Libert??, ??galit??, constern??

Here’s something short I wrote for Transdiffusion‘s YouTube channel to accompany an odd video.

Advertisements in the 1980s sometimes provoke a smile of nostalgia. And sometimes a thrill of horror. Did we really have our hair like that, eat that rubbish and think grey, white and red slanty stripes were all you needed in a wallpaper or book cover to look super-stylish?

And then there’s the French. Who knows more about style than the French? Nobody. But that comes with a failure to understand that some images can disturb. Now, *obviously* that is going to include Captain Birdseye dubbed – and badly overprinted – as Captain Iglo. But here we have a scratch card that wins you polystyrene bricks; customers who get violent if you don’t stock Babybel; cats with radioactive footprints; margarine being chronically misused; an actor in a white coat pointing at a VDU (“trust me! I wear a costume and point effectively!”); children failing to eat biscuits; and dyed canaries.

And then they bring out the naked dancing women-chips, who cheerfully dive into hot fat (don’t try this at home, kids) and then… go ice skating. Inexplicably.

Don’t have nightmares.

That was the 1980s that was

If you've ever wondered quite why us Generation Xers are so odd, here's the explanation: insanity-based, drug-induced, epilepsy-causing computer madness.

And that's just the very, very long loading sequences. When you eventually got to the programs themselves, often after two or three weeks of loading (estimated), the thing you had spent all that time waiting for was often a baby boomer's revenge for the end of the Summer Of Love like 'Manic Miner' here.

I'm surprised anyone born in the 1970s is able to hold down a job, to be honest.