Popular Nostalgia

As my name suggests, I was born in the early 80s, the things I write about will be late 80s onwards. Pretty much my earliest coherent memories are of Italia 90, which gives you some clues! I'm English. I'll update this profile bit some more soon!

I remember watching this thing when I was a child. I am not altogether sure that I enjoyed it, but TV was a pretty straightforward game back in 1991, you had your basic 4 channels in Britain, and only one of them showed children’s TV without adverts, so it was this or art attack. Come [...]

Henry’s Cat was frankly one of my favourite cartoons growing up because the story was just like my little life. Enjoy the intro video above – its taken from our all-new YouTube Channel, which you can discover for yourself right here: http://www.youtube.com/PopularNostalgia

Disney’s Adventures of the Gummi Bears to give it its full title (thanks Wikipedia) was one of my favourite cartoons growing up in the 1980s, and the video above doesn’t really show their main secret that well: Gummi-Berry Juice. When the Gummi Bears drank Gummi-Berry Juice, they could utilise their super-power, which was, rather oddly, [...]

Who remembers when children’s TV wasn’t a gateway drug for the next wannabe tv presenter? Who else, along with me, remembers those halcyon days when characters like Phil Schofield or Andi Peters would sit in The Broomcupboard with little for company other than a stuffed puppet? The Broomcupboard is yet another children’s television memory which [...]

This Queen album, with the title track “A Kind of Magic” came out in 1986 – the video above is Freddie Mercury and Queen playing “A Kind of Magic” live at Budapest in that very year. Queen were really rather good, weren’t they. This track reminds me of my 1980s childhood perhaps more than any [...]

The Muppets were the biggest sewn people for a decade or so in the 1980s and early 90s – and there isn’t a much more nostalgic show than “A Christmas Carol” when it comes to feeling christmassy, so it isn’t really that amazing that the “Muppet Christmas Carol” evokes in me all kinds of twinkly, [...]

This track, Coco Jamboo, came out in 1996 courtesy of the German reggae style outfit known as “Mr President” – this was an instant summer classic which spun us round and round the waltzers in the summer of ’96. Another treasured memory.

Saturday (or was it Sunday??) mornings never were the same once we lost the Orange Organics front-man Pugwall (Peter Unwin George Wall) and his epic series of the same name. In the UK, we used to watch these glorious moments of Aussie stardom on Channel 4. Pugwall was played by a chap called Jason Torrens. [...]

This song will probably place you in a certain period of your life, at the dawn of a new Millennium, when things like the “Bomfunk MCs” were just a new group of people who you hadn’t really heard of. The latter part is still true, but this track, “Freestyler” is one of those pieces of [...]

Strike a pose and dance like Madonna. Arms all over the place. You can now even go and dance to 80′s music in a modified nightclub aerobics class. Everyone’s done it and there are a thousand Youtube spin-offs of the complicated mime-style poses which make up the Vogue dance. The difference between Vogue and other [...]

This is a video of Wizzard performing the ultimate Christmas nostalgia track “I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day!” on Top of The Pops (another blast from the past since the BBC axed it a couple of years back!). If it was Christmas every day, we’d probably all be alcoholic, fat and skint, but [...]

Here’s some old school music that brings back a lot of memories for me. Back when rap music was in its infancy, not everything was about b*tches, hoes and shooting G’s, no, it was about having 5 on it. This is a belting classic, of that there is no doubt.

I remember Potsworth & Co. with fondness from my childhood, but a look back at the video shows that, compared to today’s cartoons, it was a pretty budget affair, which relied on good storylines. In the USA, it was called Midnight Patrol: Adventures in the Dream Zone – what a mouthful! Potsworth & Co. is [...]

Before Ben Elton made the hit musical We Will Rock You about a band called Queen, a band called Queen made the song We Will Rock You as one of their most popular track of many great tracks. With their ebulient frontman, Freddie Mercury, Queen really were a phenomenon for many years – bridging the [...]

I can’t believe we haven’t had The Raccoons featured in this Popular Nostalgia website, I mean it was Saturday morning gold when I were a wee laddie. BBC One mornings, before your mums and dads got out of bed were made all the more enjoyable/tolerable by The Raccons while we waited for Going Live to [...]