.

Ice T! Whenever I watch this show Ice T is on. He is an expert on ’70s and ’80s pop culture. He knows about Terence! Was “Trent” really this popular in the US? Next is the obligatory Woganclip; we seem to get one of these per edition. He had the guests. Also he was on Going Live!, by the look of it. The clip research is thorough as usual. But, Ice T again and he knows more about Terence. He is aware of some crucifix incident, reminiscent of Holly Johnson. Terence in 2001 is sincere, more so than in 1987 when he proclaimed he was “the best pop singer in the world”.

Onto shellsuits; now they’re not very 1987. Well, I suppose that’s only my experience – the first complete family in matching shellsuits I saw was in 1990. At an airport. Arabella Weir is on. Also newbie Carlton Dixon. And Ice T.

Ice must be so engaging to tower over all the British talking heads and scoop the airtime. Iain Lee, Quentin Wilson, Tony Blackburn – his only serious challenger is Stuart Maconie. They go through succulent clips of Cliff Richard then David Icke in their shiny shellsuits to make a link between the utility garment and Liverpool. That’s true. Was that Debi Jones I saw? A shoe buyer pulls up a chair for interview. I’d like to see something on the fire risk of shellsuits. No clips for that.

I’m mopping up some knocked-over beer and catch a glimpse of bumbags. Music is Mel & Kim. Ice T again! Then Trevor & Simon and it’s familiar ground here. Some good clips. It leads into aGoing Live! section. Now this show wasn’t very definitive. It was modelled on the safe ground ofSwap Shop and Saturday Superstore. Personally, I was always a Get Fresh kid. Good old Pip turns up, then Reeves & Mortimer, which must date it about 1990 at best. Ha, Pip describes the show as “controlled chaos”! The opposite, mate, it was the safest thing I ever saw.

Ah, Stuart Maconie. He talks some jazz, makes me chuckle. How different is today from then? In TV terms, maybe a lot. Going Live! is still on. Annabel Giles with her posh voice is teaching Sarah Greene something. Compare these simple items, set pieces and tombolas with SM:TV‘s sketches and smut.

It’s Trevor Neal and Simon Hickson. Still working, I believe. There’s a few clips of their high points. The focus was on scenes involving Phillip Schofield. Inevitably we get Gordon the Gopher. I’m ashamed to admit I had one, three quid from the market, but if there was ever a more banal puppet then I’m Bobby the Banana. Paul Smith’s hand was the one at the centre of it all – today he gives an ironic statement then admits this is the first time he’s revealed that fact. That’s good research.

A clip emerges of Phil in a white shirt buttoned to the top, and an awful tie. An equally nasty GTG puppet pops up with “1987″ on his jumper. Richard E reappears and introduces nouvelle cuisine, then the talking heads fire off in quick succession – an often-used tactic. Underneath is classic jazzy ’80s Breathe/Curiosity/Blow Monkeys music. Anthony Worrall-Thompson opines – and where is Victor Lewis-Smith in all this, I think. In fact, where were computer games, I never saw them? Clips of restaurants. I roll a fag. Some establishments ripped off dim-but-wealthy people in 1987 by serving them very small, expensive meals. Radio 5 diva Fi Glover appears, she looks like a teacher. She’s sharp though.

Stuart’s up again, but this time it’s a different Stuart in lighter shirt, and facing the opposite direction. The full-length advert rolls in, Perrier, followed by a quick round-up of bottled water. General conclusion: suckers lose again. More Stuart.

Bit of rap music starts up, and it’s onto a rap section! This is my scene. Run DMC are the focus – “DJ” Jazzy Jeff Townes tells of how he was a local DJ in their early years. Ice T of course comments, and we get modern chats with “Run” and “Jam Master Jay. There’s more rap clips, including Aerosmith. Now we’re onto the Beastie Boys. “They were of their time.” Mary Ann Hobbs rates them, using NME-speak to describe their “vibe” … or whatever. Ah, Fab Five Freddy! There’s a big group of contemporary rap stars on this show, let’s hope for a major look at that. Paul Ross. Next a clip of a Newsroom South-East-type show, reporting Beastie controversy. This is good stuff, even including a section on the VW badge rumble, with Nottinghamshire Police involved in media coverage. Ah, the familiar sight of a VW car with a big hole in the front grille. They say it was an “epidemic” of logo-snatching. Frank Bough from behind a desk and strait-jacketed into a suit, behind him BEASTS? in big letters. “We’re expecting riots”, he proclaims. There’s a Beastie press conference, full of bleeps and attitude. The journalists in the clip don’t bat an eyelid, but you can sense a barrier or two being torn down. Was this on Newsround? A fantastic definition of a rock star – “that’s what they’re supposed to do, tear shit up!”

Uh-oh, it’s Withnail & I. I never liked this. It’s not really 1987, either. It doesn’t evoke the year. It’s more of an early ’90s reheater. Maconie is back in original shirt and he doesn’t like Withnaileither. That gives me comfort. “Tell me when the funny things happen.” The film itself is a surreal trip. There’s a huge cannabis joint in it. A “fuck” is muted out, despite a clip not two seconds previously featuring the same exclaimation. This copy of the film is awful quality and the thought is continued when an amusingly catchy Jonathan Ross Harp commercial is shown. It’s clipped to widescreen, and at the end the slogan is obscured, probably taking away half the joke. This is common practice on I Love and is frankly annoying.

“Television!” This is what we want, Network 7! With the top theme, and title sequence. This footage is quickly savaged by cuts of Paul Ross, Charlie Parsons and Magenta De Vine. We’ve been here before, of course, with Watch This or the Dog Dies. They show bits of the famous cashcard incident – “the first computerised mugging”. The machine looks so old. Reporter Sankha Guha looks incredulous today, claiming that “no-one told us” that what they were doing was fraud. Clip of Did You See …?, with Ludovic complaining about fast captions, too fast to read … there’s more clips of such. Framed off and smaller on-screen, to allow us to read the captions (can they not do that with all old clips?). The Other Famous Incident, the death sentence interview. Amusingly they highlighted the stunted performance at the British leg of this transatlantic broadcast, with the live firing squad models. Trevor Ward looks like Steve Coogan. The whole thing has an air of Alan Partridge, anyway as Ward says, “injection of MUSCLE-PARALYSING … erm … liquid”. The item ends with a clever ’87 manipulation of theN7 logo.

Here comes a natty trailer for Wall Street. They have Martin Sheen. Good. Also a film critic with a familiar voice. We get a standard analysis of the film. A caption comes on, telling us that BBC1 transmitted Wall Street last week. What was the point in that? Predictably the thread follows through onto Yuppies – the clips aren’t very exciting (although mercifully there’s no David Jason), they don’t go beyond the common theme of the stockbroker throwing the phones round his console. This sort of imagery is common here and in other shows – is that all yuppies were about? More familiar shots of wedding-suited men clutching wide champagne glasses. Hey it’s Peter McCann! He’s showing us a housebrick. No, it’s a mobile phone c. ’87. Nice frames with more men dragging these things to their ears. I find old technology fascinating. On to the Filofax … and Yvette Fielding is offering us a cheaper alternative on Blue Peter. “The inserts can cost from 99p to nine-ninety-nine … an awful lot of money.”

Quickly onto thirtysomething. This extended format gives the producers room to stack up the items. The theme immediately evokes Channel 4 for me, but I never liked it. They have Bjorn Borg on, that’s good. Him and the theme is pretty much all I remember (all most people remember, I reckon). I can take or leave this section. Oh, and they’re playing It’s a Wonderful Life by Black. Teeth start to grind. This show looks dated, hope they don’t repeat it. One of the actors proclaims, “the planet wanted that show”. But here’s a programme that really did sate viewers’ demands, Damon & Debbie. Strong memories of this. On comes Phil Redmond. We get some great clips from Brookie-when-it-was-good. Look kids, it’s Jim “Arse” Royle! Damon’s been given a bloody nose by Debbie’s dad. Simon O’Brien has already popped up earlier in today’s edition (and throughout the series). Redmond and others comment on how the soap “bubble” concept allowed them to produce “guerrilla TV”, and to make it up as they went along. Damon catches Debbie about to use a needle. “She’s a smack’ead!” Ahhh, Simon claims that Gillian Kearney’s first kiss was with him on screen. Gillian laughs and confirms it. This is better use of the talking heads. “He dies tonight. Watch it. He dies … yeah, he gets stabbed. Watch tonight …” – Peter Kay on top form again. Simon wanted to leave Brookside to pursue new interests, so they decided to kill Damon off. What did he end up doing? I recall Standing Room Only and that’s all. It’s a shame as he’s been engaging and funny throughout this series. He’d be a good host.

Hey, it’s Rick Astley! As I said at the top, my man of ’87. Gratuitous clips of Top of the Pops. Simon Bates introduces his first performance on the show. Annoyingly they’ve zoomed in the picture again, so a) it looks fuzzy and bad and b) they’ve removed the original chart position FX. My favourite bit. Ha, Rick’s dance! It was basic but brilliant. They show Rick recording in the studio, with a slim Pete Waterman in the background. Rick’s on some awards show, maybe the Brits. Also he’s on Christmas TOTP, with Mike Smith presenting whilst wrapped in balloons. Pete Waterman gives a “Before And After” effect to proceedings when he steps up for duty in 2001. He explains that on the occasion of that first TOTP gig he gave Rick £500 to spend, and “he took it to Next in Warrington and bought a suit”. That’s ’80s class. There’s footage of Jeremy Paxman on Breakfast News in 1987, and some rare scenes of Rick giving an interview. Have they dragged him from his pop exile for the show? Evidently not. Lots of talk about the lad’s shyness. His change of direction in ’91 – the long hair! With miserable early ’90s dross. A gold disc for Rick, on what could be The Hit Man & Her. One more Wogan clip. Rick had enough of fame, and has not been seen since. You get the feeling that Pete Waterman is still in contact with him, as is his manager, no doubt. Ah, and then Richard is back on, and that’s the end of the show. He comments on Rick’s blazer and chinos.

And I can go to the toilet now.

1986 was the year when my family finally decided to buy a video recorder. My dad suggested to my mum that she could record the recipes off Pages from Ceefax and have herself a kind televisual recipe reference cassette. My mum suggested that a better option might be to simply purchase a cookery book. Not long after my parents separated.

1986 was – therefore – a pretty turbulent year for a 13-year-old lad like me. Amidst the unavoidable discovery that my parents were only human, television and popular culture were to become increasingly important vents. By the end of the year I would have attended my first pop concert (spending the preceding weeks internally debating whether or not I should invest in some type of hearing protection), taped my first series of Doctor Who off-air and met my dad’s new girlfriend.

All of these memories are now in some way bittersweet (in retrospect ’86′s Doctor Who hadn’t been that great and then Colin Baker got the sack to boot) and so it was with a very particular pang and a photo album perspective that I came to view I Love 1986.

For over one hour, I Love 1986 formed one of the most cohesive and satisfying episodes of this entire odyssey and threw up a number of those satisfying moments of personal nostalgia that we all seem to need a fix of these days. For example, the opening music (the Bangles) will always remind me of the boyhood taunts directed at one our school friend’s amorous nature (we would cleverly replace the words of the chorus with “gives him an e-rec-tion” and sing it to him in class whenever we felt he was “under the influence”).

Early male teenage lust was of course exactly the kind of market that Samantha Fox tried to corner back in ’86. It is my experience that you never truly appreciate that you are in the grip of a media phenomenon until you come to review it retrospectively; and in retrospect it does appear that Sam had indeed been “big” back then. “It was an accident what went brilliantly” opined the subject. The obvious down-market pitch used to propel Sam to fame (and some notoriety) was well captured as this section was punctuated with a number of The Sun’s crass television adverts of the time. What’s more, in the first of many brilliant snippets this week, the fifth best was Terry Wogan’s cringing segue into Sam’s performance of her (only) hit single: “It’s Touch Me … and who wouldn’t?” Sam seems to have come out relatively unscathed from her brush with stratospheric fame, but what the hell was that Indian version of Touch Me all about?

Moonlighting was 1986′s Friends. Both shows made superstars out of their lead actors and both rely on fast paced, self conscious and slightly post-modern humour. This section was a little disappointing. The ravages of time proved to have been unkind to both Miss Dipesto and Bert Viola, yet aside the obvious curiosity of seeing these people as they look today, there was very little here that added to our sum understanding of this quixotic programme. Sure – we all knew Shepherd and Willis hated each other, but there was too little time spent on the innovativeness of the series (save to briefly mention its propensity to acknowledge the fourth wall) and too much trotting out that wearisome line that unrequited love makes for great television. Unlike our insights into The A-Team, Knight Rider et al no effort was made to truly explain why this series had been able to captivate us so entirely that Songs for Bruno was allowed to make an impact upon the British pop chart. Also, no clip of the infamous Claymation Moonlighting episode.

Crocodile Dundee was that rare exception in 1986 – a popular film that was able to pique the interests of a 13-year old boy convinced (incorrectly) that mainstream culture had little left to offer him. The ending was rubbish though, and seeing it again here reinforced that belief. Disappointingly, I Love 1986 failed to fully identify Hogan’s peculiar place within British culture prior to the film, yet at least there was an attempt at explaining the curious attraction of a film that – at the time and in retrospect – looked like it should never have been a hit. Crocodile Dundee is a rarity of mid ’80s popular cinema in that its credibility has scarcely diminished. Contributions from Mr and Mrs Hogan were pleasing and reminded us once again of the odd mixture of the saccharine and the uncivilised that made the film such a hit. Still, I had grown mightily weary of the “You call that a knife?” joke before the film had even been released in this country, and whilst it was gratifying to see the two leads concur that its repetition has grown exceedingly wearisome, this is a piece of cinema I would still gladly elect to destroy once and for all.

In a quiet night for the pundits we fell rather unimpeded into a more generalised discussion of the wholesale absorption of Australian culture that seemed to occur in the mid to late ’80s. Those Castlemaine and Fosters ads never really appealed to me, yet these (coupled with the Carling Black Label spoofs such as the Nick Kamen shown here) did seem to unite our nation in mirth back then. Tony Hatch playing the Neighbours theme on his keyboard was an original spin on the “pundits sing the theme songs” so beloved of this series of programmes. His musical flourishes actually ensured that this particular song had never sounded better and to watch the man at his craft was a moment to cherish in itself. Any nostalgia once associated with the marriage of Scott and Charlene has been completely dissipated through continual repetition and so the decision to focus on this plotline at the expense of any other was rather disappointing. That Neighbours was initially cancelled and then picked up by another television company is a fact that is now almost completely forgotten and thus could have borne re-telling here (whatever happened to the “first” Scott Robinson, Darius Perkins?). Nice though to hear Peter Kay’s talk of Will o’ the Wisp and Monkey. Also, I swear Harold Bishop turned up in the pundits’ chair for a moment too, but contributed nothing more than a little sing-a-long. The highlight of this section though, was the opportunity to finally meet Michael Grade’s daughter. Her inclusion was a welcome doff of the hat to those who have long since understood her particular relationship with those Antipodean Neighbours.

A brief section on men’s duvet spreads brought back startlingly fresh memories of my friend Damon’s bedroom (which aside from the removal of a homemade “burner” from his wall is unchanged – duvet included – from those halcyon days) and then it was onto a piece of genuine nostalgia. When were Sigue Sigue Sputnik last mentioned on national telly? That their music was actually okay was one of the first revisions that we were forced to make to our collective memories. This section included some more fantastic pieces of archive footage (certainly unmatched in any of the preceding episodes) with a startled Anne Diamond attempting to glean some answers from a bunch of lads who – whilst sharing the same sofa – really did not share the same planet as the TV-am crew. Better still, and really priceless in fact, was the footage of one of Sputnik’s concerts descending into an out and out brawl between the band and the audience. This was unpleasant stuff yet neatly encapsulated all that was dangerous about these “miscreants”, in the process providing tonight’s fourth best moment.

The section on No Limits was something of a delight too, yet to my mind failed to tell the whole story. Ex-presenter Tony Baker looked as horrible today (resplendent in his West Ham top) as he did back then. The montage of the No Limits title sequence will have sent a frisson up the spine of many a viewer as, once again, I Love 1986 was unearthing long forgotten artefacts. Yet where was the odious Jonathan King? Perhaps the revisionist history of No Limits starts here. Still, considering the raison d’être of the programme had been to create a pop show presented by talent new to television, a reunion (or at least mention) of all of the No Limits presenters would not have gone amiss, nor would a repeat viewing of some of the audition footage. On the same night that E4 unearthed a young Davina McCall auditioning for a presenter’s slot on The Word, one would imagine that a cursory review through No Limits would chance across footage worthy of sending to Angus Deayton round about Christmas time. Here the pundits were in their element as each to a man trotted out basically the same joke: “Here we are in sunny Newquay which has a fascinating history. Now here’s Huey Lewis and the News.” Yet, this same formula has been recycled ever since to the joy of cheap and cheerful TV producers.

It was at about this point in the proceedings that it became apparent that within a decade generally recognised for its crassness, 1986 represented the absolute zenith of unsophistication. Our favourite films (Arnie blockbusters as covered in the previous week’s programme) were as devolved and unsophisticated as our taste in fashion (Essex girls) and – of course – music. Cutting Crew, Peter Cetera and Jennifer Rush all fell under scrutiny in another great section. That Su Pollard should be held up as the Power Ballad’s greatest supporter would seem indictment enough.

Yet again though, I Love 1986 chose to serve us up a gem of clip as we were able to enjoy once more Su’s rendition of I Am Woman. As easy as it is to laugh, watching the litany of Rushes and Europes storming our charts made for unsettling viewing as each of us had to face up to the fact that we had actually liked some of this stuff. For me it was never to be Jennifer Rush (who I still think sounds exactly like that woman who sang The Day We Went To Bangor), however – at the time – I believed Europe’s The Final Countdown to be a worthy song and the opening foray of an onslaught into the British charts of some real, subversive Heavy Metal. Alas, of course I was somewhat off kilter with this interpretation. Stick to the facts instead. As we sat through the (still) interminable Take My Breath Away I recalled that I had regaled many a school friend with the fact that at one time the charts had contained not one, nor two but three songs all called The Power of Love. This kind of recollection is exactly the stuff that these kinds of programmes were created to induce.

From herein it all got a little bitty with fleeting mentions of big spectacles (and my realisation that Timmy Mallet is in fact Harry Hill), the launch of The Sunday Sport, Prince Philip’s faux pas in the Far East and Freddie Starr eating hamsters. This was all too scatter gun for me as I Love 86 attempted to cover too many bases in too little time. Still it did contain my absolute favourite clip from the many served up this week (Paul Coia mid-interview proclaiming “Flip!” upon learning of the vast quantity of spectacles owned by Christopher Biggins). Still just as it seemed 1986 had been a year 20 minutes short of a 90-minute programme, the final section on Five Star (as fleeting, mercurial and sensationalised in their way as Sigue Sigue Sputnik) ensured we departed this week on a high note. One of this series greatest strengths has been to crystallise the speed in which truly big stars are able to form, shine and then blink almost completely away. Little has been seen or heard of Five Star since their supernova year. Archive footage of Anthea Turner traipsing round the Five Star mansions made for enjoyable but bizarre viewing. Surely they can’t have got that rich that quickly? Even more surprisingly, they all seem relatively well adjusted as a result of their experiences (although Stedman’s mid gender reassignment look is rather suspect, leaving him to resemble – as others have already identified – a podgy version of Stuart from Shipwrecked). Still the obvious highlight of this section and (for many) this episode has to be the unexpurgated repeat outing for the redoubtable Eliot Fletcher and his abusive telephone call on Going Live!. To my knowledge this often talked about clip has never been repeated in all its glory on national television, so to see it again here really was a delight which sent those who had seen it first time around hurtling back 15 years in time. It’s just a shame they chose not to show the next caller (“Did you hear what he just said?” asks an amazed girl “He said that you’re …” – or at least that’s how I remember it), or allow Sarah Greene the opportunity to regale us with her account within the eye of the storm. If it hadn’t been for that “Flip!”, this would have been my most treasured moment from a night of wonderful archive surprises.

So 1986 then. It was a year in which our popstars looked like superheroes, our favourite film stars were superheroes and we were all holding out for (any) hero. Can this programme get any better? Could this decade get any worse?

1985 – the year my voice broke. Well, not quite, but definitely the year I started to feel the first pangs of pre-pubescent lust, indulging in clandestine kisses with Louise Meadows under the oak tree in the village cricket green.

For me, 1985 was the year where playground politics began to transform into teenage tribalism and I sat struggling to reconcile these new-found feelings whilst pouring over my Panini sticker album collection and voraciously reading DC Comics and Choose Your Own Adventure books. It was also the year when the schoolchildren of my Buckinghamshire village took to the streets to Save Our School – the local secondary school, St. Tippings, from demolition as the ghastly fate of commuting to High Wycombe Grammar beckoned. It seemed a time to campaign for causes and for standing up to be counted, but more of that later.

I Love 1985 sees our Saturday evening nostalgia fest following its linear course, lending a sense of structure and cohesiveness to what would otherwise be unfocused stream of consciousness reminiscence, and it is indeed becoming possible to chart developing trends and stylistic preoccupations as the years have gone by. Whereas I Love 1984‘s piece on the rise and rise of Madonna Ciccione hinted at the growing emergence of “the marketing of the self”, initially I Love 1985 takes this to its logical extreme, seeming to be a roll call of emblems of ’80s chic and popularity, from Schwarzenegger to Springsteen. The section on the Artist Formerly Known As Prince ultimately did little to “unravel the puzzle” (as Mica Paris put it) of one of the most idiosyncratic figures in recent pop history, yet the segment on the evening’s hostess (a blend of archive footage and insights from the lady herself) established the maverick persona of Grace Jones with masterly economy. The combination of the air of sexual ambivalence and underlying menace and the exuberance of Grace’s vocals to some extent even overshadowed the songs themselves, though Slave to the Rhythm still sounds great. And as clips of her performances as a Zulu warrior woman in Conan the Destroyer and as murderous malcontent May Day in A View to a Kill (which despite a decrepit Roger Moore, was one of the better ’80s Bond films, but I digress) showed, it is better to remember Grace as an icon, not an actress.

The vision of Conan took us straight into the following section charting the humble beginnings of an iron-pumping Austrian and his ascendance to the status of cinematic icon. One can see now that despite the series’ reluctance to give such smash hits as Raiders of the Lost Ark andGhostbusters the nostalgia treatment, there is possibly some method present in this apparent madness. One of the most worthwhile aspects of I Love the Eighties has been its (unintentional?) documentation of the decline of the narrative-based Hollywood film (Greg Proops’ excellent dissection of Flashdance has been commented on elsewhere) where cohesive plotting and rounded characterisation was steadily displaced by a sequence of set pieces and an obsession with form over content. The action movie, as exemplified by the likes of Terminator and Commando, prioritised visceral thrills and capitalised on the photogenic potential of high-tech lethality, making Arnie the acceptable face of adolescent rabid kill-frenzy hardware and signalling the unfortunate descent of mainstream cinema into blockbuster infantilism. The popularity of Schwarzenegger (and Stallone) owed much to a period in cinema that embraced the hawkish, anti-Communist rhetoric of Reagan with a spate of aggressively nationalistic movies. A trend which reached its nadir with films such as Red Dawn, a queasy fusion of Cold War thriller and Brat Pack aesthetics as the Russian invasion of America is thwarted by a plucky band of teenage guerrillas and perhaps more controversially, Aliens, where the ruthless, single-minded predator of the original film is part of a race of gormless gooks to be systemically picked off by a bunch of wisecracking, reactionary bigots who contemplate nuking the entire planet from orbit: “It’s the only way to be sure.” Fortunately, features on Paul Hardcastle’s Nineteen and the Boss’ much-misinterpreted anthem Born in the USA were on hand to demonstrate that individuals were aware of this unsound ideology, and actively worked to critique this gung-ho mentality (“Spotty yoofs … oxycute ‘em!”)

Whilst I Love 1985 admirably evoked a time when the effects of globalisation were really starting, rightly or wrongly, to bite at British culture, it was gratifying to see the programme deviate from its mainly American-centric content and tackle some genuine British cultural artefacts. Like Miami Vice, Spitting Image was a programme I was not allowed to watch in its early years but I did so nonetheless. Viewed again nearly 16 years later, its propensity for political point-scoring now seems somewhat forcibly directed and more than a little naïve – if anything, the quietly savage depiction of the Windsor family as gambling, bone idle, common as muck ineffectual buffoons was rather more controversial and much funnier. Peter Kay made the excellent point that many viewers in fact cared little for the show’s politicised, polemical bite – a fact duly highlighted when the awesome Chicken Song, a satirical swipe at Black Lace, reached number one in the charts. It is intriguing to note that whereas the various examples of American film (Fame, First Blood) covered by I Love the Eighties have all adopted an overtly celebratory stance towards various aspects of its respective culture, the British film featured in I Love 1985 is, in stark contrast, a much more reactive, introspective work. My Beautiful Launderette is a wonderful movie, concise, cutting and compassionate in all the right places. Not content with taking the audience into the heart of London’s Asian community, the film takes in racism, the market economy and a gay love story. The launderette of the title becomes the symbol of the two lovers’ relationship and of their vulnerability when it is trashed by thugs, whilst the Asian businessmen of the film eagerly play Thatcher’s acquisitive, entrepreneurial game and are bewildered and angered by the prejudice still meted out towards them. East is East may be good for a few laughs, but it pales beside its brave and brilliant prototype.

So do you remember where you were on the 13 July 1985? I remember the thronging masses at Wembley Stadium – but I wasn’t there. It was late in 1984 that I first recall being struck by haunting images of emaciated Africans on my television screen as I glanced down guiltily at my toasted sandwich and the footage brings a lump to the throat even now. Months later, as the whole street tuned in for Live Aid, someone had the bright idea of organising a barbecue. An eminently impressive vignette, the section on Live Aid endearingly focused on the improvised feeling of the whole venture, the chaotic ineptitude of the broadcast links only adding to the exuberance of it all. When Katie Puckrik commented “When I was watching Live Aid, I felt like I was watching history in the making,” it was no hollow hyperbole. This was epic, epochal stuff – for the possibly the first time since 1981′s section on nuclear paranoia, I Love the Eighties had tackled something of genuine import and pulled it off with some considerable aplomb.

After a slightly wobbly variance in quality that has characterised the previous few programmes, the series may still be being edited just hours prior to transmission, yet I Love 1985 provides some reassurance that the producers are in charge of their material. In fact, the programme is easily the best instalment in the series since I Love 1981 (Adam Ant doesn’t possess half of Grace Jones’ dynamism and presence, so ’85 has the edge here – although not having Max Headroom as its presenter seemed a huge missed opportunity). As has been pointed out by other reviewers, the primary function of I Love the Eighties is to be evocative, not genuinely reflective or definitive.

And I Love 1985, more than any other edition in the series brought it all back to me – a fusion of fantasy and reality, where the flamboyant decadence of Prince contrasted with the horrors taking place in Ethiopia, where high concept pretensions mingled almost seamlessly with the down-to-earth basics of everyday life – MacDonalds, the megabucks corporation out to take over the world finally colonising our high street, men endeavouring to emulate Crockett and Tubbs’ tragic dress sense and pop stars uniting to save the world.

It was also the year that my father announced that we would have to relocate to Cheshire or he would be out of a job so I left behind my friends, my village and the lovely Louise – getting on the bus to High Wycombe wasn’t going to be a worry after all (but the SOS campaign failed and St. Tippings was demolished shortly after I moved away). In many ways, 1985 was the end of an era, the end of that authentic ’80s experience I recall with genuine fondness – the raised stakes, the heinous yuppie philosophy, the anodyne artificiality and close-minded false cheeriness of Neighbours and Stock, Aitken and Waterman was just around the corner. It wasn’t the end of my childhood of course, however 1986 would tell a completely different story. But perhaps that’s best left for someone else to tell…

What’s a TV producer to do? They put together a fairly harmless package of easy-going nostalgia for a Saturday night, and suddenly they’re accused of being part of a conspiracy, hellbent on undermining this country’s shared heritage.

Or, at least, The Sun’s awful Garry Bushell – fresh from accusing Channel 4′s Top Ten series of being a left-wing sneer at all forms of popular music – now devotes part of his column every week to criticising the choices for items on I Love the Eighties and complaining that they didn’t include items that “made” each particular year.

The question remains, of course, has this man realised what this series is supposed to be doing? Clearly not, given that he slagged off I Love 1983 for not featuring “the kidnapping of Shergar, the £1 coin, or the introduction of wheel-clamps”. Er … sorry Garry, but this series isn’t The Rock ‘n’ Roll Years, it’s a programme about pop culture nostalgia. So complaining, as he did, that the programme did a piece on nuclear paranoia, but not the Falklands War, is ludicrous – the former was mostly created by TV and film and, in hindsight, looks slightly comic; whereas the latter was a war, which doesn’t.

But this series has been accompanied by calls from all quarters (though not on this site, you note) that each programme fails to live up to their expectations. I suspect that we’ll see a lot more of this as we get nearer the present day, given that we’re entering an era of which much of the audience have strong memories. If, say, a viewer had been born in 1969, most of their memories of the ’70s are probably less year-specific; they were very young, it was a long time ago. Whereas in the ’80s, there’s more chance that specific years have a certain resonance – 1983, my first relationship, 1985, the year I left school, 1988, the year I started work. The viewer almost “owns” these years, and knows what they were doing. Not that you’ll get any of that from me just yet – I was five years old in 1984. Here are all my memories of this year – 1) Watching the film Animalympics on telly; 2) My dad building a dividing wall upstairs to make one bedroom into two; 3) Watching Battle of the Planets on telly; 4) Going on holiday to a caravan in Conwy; 5) Being woken up one morning during said holiday by an earthquake; 6) Oversleeping til 11am one morning during the summer holidays and moaning I’d missedTarzan. As suspected, none of these memories were considered for the programme (a shame, ‘cos I really loved Animalympics), so I was able to see what was going on in the real world instead.

And what’s great about this series is the selection of some non-obvious phenomena from each year. I’m not ashamed to say that I let out a whoop of delight when a clip of the Care Bears surfaced in the opening montage – now this really brought back some memories. I could remember watching the series on TV-am every Sunday morning, queuing up outside the Vogue cinema in Wrexham to see the film – please note I went with my sister – and nicking her Care Bears comics when I’d finished reading the Topper. A feature on Duran Duran could take you back not just to 1984, but that night a couple of years ago when you got out all your ’80s compilations, or the time a few months back you went to an irony-filled birthday party. But a feature on the Care Bears, or Transformers, takes you back to the mid-’80s and nowhere else. So do the names of Fighting Fantasy authors Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, which is like hearing from old friends again.

So it was nice to see the programme didn’t fall into the obvious traps when covering Frankie Goes to Hollywood and regurgitate the story of Relax – excluding Holly Johnson’s functional narration, the item must have lasted all of four minutes, and most of that was devoted to the “Frankie Say …” T-shirts, plus a marvelous anecdote from Paul Morley about how he’d let the Frankie management have the copyright on the design for £300, and then saw them shift thousands. And when they mentioned the banning of Relax, they wangled comments from people in the know – Radio 1 producer Dave Atkey and Mike Read himself (stating that he didn’t ban it himself, as he couldn’t make BBC policy), thus making this brief feature much more satisfying than Smash!‘s longer, but stunningly dull, item.

Mention of Paul Morley does, of course, bring me to the absolute highlight of the programme, the series, and perhaps even the whole genre of nostalgia television. I never thought that I’d be in hysterics over an item on Sade and the ’80s jazz-funk scene, but that was before I was aware of a superb slanging match between Morley and Robert Elms. So Elms used to share a squat with Sade, and according to him, most of that band’s influences (along with other exponents of the genre like Working Week and the Style Council) “came from my record collection”. Paul Morley summarised this brilliantly as “it was a great moment when the cover of The Face featured Robert Elms saying: ‘Have you heard of this new music called jazz?’”, and then told of when Elms dragged him to see Sade “because he’d singlehandedly discovered jazz”. Elms tried to get his own back later on by describing Morley-faves The Smiths as being “boring”, but Paul had won this battle fair and square. What was especially great was how snide references to Robert Elms had become real jokes, not just dull in-fighting. A comic triumph by the man Morley.

The other interesting thing about this series has been the odd “celebrities at play” factor. An analogy: much of the fun of Celebrity Stars in their Eyes (bear with me) comes from the way the celebrities are put in a situation where they have to react in a genuine way, and you get to see a side of them that doesn’t come out when they’re just reading an autocue or snappily edited. The same sort of thing applies here – alright, so maybe the views of Arabella Weir and Lisa Rogers are less relevant than those of Johnny Marr or the A-Team‘s Dwight Schulz, but most go about their job with real enthusiasm. Who’d have thought, for example, that Claudia Winkleman was a big Care Bears fan? Or Victoria Coren was an authority on video nasties? This isn’t a side of their personalities they get to show off on the midweek lottery, or in the Observer. Ditto Jayne Middlemiss getting all wistful over Tucker’s Luck - “Alan, he was a nice lad …”

And, of course, the regular nostalgia experts were on top form as well – Peter Kay scoring points with his memories of early video recorders (“My dad used to put a cushion over the clock when we went out, ‘cos burglars could see it flashing”), and Johnny Vegas and Stuart Maconie supplying memorable asides. Louis Theroux was also spot-on when he pointed out, regarding Relax, that “kids are very conservative, and they’d go ‘Oh, I don’t think they should be playing that on the radio’” – and he’s right. In school, I thought Lynne Faulkner was a bit of a rebel when she sung “Pick your nose and don’t chew it” over it. And for those who feel that the pundits overdo the cynicism, I ask – would you prefer Kay and Vegas’ look at the Care Bears, or “fan” Jenna Brewer humourlessly running through each bear and their totally unique characteristics? And the most cynical lookback at Nik Kershaw’s career came from, of all people, Nik Kershaw, who claimed that during his heyday he had no sense of humour, wrote meaningless songs and wore awful clothes. Spoilsport.

The series is still not perfect – proving again that it’s impossible to do a retrospective on Madonna without sounding like media studies A-level coursework (“Her look was unique”, and so endlessly on), and God only knows why the Torvill and Dean segment included the wretched Comic Relief “Torvill and Bean” sketch from over a decade later. But on the whole this remains effortless, amusing viewing, and still the best thing on Saturday nights.

But I’m still sick they didn’t mention Animalympics. I tell you, it was massive down our road…

Unlike other reviewers, I singularly failed to recall any significant memories from 1983. So it was with empty head that I sat down to be entertained by I Love 1983.

Hosted this week by Roland Rat, this was one of the poorer efforts of the series so far, with some interesting segments, but not nearly enough highs to make up for the overwhelming lows I experienced. Here was a programme too bitty, too generic … too padded. Cabbage Patch dolls, smoochy love songs, snogging, love bites, legwarmers and aerobics; the whole thing descended too often into unlovable trivia, with few redeeming qualities, and made for faintly depressing viewing. This feeling is of course compounded by the fact that various “spoiler” programmes (Sky’s TV Years and the BBC’s own Young Guns) had ploughed many of these furrows already; albeit often not to the same depth. But for me anyway, a lot of the clips tonight were overly familiar and too recently recycled. Nostalgia telly is fast turning into one great amorphous blob.

One of the strengths of the I Loves thus far has been the variety of interviewees. Tonight, David Hasselhof was clearly happy to reminisce at length about Knight Rider, and to regurgitate his own PR – after all “people need heroes”. However it was the comments of Glen A Larson (trash US TV supremo) that were the most interesting, as he revealed that plans to market replica KITTs were shelved after reports of one being used in an attempt to jump a train. From the “American James Bond” (Hasslehof again, now thankfully pursuing a pop career in Germany), we moved swiftly through Cabbage Patch dolls, to Flashdance; a film I’ve never seen, and would defy anyone to claim they’ve watched from start to finish. It was therefore with some bemusement that I witnessed a parade of “admiration” and fond remembrance for this acknowledged turkey. Although this segment of the programme was far too long, it was partly redeemed with the revelation that not only did Jennifer Beales have a dance double (fair enough), but that during the break dancing sequence, the double was a bloke. Am I to believe that in 1983 there were no women at all who could break dance? History was made here, however, with the first worthwhile contribution from Greg Proops (his summation and devastation of the film’s plot was superb).

A sequence on smoochy songs followed; being generally tasteless it was saved only by Stuart Maconie’s observations on Tony Hadley’s megaphone-style delivery of True. The whole thing developed into a really pointless section on snogging and lovebites, which apart from Wayne Hemingway’s naïveté (“do people use tongues in kissing?!”) was just distasteful.

The only real musical contribution to the programme was the section on Wham! (exclamation-mark required). Inevitably this felt lacking when compared to the Young Guns treatment on the same subject, and here it was overlong too. Upon establishing Wham! were middle-class, suburban and tanned, there seemed little else to say. Except that Wham! was “of its time” – thanks, Gary Crowley, for that one.

Moving on, and was The Sloane Ranger Handbook really important enough to be included? OK, so it was pertinent to its time, and a piss-take unwittingly embraced by those it ridiculed, but … who cares? This London-centric “phenomenon” was really of little relevance outside those limited parameters it documented. But He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, now here was a real phenomenon – with a far-reaching effect. Contributions from creators, voice-over artists (great to hear the nasal Skeletor again) and another look at those bizarre Tom Baker-voiced adverts (“Stinkor! He really stinks!”) really lent themselves to a worthwhile discussion on the exploitation of children’s programming for merchandising return. A given today, it all started here. Great stuff. Alas the segue into the Green Goddess and Mad Lizzie trotted out much aired footage of Diana Moran cajoling commuters into stretches, whilst Ken Livingstone bobbed up and down alongside Lizzie Webb. This little section, however, was almost redeemed by Moran’s comment in ’83 to all the “ladies” that it was time for them to make breakfast for the family.

Then it was break dancing. Again, this meant little to me personally however it proved to be quite an interesting segment. And it confirmed that – yes – there were actually female break dancers in ’83. It was at this stage that I expected Michelle Gayle’s presence to be justified by reference to her Grange Hill hip-hopping character Fiona Wilson, half of the programme’s Salt ‘n’ Peppa-esque rappas Fresh ‘n’ Fly (Ronnie Birtles making up the duo). Or perhaps we could be uncharitable and conclude that the production team of I Love 1983 erroneously had Gayle down as “Ro-land” Browning’s unwanted Jiminy Cricket, Janet St Clair. Surely not. Similarly, the section on Just Seventeen had little personal resonance for me; I was 15 in 1983, and as acknowledged in the programme, already outside the readership bracket for the magazine. But again, there was some interest therein, with agony aunt, Melanie McFadyean providing a candid and funny account of the Problem Page, reminding us all of how young girls defined themselves in ’83 – signed “a Kajagoogoo fan”.

After a bit of a sideswipe at Blockbusters (did everybody really hate it that much?) we had some predictable clips – “Can I have a P please Bob?”, and the “orgasm” – and it was swiftly onto Thriller, without even a mention of the hideous Lopi jumper we had just witnessed. So, a standard run through of the Michael Jackson epic brought proceedings to a close.

Overall this was a ropey effort, with few highlights and a lot of lows. Ultimately this all felt rather rushed, and very often by-numbers with little new or inspirational at best, and huge gaps and inaccuracies at worse. Where have they been getting their information from?

Before sitting down to watch this programme, I made a conscious effort to recall 1982 as best I could. What did 1982 mean to me? What could my faltering memory recollect?

Well, in this year I turned 18, finally left school and failed to enter university. I managed to find a summer job in a raspberry-canning factory in a town that made Royston Vasey look positively normal. I got my first proper hangover, joined the swelling army of Thatcher’s unemployed and won a poetry competition. Billy Downie discovered world communism and attempted to enroll us all in the Sighthill branch of his revolutionary freedom fighters. Ronnie Bowie lured me into following Partick Thistle on a regular basis, home and away (thank god for the UB40 gate – no stigmatisation there then) and Stephen N. introduced me to the joy of LSD. Rampant rumours of conscription struck as the Falklands “situation” evolved and, frankly, we swallowed the urban myth – or whatever they were called then – and proceeded to shit our pants for a few weeks. And, rather embarrassingly, I got myself into a situation in the common room when Lesley Greenhill sat on my lap. Splendidly good year, actually. Rounded off nicely at a New Year’s Eve party by dropping acid and deliberating for hours with fellow veg-heads as to which were the top three crisps of the day. Right then, 1982? Bring it on.

Well, what can I say? My first reaction was to spend the duration of the show spitting the dummy out of my metaphorical pram. This was, on one hand, a vibrant and occasionally fascinating piece of television, but on the other was a turgid pile of hastily put together, ill thought out bollocks. I appreciate that you can’t please all of the viewers all of the time but there definitely appears to be a massive gap between what I lived through and this programme. Deely boppers and BMX bikes? At least I can watch the rest of the ’80s series safe in the knowledge that ’82 has to be the nadir of the canon.

Confounding my expectations, however, I doff my cap to Messrs Vance, Travis and Read as our hosts for the evening. Unobtrusive and precise, their very status as “has-beens” somehow seemed utterly appropriate here, and enhanced the show. On the odd occasion they even lapsed into that cartoon buffoonery and mugging to camera, so behoven of the Radio 1 DJ in the early ’80s.

The opening intro, which neatly previewed our viewing delights, struck the first note of discord. Clearly, we were in for a fairly limited and blinkered view of 1982 though the use of the wonderful Fantastic Day by Haircut 100 softened my militant stance somewhat. First up, we had The Young Ones. Sneaking in at the tail end of the year (the first episode went out on 9 November), there is no denying its place in the pantheon of classic television. I loved it and fondly recall gathering together with my mates Ronnie and Steven, purchasing a case of Schlitz and watching it religiously. We loved it and immediately took it to our hearts. I was disappointed that no mention was made of the Comic Strip Presents (nor the birth of Channel 4 itself), the first of which, “5 Go Mad in Dorset”, was actually shown a week previously. That nitpicking aside, it was obvious that the procession of talking heads that provided a hagiography for the show clearly loved it. The clips were wonderfully judged and made me chuckle all over again. It was an utter delight to watch an appalled Lawrie McMenemy on Did You See …? rubbish the show – this from a man who advertised Kaliber! I was a tad disappointed that only Nigel Planer appeared, although I suppose that Mayall and Edmondson are sick to death of talking about it, but I would have loved to hear what Alexi Sayle and Christopher Ryan had to say on the matter. As for the assertion that The Young Ones was our generation’s Goons or Python - I don’t know. I can appreciate the view but I certainly don’t subscribe to it.

As we faded out from the anarchic comedy of The Young Ones, we heard the delightful strains of Come On Eileen by Dexy’s Midnight Runners & The Emerald Express. Given the time accorded to Bananarama and Imagination, I was massively disappointed that no time whatsoever was given to the big hit of the summer. You couldn’t move in discos in Glasgow for acolytes of mock-gypsy dancing wildly in the manner of Kevin Rowland, hands clasped behind their heads clad in dungarees and lumberjack shirts. Four weeks at number one, sandwiched, incidentally, between the two worst chart toppers of the year (Fame and Eye of the Tiger) this was the sound of a beautiful summer. Come On Eileen was that rare beast, a summer number one that captured not only the climate but the mood of the time. August was wonderful indeed.

Next up we had a piece on hair that, quite frankly, left me agog. Big hair in 1982? Do me a lemon. I’m sure that a variety of big haired acts from 1980 and ’81 were pissing themselves laughing at this. You just knew, with an ominous sense of clarity, that it would all end up with Flock of Seagulls jibes. This was a waste of space, full of factual inaccuracies and an insult to the viewer. Starting with the oft repeated, awful cliché that the ’80s “were the decade that taste forgot”, we were treated to a procession of talking heads droning on about “my hair”. As for the mullet piece, what were pictures of Hoddle and Waddle from the 1986/87 season doing in the show? Funny how I read an article recently in which Trevor Sorbie stated that he cut his first mullet in ’84. Why Limahl was singled out for the level of abuse he received, I don’t know. There were far worse hair disasters in 1982. Phil Oakey, John Taylor and David Sylvian – I’m looking at you.

As for the A Flock of Seagulls sequence – I was howling gales of laughter at this point. The Seagulls hairstyles were a deliberate ploy. One of the band (Ali Score?) was a hairdresser, and he used his “talents” to sculpt the groups’ hair accordingly. The band have never hid this fact and, subsequently, reveled in the scorn heaped on them. The wet look thing passed me by a little (Boots Country Born anyone?) but it was bizarre to listen to Gina Yashere bitch about the wet look whilst sporting a hairstyle that was – and there’s no other term for it – “wet look”. Soon we had Jayne Middlemiss (who had previously mauled Limahl and Nick Beggs) telling us she had “big, big hair – like Bonnie Tyler in a force 10 gale”. Cue a clip of Bonnie, not from 1982. It’s accepted that this series will venture outside the confines of the year in question, and yet the whole hair segment was utterly vacuous, and didn’t merit such an excursion.

Gathering speed on a downhill slide, we then moved on to Rambo. A variety of heads proceeded to pronounce forth on it but not a single one of them quoted the film’s title, “First Blood”. This fact alone spoke volumes, and clearly, Rambo was being talked of in its entirety, not just from “First Blood”. That said, the clip of the look-alikes from Wogan was worth sitting through the programme for. In a telling contrast, the producer of “First Blood” appeared as an eloquent and intelligent voice in this fairly brainless section, but I was saddened by his failure to mention the death of a stuntman during the filming, preferring to focus on Stallone cracking a few ribs.

Grasping, perhaps, for firmer ground, it was now time for a dissection of the career of Boy George. George was many things – immensely self confident, striking, a wonderful sense of self-promotion, above-average voice – but original he was most certainly was not (I’m sure Pete Burns would have laughed at this section if he was watching). This was a safe and predictable piece, with safe and predictable quotes from all concerned. The piece with Natalie Casey (ex ofHollyoaks who’d appeared with George on Saturday Superstore as a toddler and had famously asked to be taken to the toilet whilst Mike Read was interviewing him) was mildly entertaining but is that what the show was reduced to? A three-year old’s recollections? Given the later exploration of the fall of Musical Youth and the tragedies that befell them, why no mention of Mr O’Dowd’s fall and subsequent reclamation of something approaching stardom? Strange.

After worthless sections on deely boppers and BMXs my fears of a parallel universe 1982 were being confirmed and in Chez Borland bottle number three of wine was swiftly uncorked. Glugging down the Shiraz, I wept at the Breville sandwich-maker segment, trotting out the truism that the thing never quite succeeded in cutting the bread in half. But then Musical Youth saved the day (now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d have to write). This was, alongside theBlackstuff retrospective (of which more in a moment), the highlight of the show for me. Here was a wonderful insight into their lives at the time, beautifully balanced and hauntingly sad. The members who appeared were honest, earnest and eloquent individuals who spoke with wonderful candour of their time together. A beautiful little vignette, one that totally enthralled me.

As did the E.T. piece. Not quite as beautiful, but equally enthralling. Like so many others, I watched it on pirate (the quality was, surprisingly, excellent) and it was a capacity crowd in the living room that day. Unabashed, I will admit to crying at it. This was a classic film, and I fondly recalled the immense hype that came with it. I really can’t remember any other film approaching E.T. in terms of expectation and hyperbole, and the footage on I Love 1982, I thought, distilled this succinctly. Quite why they backed the segment with Buck Fizz’s anti-Thatcher rant, Land of Make Believe, I don’t know. Surely Renee & Renato’s Christmas number one Save Your Love would have given a better sense of schadenfreude? Great to hear Fat Larry’s Band again.

Just when we were almost back on track, up came the school uniform segment to derail us. Another generic theme that was irrelevant to 1982, kids have always bastardized their school uniforms, and this piece reeked of time-filling. There were a variety of other relevant subjects that we could have done with but this was appalling. Even the excellent Jim’ll Fix It clip failed to save it. What underlined the poverty of this piece was the fact that a number of those quoted would only have been six or seven-years old in 1982.

Mercifully, next up was Boys from the Blackstuff. Cleverer people than I have eulogised and waxed lyrical about Alan Bleasdale’s serial, but in my own humble way, I’d like to add to the praise. Here was magnificent television and upon its initial screening in ’82 I sat riveted, lapping up every single second of this drama. The ignominy of signing on was something I readily identified with, as was the hopelessness of being unemployed, the feeling of thinking, “will I ever work?” Boys from the Blackstuff was genius. Sheer, unadulterated genius. Bleasdale articulated my feelings, spoke from the soul for a generation and told our story. Under the Tories, we were nothing, non-people but Blackstuff let the nation know that we existed, that we had pride, that we wanted to work, that we weren’t the malingering, work-shy shower the Tories would have the world believe. This was potent, polemical and an inspiration. As far as TV drama goes, I don’t think anything will ever touch my soul the way Blackstuff did. And fittingly, I Love 1982 offered up a sombre, yet humorous tribute.

The section on Bananarama was a wonderful piece of revisionist pop history. It’s almost as if there’s a collective willing of the pop world to convince us all that the Nanas’ were actually pretty good. Hmm …

Next, Snooker. Any opportunity to glimpse the genius of Alex Higgins again is always welcomed. What truly staggered me about this slice of the show, was the identification of the semi-final match’s (against a so-young Jimmy White) closing frames as perhaps the greatest snooker ever screened. Forget the tearful histrionics from Alex, this semi was irrefutably magnificent and all power to the researcher who recognised this salient fact. If I had to distill the beauty and majesty of snooker into 15 minutes, then these final three frames would do just nicely. The haunting look on White’s face as he realises that one missed ball has let in an unstoppable Alex is a moment of monumental greatness.

“Monumental greatness”, of course, couldn’t be attributed to ra-ra skirts (and they would have gotten away with it, if hadn’t been for those pesky revisionists!), and likewise the lamentably forgettable Imagination. But, it’s the programme-makers’ prerogative to decide what they think constitutes the essence of a year, not me. Me, I get to snipe like an ill-tempered, spoilt brat from the safety of my armchair, and whine witheringly. On the whole this was a real pick and mix of a show. When it was good, it was very good but when it was bad, it was dire. I can’t really figure out the stream of consciousness that permeates the programme but I do, genuinely, admire the attempt to, in 90 minutes, reflect all that makes up a year. And yet, all things considered, they can have their BMX bikes, their Hubba-Bubba and their big hair. I’ll remember the Falklands, the demise of the Jam, Blade Runner and that incident, in the quiet of Allan Glen’s sixth form common room, involving the beautiful Lesley Greenhill.

The year 1981 will be remembered for some of the greatest and most visually striking pop music ever to have ascended to the highest peak of the charts. It was entirely appropriate that a key exponent of this – Adam Ant – should have fronted this show; like Marc Bolan a decade earlier, he was a teen idol from the unlikeliest origins, the leading subculture at the end of the previous decade (hippy for Bolan, punk for Adam).

The segment devoted to Antmania which headed up this show – a reflection of their 9 weeks in ’81 with the number one single and 10 weeks with the number one album – showed them to be more influential than some of us imagined. Dave Hill was spot on to point out that they were one of the first (possibly the first) band to build their success around their videos as much as their songs, at a time when the video medium was still very new. Although Adam’s time in the spotlight was brief, the Ants’ stress on image and contrivance was a key factor in forming what became known as the “designer decade”, and did much to further pop’s shift to become a high-concept multimedia project, away from its comparatively low-rent, utilitarian ’70s incarnation, where visual image and appearance counted for much less (compare Top of the Pops in 1984 with Pops in 1978, and see the effect of these changes). It was also noticeable just how good the Ants’ records still sound, 20 years later; the combination of proto-New Romantic poise and punk gang mentality and rhythmic intensity has survived two decades better than any of us could have imagined back then.

The rest of the pop coverage in this programme was uniformly excellent, like the music itself; Kim Wilde’s early singles still sound pretty good, and it’s a classic turn-of-decade pop trick; the image is very 1981 indeed but the actual sound of the records is thrusting, airy ’70s glam-rock (it was a masterstroke to have Mickie Most pointing this out, since most people seem to have forgotten that he produced Kim’s early singles, and that they were released on his ultra-’70s RAK label). A feature on the New Romantics not only evoked the scene’s image and aesthetic, but the introduction of a slightly bemused middle-aged presenter “explaining” the movement to his audience conveyed a real sense of how pop and youth culture used to be filtered through the adult, middle-class establishment, where now they are presented as though most of the audience will instantly recognise them (it’s significant that the broadcasting outlet which has done most to bring about this transition – Channel 4 – began the following year).

Various adverts and features (especially on executive toys) and records in the background like Landscape’s Einstein A Go-Go, Depeche Mode’s Just Can’t Get Enough and the Human League’s Love Action (I Believe In Love) confirmed our consensual memory of the early ’80s as a time of rather naïve interest in synthesizers, early computers, and the mystique of “new technology”, but thankfully viewed it with affection and respect. The section on Gregory’s Girl - fusing into clips of Altered Images’ magnificent Happy Birthday and I Could Be Happy – was a genuinely well-meant and affecting tribute to the film and to Clare Grogan herself. Even Shakin’ Stevens deserved acknowledgement, not only for his seven weeks out in front with two number one singles in ’81, but as a representative of the ’50s nostalgia boom that was arguably even bigger in 1981 than, say, ’60s nostalgia in 1995/96, kick started by Grease and Happy Days in the late ’70s, and given its low-rent, down-at-heel British equivalent in 1981 with Hi-De-Hi!(which remained unmentioned throughout this programme). Ekow Eshun nailed him good and proper as “mums’ music” (the songs This Ole House and Green Door may be 1950s hits, but they aren’t exactly rock’n'roll), but I felt slightly uneasy about the attitude taken – Stevens in 1981 was a symbol of populist, shared nostalgia being sold to a new generation, the very phenomenon to which this programme owes its existence; one might therefore argue that no contributor to I Love 1981 has any right to sneer at Shaky.

The segment on Dangermouse was probably the most entertaining part of the whole programme; David Jason “in character”, Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall themselves, and writer Brian Trueman, combined with clips from the series, showed just how intelligent, well-made and fantastic a programme it was, playing about with the clichés and conventions of virtually every genre extant like virtually no other cartoon series ever. Top marks for the research in the section on Bullseye (which correctly prefigured the titles of the programme with the ATV ident – shortly before ATV became Central) and the brief mass popularity of darts as a TV sport in the early ’80s. The segment really did make 1981 feel like a foreign country; the lumpen-proletarian working-class culture embodied by darts seems to have been largely superceded, as British life and culture generally have become more metropolitan and sophisticated, and it’s hard to imagine that world getting that amount of TV promotion today.

The scenes of the crowds in London on the day of Charles and Diana’s wedding were tantalisingly brief; I’d been vaguely hoping for people recalling how distant that week of hysterical national fervour now seems, and how it could more or less have been happening in a different country from the inner-city riots that were going on pretty much the same week. Nevertheless, the sections that bored me, those for which “you had to be there” (the tedious sex comedy movie Porky‘s, huge Valentine’s Day cards, smelling rubbers) were easily outnumbered by those which fascinated and intrigued me. A necessary corrective to the slightly rose-tinted nostalgia elsewhere was a superb sequence on nuclear paranoia. Only a pedant would object to the clips from Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Two Tribes video and the BBC film Threads, which both date from 1984, because the sequence chilled and terrified me, even all these years on, totally destroying any suspicions that the early ’80s were lovely, innocent times. Far from it; it was absolutely necessary for the series to acknowledge that the entire “1981 generation” lived in fear of a nuclear attack, that the desperate nerves and unease of the time had a huge psychological impact on the programme’s core audience, and that this still resonates and disturbs today; for a 20-year-old like me, it is a necessary corrective to 2001′s rather empty hedonism that, within my lifetime and less than 20 years ago, it genuinely did feel like we were all going to die. Superb.

Really, a thoroughly entertaining programme all round; the series has been improved considerably by the extended length (were it still an hour, I suspect that the nuclear section would have been excluded, and therefore the picture of the era would have been far narrower and far less representative). It seems to me that the series really has found its form, perhaps more than it ever did while the ’70s were the decade in hand – and it will be fascinating to see the pop-cultural aesthetic gradually evolving and moving on as we go through the 1980s. We can be thankful that I Love the Eighties has a long, long way still to travel.

Almost with indecent haste Saturday nights on BBC2 have resorted again to nostalgia. After the summer success of I Love the Seventies, it somehow feels appropriate that the altogether murkier ’80s are relived on cold, winter nights. Despite the seasonal change (and the increase to 90 minutes per episode) bedding in for a night of archive footage and talking heads felt rather familiar. In fact, rather too familiar thanks to Sky One’s spoiler series TV Years (focusing on a scatter-gun of years from the ’80s) which covered a lot of the same ground. One of the points of interest here, then, will be to see exactly where I Love the Eighties dovetails and where it diverts from TV Years.

The common denominator tonight between the BBC’s effort and Sky’s was The Common Denominator in TV punditing of course, Stuart Maconie (who’d narrated TV Years). And prompted by the mention of Maconie, perhaps at this stage we should address that hoariest of issues and rate the pundits. Patently the most missed talking head this time around was Peter Kay (although Louis Theroux is an adequate stand-in when it comes to singing the theme tunes). Emma B stated the bleeding obvious, whilst Jamie Theakston’s comedic riff on the theme from Fame (“I’m gonna learn how to fly – what sort of school is that?”) was pretty charmless, but thankfully grumpy old Phil Oakey was happy to take the opportunity to yet again slag off some of his contemporaries (on Sky One it was Boy George, this time OMD got his ire). All in all, however, the contributed commentary was pretty good, although it has to be said that asking in a perplexed fashion “I mean what was that about?!” is becoming a bit of a cliché.

So a faintly regal Larry Hagman presided over events with a rather bemused twinkle, introducing items he patently had no affinity for (Barbara Woodhouse, for one) – but that just added to the fun. As did the superb amount of detritus in the actual archive clips themselves. A snippet fromFame was introduced via a snatch of Mike Reid on Saturday Superstore segueing into the song, whilst much painful inter-DJ banter framed the pop clips. It’s really this sort of stuff that stirs the memories: Metal Mickey is certainly of its time but it does in some way transcend its years too, so that it doesn’t feel truly representative of 1980. An excited Tommy Boyd introducing the robot on Saturday Starship, however, positively aches of 1980.

Probably as a result of the extended running time, I Love 1980 only really varied from its precursor when it ambled into more general reminiscence of early-teen years, rather than nostalgia based around the year in question. Thus discussion of swimming classes in school and fairgrounds slightly smacked of an attempt at commonality between disparate parties (the sort of forced conversation you may have with strangers at a party before finally lapsing into a discussion about Bagpuss). That said, it kept things sufficiently buoyant and any lags at bay (which did affect the Christmas episode).

Bruno Martelli’s belief that the orchestra was to be made obsolescent by a keyboard chucking out fat sounds (as revealed in the Fame section) was returned to later in the programme with a section on synth music that really seemed to encapsulate 1980 for me. Serious-minded young men slavishly working away at looking ridiculous and producing clunky electronic music confirmed my memories of the early ’80s as absurd, but deadly earnest.

But actually, it’s this sort of glib summation that the programme itself commendably avoided. As with the ’70s series, this look-back was good humoured but not demeaning. I Love 1980had the feel of community, a shared, affectionate recollection of times gone by. And if Iain Lee does insist on sneering at the un-twisty turns at the climax of a Tales of the Unexpected then let him. It takes diff’rent strokes…