What is it about the Irish that we seem to succumb far too quickly to every popular fad and gadget that is thrown our way, usually from across the Atlantic? In this feature journalist Ger Leddin tales a look at some of the consumer items that we simply had to have had during the past decades but are now either gathering dust in the attic or have been long thrown out and forgotten.
Perhaps it was the late entrance that Ireland had into the evil world of commercialism; let’s face it up to the seventies we were still dancing at the crossroads while watching black and white single channel TV as we milked the cows of an evening but we took to fads and silly inventions like no other nation and simply had to have certain stuff. Stuff is a technical term used by scientists and marketing people to describe things, let’s take a meander down memory lane.
1. The Tamagotchi
One of my children, now a noted academic, still carries the mental scars brought about by when I — like many other Irish parents got so sick and tired of this electronic pet devise and flung it into a glass of Coke one evening while on a weekend break to Manchester. By the way, the rest of the family cheered as the bloody thing gasped its last electronic beeb.
The Tamagotchi represented an alien egg which was deposited on Earth and needed constant care and developed differently as the minder nurtured it; thankfully now no longer a must-have toy and hopefully maturing in some landfill site somewhere.
2. Cabbage Patch Kids
I was lucky, I never had daughters, but those Irish parents who had will surely remember the hours spent queuing up in shops to buy these stupid things – they always seemed to be out of stock at least in Ireland where during the eighties stock-management never kept pace with demand.
The Cabbage Patch little monsters were, of course, American and were probably the most successful marketing ploy of the eighties and nineties. The funny thing is the dolls didn’t actually do anything — not like today’s all singing and dancing dolls. A version which had hidden rollers in the doll’s mouth allowing the doll to eat prepared plastic snacks was launched in 1996 but was swiftly recalled when the Consumer Product Safety Commission began to notice that some dolls were developing the nasty habit of trapping little girl’s hair and fingers. God, but it sounds like the script from a horror movie.
3. Four Colour Multiple Ink Pens
Yes, they haven’t gone away, they can still be purchased but thankfully they are used less and less these days. Back in the eighties and nineties every school going child and public service official seemed to depend on the things.
Ok, I can understand the attraction for school kids, I mean, after all, they need to draw graphs and diagrams. But why oh why did supposedly grown-up public servants need them? It was bad enough before the advent of the internet and online services, having to queue for everything from dog licences to motor tax but having to wait the extra fifteen minutes while the clerk behind the counter fiddled with her multi-coloured pen trying to get it to work, was the bane of many.
4. The Joy of Sex Book
The Joy of Sex Book was at the top of the New York best seller list in 1974 but as usual, took the long way round crossing the Atlantic to Ireland and didn’t really begin to impact on us innocents until the early eighties.
You must remember Ireland in those days was, how will I put it – a bit backward about coming forward and sex, if talked about at all was talked about only in the locker rooms, pubs and school bicycle sheds and only talked about with mates and never ever with one’s wife – we didn’t have partners back then; you were either married or celibate.
Anyway, the book describing — the filthy — things that couples got up to in the bedrooms was a great success, selling out in days, although funnily enough as no one ever admitted to buying “that filth” every Irish couple seemed to have read it.
5. The Crook Lock
The Crook Lock also known as the Krooklok was de rigueur during the eighties and into the nineties. In those pre-Celtic Tiger days if you could afford a car, chances were you couldn’t afford an expensive one which included a decent lock and anti-theft alarm.
I actually remember the days when if you lost your car keys, your neighbours or workmates ones would work, with a little bit of jiggling, on your car.
Of course, after the Celtic tiger sprinkled us with his magic money-making dust we all started buying or leasing if you were really rich, new and expensive motors that came complete with locks that worked.
But back in the early nineties we all had the crook lock tightly positioned from the footbrake to the faux leather covered steering wheel.
6. Go Faster Stripes
Like the Krooklok, Go Faster Stripes were purchased in car accessory shops — those also seem to have disappeared from the face of the Earth. But in my early driving days during the eighties, honestly, you were no one if you didn’t purchase what was called Go Faster Stripes and painstakingly apply them to your car.
Then, in fairness, not only did you look cool but I swear, you actually felt that your little Mini 850 or Ford Capri did actually go faster.
7. Avocado Coloured Bathrooms
Oh, my God, they had to be the sickest coloured bathroom suites ever plumbed into a bathroom but during the eighties, they were all the rage in Ireland and every house had to have one.
Personally, I blame the wives for this, and hearsay evidence suggests that many marriages came to the verge of collapse because the women in the relationship insisted on this obscene colour and “simply had to have it.”
Imagine coming home after a having a feed of drink and facing into a bloody avocado coloured bathroom. Anyway, luckily these fell out of fashion and again thanks to the Celtic Tiger we could afford to rip these obscenities out and replace them with the classic white.
8. Telephone Answering Machines
Telephone answering machines (TAMs) were all the rage in Ireland during the eighties and nineties — you simply had to have one. You see, mobile phones, which in those days were roughly the same size as a brick, didn’t become popular until the mid-nineties. I remember buying my first mobile phone in 1995 and almost needing a trolley to carry it around in.
Anyway, I digress; until the arrival of the mobile phone we all had and used a great big answering machine, sited beside our land-line phones.
Each time you came home, your first and instinctive action was to rewind the TAM tape and check your messages and many people needed counselling to deal with abandonment issues if a few days went by without anyone calling and leaving a message.
9. A Cassette Tape Recorder Just Beside a Radio
Ok, it was a flagrant disregard of the copyright laws but we all did it. It’s hard to imagine now in these days of streaming music and internet playlists such as Spotify, but back in the eighties, we had to work hard to capture the music that we liked.
To make a playlist what you had to do was keep your cassette tape recorder on a shelf close to your transistor radio and when a song you liked was playing, you would leap over the furniture yelling at your family to keep quiet and press record.
When you had filled up both sides of your thirty-minute tape, you could then play it back as you proudly walked around with your early-model cassette Walkman.
10. Platform Shoes and Flared Jeans (for men)
Probably due to the popularity of the 1977 movie Saturday Night Fever starring John Travolta as the coolest guy in New York but by God did platform shoes and flared trousers become all the rage in Ireland during the eighties.
Seriously you couldn’t go out for a few pints of a Saturday night and on to the local discothèque without risking life and limb by having some drunken “cool-dude” trip over his flares, fall off his stilts and land on you.
I suppose the only good thing to come out of the fad was that it cut down on drunken brawls in nightclubs: there was absolutely no way someone could start a fight while tottering around ten feet in the air.
Anyway, there you have it, ten of the absolute must-have items in Ireland during the eighties and nineties. It wasn’t all bad though and at least now we can look back and laugh at ourselves.
