Popular Nostalgia

Popular Nostalgia specific to the UK & (or) Ireland. These are either events which took place in the UK or Ireland, or those remembered by people who were in the UK or Ireland at the time…

Count Duckula was another cartoon that I grew up watching in the late 1980s and early 1990s – enjoy the episode above – I hadn’t remembered the intro was quite so long!
This was one of my favourites, probably because it was pretty dark and macabre.
Count Duckula was made for four series and there are 65 [...]

Do you remember the Luminous Spooks, a set of ‘glow-in-the-dark’ ghostly figures given away with Quaker Sugar Puffs breakfast cereal in the UK in 1965?
There were eight of them to collect and they could be mounted in a ‘Super 3-D Haunted Manor’ (as a comic advert put it) constructed from the cereal packet.
The Luminous [...]

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, [...]

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. We all [...]

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 music [...]

Airwolf ran from 1984 through 1987. The supersonic military helicopter with hidden weapons and stealth capabilities flew along the thin line of the Cold War standoff. Its test pilot, Stringfellow Hawke, was played by Jan-Michael Vincent.
When Airwolf is stolen by its twisted creator, Doctor Charles Henry Moffet, “the FIRM” asks Hawke to go to Libya [...]

Hands up who remembers the Really Wild show that used to be on BBC TV during (I think) the early 90s and possibly the late 80s too.
This show features Michaela Strachan, who was the first woman most young boys fancied, and Terry Nutkins, who certainly was  not her male counterpart in the fanciability respect, but [...]

Look at these old fashioned sweets online. Nipits were around after the war. Now their is an old classic. The choice of sweets is great and some great memories to be had. From kola cubes to buttered brazils.

This post was submitted by Glen Neilson.

Reboot was a Saturday morning cartoon in the mid-nineties, when the internet was still very new. It was based on internet features and was drawn in futuristic block-style 3D. The series used loads of words from computing to name the characters. The humanoid characters were “sprites” living in “Mainframe”. They faced a threat from the [...]

Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? was a Saturday morning cartoon series that was shown in the early nineties. It featured the adventures of Zack and Ivy, two teenage siblings who worked as ACME agents and, aided by the Chief, had to stop Carmen and her gang from stealing artifacts.
Most children of the nineties remember [...]

Tunnock\’s Teacakes have been around for goodness knows how long but both the TV adverts for them and actually eating one remind me strongly of childhood packed lunches and, as I ordinarily ate school dinner, school trips.
Slightly melted Tunnock\’s Teacakes would be consumed readily on the bus to Beamish, where we went at least once [...]

Mighty Max was an off-shoot of the Polly Pocket toy line and was aimed at boys. The plastic playsets are now worth a fortune to collectors as some of the pieces are so rare. The “Doom Heads” amongst other toys, sparked a trend for including a playset inside the head of a character.
An animated TV [...]

Crop tops were a fashion accessory of the early nineties and went hand in hand with lime green shirts, jelly shoes and shag bands. There was something on the news about a girl getting a kidney infection because her crop top didn’t keep her warm enough. Dads made comments about needing woolly jumpers and Julia [...]

Walking in the Air is the signature song from The Snowman an animated Christmas film about a boy who makes friends with a snowman. It is shown at Christmas time every year. It was sung by St. Paul’s Cathedral choirboy, Peter Auty for only £300. He was left out of the credits in a rush [...]

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 that’s [...]