EVERY decade has its crazes, but the 1980s featured some particularly strange ones. Take a trip down memory lane to a weird time when adults wore deely boppers.
Neon socks
As a kid in the 80s you HAD to have neon socks, but you never knew why. It certainly wasn’t to look good, because paired with a school uniform, a bad haircut and spots, you just looked like an even bigger twat.
Masquerade (The hunt for the golden hare)
A book of paintings containing clues about the location of a valuable gold hare buried somewhere in Britain. The puzzles were insanely arbitrary and therefore (A) not fun, and (B) impossible. Someone finally claimed the prize, but the real winner was artist Kit Williams, who sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his confusing book.
Who shot JR?
This was massive, with people regularly saying ‘Who shot JR?’ and buying t-shirts asking the same. In the end it turned out to be a character no one remembers, Kristin Shepard, but worse insults were on the way for Dallas viewers when a whole season was all just a dream.
Rubik’s Cubes
An odd thing stands out about these little cubes of frustration – unlike, say, computer games, they are incredibly unenjoyable. To add to the annoyance, there was always some anal retentive kid on TV who could solve one in seconds.
Uri Geller and spoon bending
This magician fascinated Britain in the 80s, appearing on live TV promising to teach the nation spoon bending and how to restart a broken watch. It seems no one asked: ‘Is this bollocks or are we all powerful psychic wizards?’
