Electric Dreams Review: The 1980s Family Experiment

Episode 2 The 1980s

The Sullivan-Barnes family found the 70s a very spartan decade in terms of technology, but the 80s promise to be very different decade for these gadget lovers. Fashion wise as our first glimpse of them shows, things have certainly improved from the flare dominated 70s. What will their house look like though? Will it still have the more closed off and smaller living spaces of the previous decade or will it showcase a more spacious way of life? Well, first impressions are of a brighter and more spacious looking sitting room, although the flowery old fashioned look that was popular at the time is not to Adam or Hamish’s taste, the latter comparing it to a granny’s house! Adam loves the huge hi-fi and Steff is impressed with the sleeker television, although she mentions that she is looking forward to having more channels. Georgie has to tell her that the fourth channel doesn’t arrive until 1982 and that’s it for the decade! The parents bedroom is now dominated by a four poster bed that looks awful! On the plus side they have their own ‘futuristic’ phone. Steff and Ellie have the nightmare inducing Cabbage Patch dolls in their room, but on the plus side they have their own tape player. It’s a very feminine house, which is interesting because it reflects the increasing influence of women when it came to decoration. Was it because women were taking full time jobs alongside their partners and therefore looked for more say on how their shared finances were spent? Was it that they were seen as more adept at coordinating interior decoration? Was it due to the marketing power of brands like Laura Ashley? I think it’s elements of all three myself that moved us from functional to ‘pretty’ in the home. It’s very funny watching Hamish and Adam trying to mark their territory in this feminine house! Adam in particular is adamant (no pun intended) that the man of the house would not allow women or children to touch the hi fi centre! Georgie, Steff and Ellie send him out of the room in retaliation.

In the kitchen, the microwave that the Sullivan-Barnes family have delivered by the tech team was not very popular in the early 80s because there was a documentary that erroneously equated microwave energy with radioactive leakage. It was an early example of fake news and the sales took a long time to recover even when the fears were proven groundless. I’d forgotten how incredibly large and heavy the early microwaves were. The use of the technology to cook the meal turns out to be very time consuming and a family meal that started cooking at 7pm was not ready to eat until nearly 9pm. However, one time saving gadget was available in the lounge, a very early remote control which is huge by today’s standards.

The kids are initially perplexed by their handheld games which were, of course, incredibly basic in 1981, although at the time they looked cutting edge, but they soon start playing them in silence. Adam has his Walkman and, like I did when I was training to go into the RAF, was soon off pounding the streets to the accompaniment of music on his cassette tape. Even Jude, who was only two when this was made, was captivated by a Speak and Spell gadget. It may not have been advanced, but the new tech was already pointing the way towards a more atomised future within the family structure. Georgie has the only new gadget that could be seen as inclusive, a polaroid camera, but even that required her to separate herself from the family to record their experiences. I remember that steady disconnection myself as a teen as I went upstairs at every opportunity to play records or watch television.

A really interesting section was the interview with Simon Webb of the National Museum of Computing. He reflects on the firms that produced Jupiter Ace, Oric-1 and Dragon 32, brands that disappeared without trace while the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and the BBC backed Acorn succeeded. Apparently the deciding factor was the availability of software in an era when no two computers exhibited any compatibility whatsoever. Obviously, in the case of the Acorn, the government putting one in every school helped enormously. I remember that the Computer Club at our school was restricted to those that the teachers thought would benefit most, so that of course meant the maths high fliers. I never got to touch the Acorn at school and I was at work when I bought my own computer for the first time. What a difference from today’s classrooms when paper based tests and exercises are virtually unheard of, and screens distract almost everyone from the actual content of the lesson. The family end up choosing the BBC Computer, but Georgie is really worried about the effect it will have on the children. Hamish is determined that the computer should be in his room but he is outvoted because everyone needs to be able to use it. However, as Steff observes, the males in the household will end up dominating it. In this, if in nothing else, Adam and Hamish are very much 80s men!

It’s interesting, from today’s standpoint of specialist computer programmers, that the expectation was that all children and older computer users would learn to code for themselves. Hamish quickly gets used to the idea, but Ellie watching the TV being taken over by very basic graphics is less impressed. However, the girls are more excited when a synthesiser is delivered, and Adam and Georgie star struck when Ultravox keyboardists Chris Cross and Billy Currie arrive to demonstrate how to play it!

1984 was the year that VHS and Betamax battled to become the biggest format with the latter having 25% of the market as the aficionados proclaimed it the better format. However, VHS won out because of the the simple fact that more home video tapes and films were produced for that format. We were quite early adopters as I remember having a video recorder in our house in 1981. When the VHS player is delivered, so is a camcorder, which Hamish once again decides is his area of expertise. In fairness the music video he makes with his sisters is actually very well put together, from the concept to the execution. To test the VHS recorder, they need a VHS tape. It takes Adam over 2 hours to find a shop with a VHS stock, but when he gets back the tape recorder mysteriously fails to work. Ellie keeps quiet about the fact that she tried to put a Betamax tape into it!

The CD player arrives in 1985 for the Sullivan-Barnes family and in this case it seems to be Adam who is out of step in wanting to keep his vinyl. Recent years have proved him right, that’s for sure! The repaired VHS player is very much a family thing, but the computer is still a ‘boys toy’ much to the frustration of the female members of the household. 1987 saw the mainstream adoption of microwave meals as both parents working became a much more universal situation in the 80s. It was great to see Ceefax at the end of the decade, but I had forgotten the recipe page!

The issues with the hardware which the 1980s was plagued by made things incredibly difficult for earlier adopters. It is interesting how quickly the gender gap arrived with the men and women wanting different things from their technology and the tech replacing the role of DIY in some ways as the medium through which men demonstrated their ‘prowess’. Having watched this again, I find myself in agreement with Adam who admits that all the amazing technology of the 80s was frankly ‘a bit rubbish’!