There was one morning a week where nine-year-old me would willingly leap out of bed, and it certainly wasn't a school day. Saturday. Down the stairs while the rest of thew house slumbered, a bowl of Rice Krispies, the TV warming up with that faint electrical hum sets used to emit. You had a few hours, and then it was gone. Not paused. Gone, until the same slot rolled around the following weekend. Saturday morning TV was the one appointment a child never missed, largely because missing it … continue reading
Nostalgia
Looking back without the rose tint. Keith A Pearson on the people, places and tat of decades past: the raw material of his time-travel fiction.
The Sound of 1979
At eight years old, I didn't understand that the country had begun to shift under my feet. I only knew that Top of the Pops looked stranger than the year before. Blokes with white faces and no expression at all. Men in pork-pie hats moving like clockwork toys. And underneath the racket, tunes that lodged in your head like a stubborn splinter. People file 1979 under punk, and I understand why, but take a closer look, and you'll see the year in a different light. By 1979 the actual punk moment … continue reading
The TV Adverts Every 80s Child Can Still Recite
I cannot reliably remember where I left my keys an hour ago. I have stood in a supermarket aisle, blindly staring at a shelf with no memory of the items I mentally listed on the drive to said supermarket. Yet ask me what a small orange character sang to a passing crow in 1985, and I will deliver every word without pausing for thought. The information sits in there permanently, taking up the space where useful things should live, and it refuses to leave. This, I have decided, is the great … continue reading
What a Night Out Cost in 1992
In 1992, I turned twenty-one. I had a wage packet, a suit that I sincerely believed made me look like a man of the world, and the bulletproof confidence of a young man who believed he was a bona fide adult. I write books set in this era now, so I spend a fair amount of time rummaging through the receipts of the past. And the numbers, three decades on, make for interesting reading... or so I hope. So let me walk you through the economics of a Saturday night in 1992, when a tenner counted as … continue reading
The Roads Not Taken (and Why the Other One Probably Led to a Cul-de-Sac)
Everyone keeps a private museum of the lives they never lived. Mine has an entire wing devoted to the version of me who stayed in the property business, drives something German and expensive, and has never once known the specific thrill of arguing with a stranger on the internet about the correct use of a semicolon. He's doing fine, that other Keith. Somewhere in a parallel life, he's on his third pension review of the year, perhaps living in a different town or even a different country. … continue reading
Holidays Before easyJet (When a Fortnight in the Sun Meant Sleeping in a Tent)
There is a whole generation of British adults who genuinely believe a holiday has always meant tapping a phone, paying £34 to a Hungarian airline and standing in a queue at Luton at half four in the morning. They think the package holiday fell out of the sky fully formed, complete with a pre-dawn drink at Weatherspoons and a complimentary neck pillow. It did not. Somebody had to invent the idea of shipping pale office workers to the Mediterranean and feeding them chips, and the story of how they … continue reading
Why Nostalgia Makes the Past Feel Better Than It Really Deserves
Somewhere in a loft in Surrey sits a cardboard box, and inside it lives 1983. There's a Panini album three-quarters full, a copy of BMX Bandits on VHS, and the memory of a Saturday morning so perfect I could weep. Blue sky. Space Invaders. A cold can of Quatro. My whole childhood, apparently, played out to the soundtrack of birdsong and the Grange Hill theme tune. None of it happened like that. I know this because I also grew up on a council estate where the streets were lined with piles of … continue reading
The 1990s Gadgets We Thought Would Change the World
Every decade reckons it has glimpsed the future. The nineties reckoned it harder than most, and did so while wearing a fleece and a pair of Global Hypercolour trousers that turned a damp shade of purple whenever you sat down. We queued outside Dixons. We circled things in the Argos catalogue with the little blue pen, quietly working out whether we could ever afford any of it. And we believed, with the fervour of a man who has just discovered oven chips, that we stood on the very edge of a new … continue reading
Second Chances: Do People Really Turn Things Around
I have built most of a career on a single, faintly ridiculous premise: what if you could go back and do it all again, only properly this time? My characters are forever being handed a fresh crack at life. It sells rather well. The trouble is, miracles rarely happen in real life, so we muddle along with what we have. So I wanted to know whether the thing I keep writing about actually happens. Do real people, with no supernatural assistance and no time portal in a suburban hallway, genuinely … continue reading
Sweets and Crisps the 80s Quietly Killed Off
There's a very specific flavour of grief reserved for snacks. Not the loud, public sort, but the quiet kind that ambushes you in a corner shop four decades after the fact. Your hand drifts towards the confectionery shelf for something it remembers, something that left the building before your voice broke, and the hand comes back empty. The sweet has gone. It left quietly and nobody held a service. I grew up on a council estate in Farnham in the seventies and eighties, where pocket money … continue reading
A Week of 1988 Telly (All Four Channels of It)
I left school in the summer of 1988 with a handful of GCSEs and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the TV listings, only one of which has earned me a penny since. Telly mattered in 1988 in a way it simply can't now, because Britain had precisely four channels and no means of pausing any of them. You watched a programme when it went out, or you waited for the repeat, sometime around 1994. So pour a coffee and let me walk you through the viewing week as it actually looked: the teatime soap … continue reading
The Toys Every 1980s Kid Begged For at Christmas
Every November, roughly when the tinsel appeared in Woolworths, an entire generation of British children launched a campaign of psychological warfare against their parents. One objective. The toy. Not a toy; the toy. The one the telly had promised would transform our small lives, and which, in a sobering number of cases, would sit broken or abandoned by teatime on Boxing Day. I speak as a veteran of this front line. My childhood Christmases ran on a Provident doorstep loan, paid off in weekly … continue reading