LIVE Aid, Comic Relief, Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, Wham!, Dallas, Dynasty and Torvill and Dean?

While favourite rock band posters adorned most teenagers bedrooms, nearly everyone who owned a television owned a wooden television stand and wooden shelves were all the rage.
Wooden bookcases hoarded all manner of items and cluttered fruit bowls remained a centrepiece. Hi-fi centres and video recorders were everywhere while DVDs and MP3 players were unheard of gadgets of the future.

If the 1970s were sometimes known as the decade that style forgot, for many the 1980s was arguably summed up as the decade that missed out on style considering the bulk of interior décor ranged from black ash furniture to avocado bathroom suites and haphazardly striped bed linen.

Homeowners may have found themselves in the throes of some designer disasters only to be relieved by the introduction of flat pack furniture in innovative designs which came along in the late Eighties.

Savvy home stylists were soon created and stone effect fireplaces soon to be considered history along with borders and dado rails.

1987 saw the opening of the first IKEA store — in Warrington, Cheshire — bringing the innovative Swedish flat-pack furniture brand to the attention of savvy home stylers.

And Athena transformed the walls of thousands of homes with quirky images that stand the test of time.

The main look:

Black ash coffee tables and bookcases teamed with wood and chrome hi-fi centres.

Stone effect inglenook fireplaces ... with shelving for that innovation, the video recorder.

Wallpaper design included the use of dado rails and borders.
Bathroom suites went through a colourful phase — from deep burgundy to bright pink.

The hard, industrial look became popular with designers, who fashioned unusual furniture from the most surprising materials.
Many were inspired by the Mad Max films showing life after nuclear war.




THE Eighties was the decade, for the baby boomers, when life got a whole lot more complicated.

The strain of raising a young family, the pressures of trying to make it in Thatcher’s world, the challenge of new technology, the Poll Tax, miners’ strike, the Falklands, filofaxes and the rise of the Yuppie. Fun in the Eighties? We didn’t have the time.

It was the decade when you had to move to a bigger house, buy a better car, take more holidays abroad. To achieve the materialistic high ground, people worked longer hours, took second jobs... and piled up credit card debts as they were swept up by the boom and bust mentality which led to the Black Monday stockmarket crash
of 1987.

It was the decade when Charles and Diana, briefly, captured hearts and minds; breakfast television came into our lives and the £1 note vanished forever.

The decade started with the despair of John Lennon’s death — any hopes we Beatles fans had harboured for a reunion one day were instantly, cruelly dashed by crazed gunman Mark Chapman.
The country needed something uplifting and it followed in 1981 with the wedding of Charles and Diana.

A technological revolution was on the way and in 1982 we made our contribution, buying a ZX Spectrum games computer for
the children.

They were primitive by comparison to today’s all-dancing, all-singing products and it is sobering to think about how far we have come in 25 years. Remember it was 1983 when the first trials of a computer disc began.

It was these early computer geeks who were attracted to another gaming phenomenon of the Eighties — Dungeons & Dragons. To bring a little balance into childhood, it was also the decade of the Cabbage Patch Doll.

Although the Eighties did pass by in something of a blur — a case of running flat out to stay exactly where we were — it was an important decade of change.

The Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall came down, Sky dishes began to bristle from the rooftops and pop stars united against poverty
in Africa.

Oh, there was one craze that arrived on these shores in the Eighties and is still with us. We must remember to thank the Japanese for karaoke.











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