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Chapter 76 - Peter Powell Stunter Kite (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 77 - Petite Super International Typewriter (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 78 - Play Doh Monster Shop (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 79 - Pocketeers (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 80 - Racing Bike (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 81 - Rainbow Brite (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 82 - Raving Bonkers Fighting Robots (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 83 - Remus Play-Kits (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 84 - Ricochet Racers (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 85 - ROM the Space Knight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 86 - Rubik’s Cube (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 87 - Scalextric (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 88 - Scrabble (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 89 - Screwball Scramble (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 90 - Sea-Monkeys (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 91 - Shaker Maker (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 92 - Shrinky Dinks (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 93 - Silly Putty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 94 - Simon (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 95 - Sindy (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 96 - Six Million Dollar Man (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 97 - Slime (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 98 - Slinky (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 99 - Smoking Monkey (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 100 - Sonic Ear (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 101 - Sorry! (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 102 - Spacehopper (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 103 - Speak & Spell (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 104 - Spirograph (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 105 - Squirmles (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 106 - Star Bird (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 107 - Star Wars (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 108 - Stay Alive! (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 109 - Sticklebricks (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 110 - Stop Boris (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 111 - Strawberry Shortcake (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 112 - Stretch Armstrong (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 113 - Stylophone (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 114 - Subbuteo (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 115 - Swingball (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 116 - Tank Command (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 117 - Tasco Telescope (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 118 - TCR (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 119 - Terrahawks Action Zeroid (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 120 - Test Match (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 121 - Tin Can Alley (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 122 - Tiny Tears (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 123 - Tip-It (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 124 - Tomytronic 3D (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 125 - Tonka Trucks (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 126 - Top Trumps (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 127 - Transformers (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 128 - Trivial Pursuit (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 129 - Twister (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 130 - Up Periscope (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 131 - Vertibird (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 132 - View-Master (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 133 - Walkie-Talkies (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 134 - War of the Daleks (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 135 - Weebles (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 136 - Whimsies J (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 137 - Yahtzee (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 138 - Zoids (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 139 - ZX Spectrum (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements and thanks (#litres_trial_promo)
How to use this book (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Just what is TV Cream anyway? (#uac95fb91-3e4f-5a1a-b459-eb2fe1a1d3ee)
In short, it’s a website. You want it shorter? Try www.tv.cream.org then. Flung online in 1997 as a memorial to great TV, it has since snowballed into an online repository of all things retro from the past four decades–mucho ephemera, therefore, from comics to crisps, adverts to annuals, films to fashion. Oh, and toys, naturally.
Updated woefully infrequently considering the sheer number of people who work on it, the website does at least play host to a couple of regular ‘e-zines’ and occasional definitive lists of key pop culture touchstones (top TV themes, popular presenters, media movers and shakers).
Its slightly sarcastic, often sweary approach has won many admirers, most of whom have contributed to this book.
Introduction (#uac95fb91-3e4f-5a1a-b459-eb2fe1a1d3ee)
‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’
So wrote St Paul in his Letter to the Corinthians (Chapter 13, Verse 11). Wise words from a wise man. Or so you’d think, it being the New Testament and all It’s just that, when we came to put away our own childish things, we thought ‘Hang on, there’s a complete Matchbox Race And Chase in here, and a Big Trak with working transport. And there’s a first-edition My Little Pony. We could get quite a bit for that on eBay. Let’s not stick ’em up in the loft just yet, eh?’
(#ulink_50f21146-f0cc-5ced-a966-7ef098c9c7d4)
Back in 2004, TV Cream – the UK’s most popular and award-winning nostalgia website
(#ulink_35306491-6602-5233-ae7a-bebc67b1430c) – celebrated the top one hundred toys of yesteryear, from the tiniest 50p rubber novelty to the many bulky Bakelite candidates that vied for hallowed ‘main present’ status at birthdays and Christmases. Or rather, we celebrated those toys that were lusted after but never actually received because – time and again – parents would mistake their offspring’s fervour for overexcitement and ignore the repeated pleas, the letters to Santa or the tantrums.
You see, we used to want for things too. Before Amazon wish-lists, online ordering and ‘add to basket’ buttons, we relied on the catalogues: big, chunky, glossy bi-annual volumes with a dozen or so pages at the back brimming with toys, games, crafts and novelties. Special wishing books just for kids: Littlewoods, Kays, Grattan, Freemans, Marshall Ward, Great Universal, Argos. They were our Internet. That was where we learned to ‘browse’, circling toy after toy with red felt-tip, carefully planning imaginary shopping trips but never really believing we’d go on them.
Never forget, there are entire generations for whom giant stores like Hamleys and Toys ‘R’ Us were unimaginable fantasies on a par with space cars, food pills and robot butlers. The rear sections of the catalogues were a 2D vision of some incredible future where thousands of toys might be gathered in one place in a tableau of pastel colours. It was a hypnotic, limbo-state where girls were subtly encouraged to take up crafts and think about a life of domesticity, while boys were pointed towards combat toys and things that could be kicked.
Then, as we grew up, we also started to explore some of the other pages (and yes, thanks, the adolescent jokes about the underwear section have already been done – in 1996, by Frank Skinner, so let’s leave it there, eh?) Girls tended to graduate to jewellery and – for the poor are always with us – occasionally the clothes. As far as boys were concerned, however, it was usually the digital watches that were first to attract attention, followed shortly by the posh ‘scientific’ calculators. Nowadays, it’s all mobile phones, ringtones and 3G video clips.
(#ulink_60eaecdc-8b5e-5574-af10-e31f9d0e8eeb) But what is a mobile phone if not a portable toy for grown-ups?
Back in what we fondly call the Cream era,
(#ulink_9d6fbdc7-a4f5-5266-8d36-1986140438e4) the summer holidays were longer and hotter, sweets were cheaper and bigger, and toys were there to be played with – abused, battered… broken, even. They weren’t bought as an investment, to be squirreled away in storage for collectors and completists, or auctioned off thirty years later, ‘mint on card’, ‘brand new in box’ or ‘factory sealed’. The toys you’ll find in this book are the ones that had us wide-eyed with anticipation, tearing down the stairs at five in the morning on Christmas Day; the toys we hoped to find among a mountain of wrapped-up boxes; the toys we’d rip recklessly from the packaging and put straight to work.
What we’ve tried to do is capture at least some of that experience
(#ulink_62b65ace-d806-5f19-98dd-f359d98b65ed) but without being too earnest about it. They are only toys, after all. On the one hand, there’s the catalogues and, on the other, there’s cataloguing (in the most dry, joyless way imaginable). We hope the next couple of hundred pages will illuminate the difference. Along the way, there’ll be some mildly interesting trivia (did you know that the original Sooty was just a mass-produced Chad Valley bear puppet?), some weak observational jokes (such as: why is it that Monopoly is only made by one company?) and far too many references to Doctor Who. If that’s not your cup of tea, we’ll chuck in some tortuously extended metaphors, just for good measure.
Why? Because what we’re trying to do is reclaim our childhoods, like so much silt from the fens. Rising from the wetlands of that original online top one hundred, this book examines in detail the seven score or more toys we most yearned for as youngsters (plus a good couple of dozen others that get a mention in passing). These are the peerless playthings of a nation’s youth, the ones that encapsulate a time and place to which we can never return, no matter how many mini-desktop versions The Gadget Shop churns out. Neither a definitive history of the toy industry nor a stat-packed collector’s price guide, TV Cream Toys is the Christmas morning you should have had when you were young enough to appreciate it.
And that’s it really. All you need to know to use this book. So hold firm, St Paul, as it’s now time to unpack those childish things for one last circuit around the living room carpet.
1 (#ulink_ab0eb5f1-31b0-5e8d-adc3-a849350ca0e1) None of this is true. In fact, in common with much of this book, it’s an old stand-up routine we pinched (in this case, with permission, from the very lovely Richard Herring). We’re hoping that the quote from The Bible is out of copyright. Mind you, what the hell does ‘spake’ mean? We can’t find that on our Speak & Spell.
2 (#ulink_783855da-26d2-5689-8574-b768404c1b51) The award was Yahoo! Find Of The Year 2003 (they found us after six years, bless ’em). What’s with all this ‘we’ business? Well, we’ll come to that in a bit. In the mean time, get used to these footnotes; the book is riddled with them. They’re the paper equivalent of a director’s commentary.
3 (#ulink_04f50784-8315-5d8c-9b6a-fa1ed1cfe524) Gawd, how dated is that sentence going to look in two years’ time? Don’t get us wrong, we’re not trying to be curmudgeonly or wring our hands at ‘the youth of today’ (although, c’mon, they really don’t know they’re born, do they?). There are plenty of future classic toys and games for twenty-first-century children. They’ll just have to write their own nostalgia book, that’s all.
4 (#ulink_f57bd4f7-9ecb-580d-9770-f85d05f67489) Your own Cream era is the period in your life that created the most vivid and enjoyable memories, the ones that conjure an indescribable yummy feeling and that don’t need to be validated by Kate Thornton gurning away on some godawful TV talking heads compilation Alternatively it’s that year – any time from the ’60s to the ’90s – when you hit ten years old. Whichever definition suits you best… Watch out for 1977, though. That’s the year Star Wars (and a flood of merchandise spin-offs) changed the toy business forever.
5 (#ulink_0d6ceb17-904b-5228-91eb-708ca70c5c9c) This book is a collection of shared experiences. No single person can claim them. You can’t claim them. Steve Berry can’t claim them. Even TV Cream itself can’t claim them. They belong to us all. Just look at the list of contributors for one thing! The toy and game floor of TV Cream Towers is inhabited by a sort of gestalt creature. So, because we’re all in this together, this book has been written in the first person plural (or, as our Queen would prefer, the royal ‘we’).
The Toys (#uac95fb91-3e4f-5a1a-b459-eb2fe1a1d3ee)
‘A La Cart Kitchen’ (#ulink_25eb8cc0-8964-596e-8807-84e9181fd69f)
Training the housewives of tomorrow
This is how it begins–with a none-too-subtle reinforcement of gender stereotypes for the Daily Mail readers of the future. Many are the generations of little girls that were saddled with ‘minimum’ plastic ironing boards and carpet sweepers from an early age (all the better to brain your little brother with), and many the house that was cluttered with all the paraphernalia of pretend cleaning without any real cleaning actually getting done.
Reminding us once again that a woman’s place is in the home, this particular primary-coloured party-pooper was a complete kitchen set comprising oven, hob, sink and, erm, washing machine on a handy moveable cart–hence it’s ‘A La Cart’, geddit? Quite why the more predictable inclusion of a kitchen fridge was omitted is anyone’s guess.
(#ulink_f1e7a920-318a-58b4-963f-a330c252abda) However, the toy was successful in ingraining itself on the nation’s collective memory primarily because of an extremely enduring TV advert. Briefly, this featured a small girl who got up unfeasibly early in order to potter around for a few hours, knocking together bits of plastic in a brisk but pointless way and eventually arriving in the parental bedroom to feed her dad cold baked beans and arctic roll from a plastic saucepan (Wake up Daddy, breakfast’s ready!’). He at least had the unshaven grace to pretend to look happy–we can only imagine how a genuine parent might’ve reacted.
