“I swear that disappeared when I was a kid,” Justin said over a glass of the cold amber nectar. “And you’re how old?”
I take a sip from my own glass, its shape and logo branded by San Miguel. “Twenty-nine.”
“No way, mate.” Justin shook his head. “That stopped when I was about eight.”
This time was my time to shake my head. “I distinctly remember sitting there in the morning looking at it and waiting for it to go away so that I could watch the early morning TV. Like Playdays and the stuff.”
“Nah, nah, nah. That disappeared when I was a kid.”
I dug my heels in and adamantly glared back. “No way, I remember it.”
“No, you remember seeing a program about it. I remember putting 50p’s in the TV and seeing it.”
Di looked at her phone, “Ok Google,” she said. “When did the girl and with the clown disappear from the TV?” her phone bleeped at her. “It says here that it disappeared in 1997.”
“So I’m right,” I said exultantly.
Although, this memory caused a semi-heated debate that spread to other people, and several google searches later, I was still found to be right by the many wikipedia sources that all said that BBC went 24 hour in 1997. The Test Card disappeared in 1997. The main point of it all was that it gave me a lot to think about.
Although I am twenty-nine there is so much that has changed and going to University a decade later than I should have, has made it all the more apparent. Microsoft have even leaped on this with their advertisement for Windows 10, going on about the different things that the children of today will never have to do. Listening to that, I felt like I had to add a few more things.
Children of today will never have to listen to the dial up tone that I remember my Dad having to bear whilst waiting for the basic C++ software to handle the very first edition of Windows Explorer. They will never see 20 Benson and Hedges Gold selling at the paltry price of £1.80. Mobile phones that you could barely fit in your pocket. Not because it is the size of the Iphone 6. But because it was so thick and could barely handle calls or text and the most powerful game it could handle wasn’t The Simpsons Tapped Out but Snake.
The funny thing is, people complain about the size of phones today, however E-cigarettes are the same size as the phones of old (to no complaint by the user.) In addition, phones of today are rapidly getting bigger and bigger. Maybe we’ll see a retro revamp of the first mobile phone equipped with HD TV???
400 Words A Day 