9 fashions from the 90s that are due a major comeback

I am not the most fashionable person in the world. Unlike women on TV, I have four pairs of shoes. Yesterday I went out wearing my boyfreind’s tracksuit (although I was only going to Games Workshop, so…)

The point is that I am perhaps not suitably qualified to judge fashion. However, I am qualified to petition for the return of a time where everyone looked shit, so it didn’t matter.

I understand that 90s fashion is making a modest comeback. This is news to me, because the things that are apparently just back in fashion I never stopped wearing. Apparently, things like scrunchies and dungarees were out of fashion for a long time, and are only recently allowed again. I wish someone had told me.

Anyway, here are nine fashion and beauty items from my younger years that we could maybe work with these days. We might have to make some of them work by only wearing them to a room full of blind people, but that’s a minor detail.

1. Bermuda shorts

To be proper and authentic, the Bermuda shorts have to be A) neon/floral neon/polka dot neon, B) worn with a T-shirt featuring a dopey looking dog and the slogan ‘don’t worry, be happy’, and C) worn on holiday to Butlins in 1990.

2. Curtains

Worn by a very specific type of ladies’ man in the 90s, particularly those ladies’ men who were teenage boys without girlfriends. Inspired by greasefest-cum-testosterone-factory 90s boy bands such as Backstreet Boys, the centre parted hairstyle was every guy’s ticket to lady bits heaven. The only flaw in this theory was that the hairstyle was crap.

3. Hair mascara

Not allowed/too chicken to dye your hair? The crap-in-a-packet ‘Shaders’ and ‘Toners’ from Wella not working, on account of how they’re just food colouring in a bag? Never fear, the answer is here! Or so we thought, before we actually tried hair mascara. According to the blurb, hair mascara was supposed to give you this look –

In reality, you got this look –

Yes, it changed the colour of your hair slightly, but the trade off was that you ended up with three big greasy strands of hair, and nothing else. We should have known – after all, cheap eyelash mascara leaves women with about three massive eyelashes, so we really shouldn’t have been surprised to find this stuff was just coloured glue.

4. Global Hypercolour

You know what I miss? Having clothes that let everyone around me know when I’m sweating. Or having clothes that let everyone know some guy’s just been feeling me up. Or worse, that I’ve been feeling myself up.

5. Velvet Paddington hats

I did genuinely love these when I was younger. Inspired by Michael Bond’s famous marmalade eating bear, Paddington hats were the perfect mix of glamour and understated tatty cool. It was a 90s girl’s way of saying “yeah I know this hat looks good, but I don’t really care that much, I’m too busy thinking about poetry and stuff”.

These days I probably couldn’t get away with one of these hats; they’d probably just make me look like an exceedingly camp pig farmer.

6. Sweater Shop

The Sweater Shop is still going, which is news to me. Back in the day, they were inexplicably the height of fashion. Teenagers everywhere would flock to buy their overpriced jumpers that looked like they’d been knitted by some old woman who could only knit while listening to Val Doonican. These jumpers were the calling card of every child bully and ‘popular’ girl in my school. I guess the equivalent now would be wearing a beige car coat and a blue rinse, but apparently that never caught on.

7. Mood rings

In the 90s we used to rely on these cheap novelties to tell us what our mood was, because we were too stupid to figure that out for ourselves. As far as we were concerned, these rings were some kind of magic, and would give us insights into our personalities and our secret wants and needs that we never could have gained otherwise.

Do you have trouble recognising when you’re feeling “calm” or “average”? If so, give me your money, because you obviously can’t be trusted not to spend it on tat like this.

8. Shell suits

A classic for a reason, although I’m not entirely sure what that reason is. Shell suits were the ultra stylish, ultra neon, ultra flammable staple of my formative years. They were practical too – they kept you warm in summer and cool in winter. Also, they were useful for keeping those pesky relationships away – partly because no one would be able to stop laughing long enough to go out with you, and partly because rubbing up against a shell-suited love interest would cause a static inferno of apocalyptic proportions.

9. Sun Moon Stars stuff

This was the 90s version of the free love movement – except that instead of sex and drugs, 90s pioneers chose to drape their settees with a load of cloth featuring creepy, anthropomorphic gas balls. The people who loved Sun Moon Stars stuff were the same people who bought mood rings, I’m sure of it. Relaxing, mind-altering, hippyish décor that left the owner with a sense of cosmic wellbeing, at least according to their mood rings.

4 bizarre Jeremy Kyle guests

Like most people, I enjoy making fun of people I consider beneath me. And here in the UK, smug, overly confident people like me get most of our kicks by observing those specimens found on The Jeremy Kyle Show.  Just lost your job? Renew your confidence by watching Jeremy Kyle shout at someone who has failed to ever keep a job for longer than a week, despite having six kids. Feeling guilty because you started drinking a bit too early in the day? Never fear - Jez is on hand to provide people who drink and shoot up before BBC Breakfast starts. Worried about that harmless crush you have on a work colleague? Simply watch Jez’s couples-at-war arguing over just how many dozens of girls the boyfriend slept with while the girlfriend was nine months pregnant/working a 12 hour shift down the coal mine.

Do you feel better about your life yet? No? Well you soon will, after you accompany me on a sightseeing tour of the very best Britain has to offer. This post may be unsuitable for work/life, defending on your stomach acid levels.

1. The 62 year old stripper

I am not here to make fun of the elderly. God knows I feel like they do most of the time – aching limbs and loss of looks. For this reason it annoys me that Jeremy Kyle should be so personally affronted when an older woman comes on his show and talks about how she’s now having the time of her life. Admittedly, she doesn’t have the best haircut in the world. No matter, because she’s out there living the dream – having it off with ten guys a week and partying it up ‘til the cows come home. That daughter is just jealous because she has a face like a stapler.

In all seriousness, I do believe this woman isn’t really doing anything wrong. If she was having sex with guys purely for her rent money I’d feel differently. But she just wants what any of us want – attention and affection. If she’s happy, let her carry on; all the daughter appears to be worried about it how this will look to the neighbours. Let me tell you – if my 64 year old Dad suddenly became the village slag, casting women aside willy-nilly, I’d be delighted and happy for him. It would certainly be better than him fawning over the Sky News weathergirl.

2. The strangest man in Britain

This is unusual because poshos don’t normally grace the screens of Jeremy Kyle. But this guy is hilarious. You’d think that with all his public school and correct knife and fork breeding that he’d be able to form a cohesive argument with which to slay the Kyle. Not so. All he can do is call him “Mr smart alex”, which is wrong even by Jeremy Kyle standards*.

Lord Dickwad continues to befoul himself by stating that he’d never reasonably have sex with the woman in question (who is relatively decent looking and nice, even though she harassed him for the “last past year”), and by smiling at wholly inappropriate times, and by just generally being an arse.

He also indirectly threatens the bouncers with a lawsuit if they attack him. This would never happen on Jerry Springer – they’d just get off with the security. Our country is so bad.

“Oh, oh yeah I do care about them exactly I do”

I’m starting to think he’s not posh, he just has a cold.

I will stick up for Jez this one time – he takes any insults thrown at him with admirable nonchalance, not bending once to this weird, semi-toff boy’s demands for attention. In this episode, he almost, almost comes out looking as good as Jerry Springer.

3. The petrol station? (starring Albert Steptoe and some guy who looks like some guy I used to know from Worksop)

This might just be me, but I’m disturbed by Albert Steptoe sat there arguing with my ex-boyfriend’s unwelcome houseguest lookalike from five years ago. Also, there is the matter of the teeth in the later parts of the video. I swear, I am one of the least vain women in the world, but even I draw the line at having a coal hole for a mouth.

Albert Steptoe also has the power to entice two men into her bed. This means she is a more alluring woman than me, who has never been able to lure two men into her bed at once. She does lose points though, on account of at least one of the men looking like a tramp's arse.

Albert Steptoe apparently had sex with two guys at once behind a petrol station. I’ll just let that image sink in for a minute. I don’t know, you might want to go to bed with a box of tissues and think about that image in more detail.

We eventually come to learn that Albert Steptoe and her shovel-faced boyfriend hate each other, and are probably only together because their names were picked in some kind of weird breeding lottery. But surprise surprise – they stay together, because the thought of having to buy new pants and make an effort to impress a potential new partner is evidently too much hassle.

4. Skeletor

Some people have to take things too far. This guy could have just dyed his hair green or something, if he wanted to make a statement. Instead he decides to get Skeletor’s face tattooed onto his face. This, unsurprisingly, pisses off his girlfriend and upsets Jeremy Kyle, who decides that this is a personal insult to him, for some reason.

‘Mad Dog Dion’ can’t see what all the fuss is about. As far as he’s concerned, it’s a rocking look that only looks a bit shit because it “isn’t finished yet”. As far as his girlfriend and kids are concerned, he is Satan in the body of a chav.  His kids are frightened of him, and his girlfriend suddenly prefers to not do sexing while she’s facing him.

I’m not sure what the girlfriend is hoping to achieve by bringing ‘Mad Dog Dion’ on the show. Is she hoping to make him go back in time and not get a permanent tattoo on his face? I think she’s secretly hoping to trade her drawn-on boyfriend for Jeremy Kyle. Kyle, however, is only interested in looking at himself in a mirror, and occasionally shouting at people for “smoking cannabis” (probably), even though the story is about tattoos.

*The correct term is "Smart Alec" and is thought to originally refer to a gangster/pimp in the 1800s. Maybe the guy was just trying to use the plural, I don’t know. Probably not.

Bros annual 1989 - they owe you nothing (except your £3.95 back)

The other day I showed you guys a load of crap I bought from the car boot sale. Included in that pile of crap was the 1989 Bros annual. For those of you who have never heard of Bros, they were a short lived boy band active in the late 80s/early 90s. Famous for containing twins and next to no talent, Bros soared to somewhere in the charts a few times, released an annual, and then everyone just sort of forgot about them.

Not me though. When I was little my older sister had a massive poster of Bros in her bedroom, which is how those peroxided faces came to be etched on my young memory. Imagine my joy when I found a further chance to possess not only photographs of these goons, but quizzes, quotes and so much more, and all for just 50p! Money well spent say I.

I am not a selfish person, so I'm going to share this wondrous find with you. Prepare to feast your eyes on the joys of Matt 'n' Luke Goss, and the other one, who was probably called Roger.

First up we have the inside cover, which helpfully reminds you of the band's name, just in case you forgot which book you were reading and kept expecting Winston to meet Julia, or Humbert Humbert to meet Charlotte Haze's daughter -

Next up we have the obligatory 'Letters From...' section. Although there seems to have been a printing error - this page reads - "Letters from Bros Bros Bros Bros Bros Bros Bros Bros Bros". I don't know if those are autographs, or if a child has scribbled on the pages

After a few pages of filler, including 'posters' of questionable quality and a 'story so far' mini biography, we come to this oddity -

Yes, you too can learn to cook Goss, Goss and Roger's favourite meals! These include chilli (fine), some disgusting sounding tuna thing (not fine), and the mysteriously named 'London Pie' (may contain actual bits of London). I'm not sure this was exactly what Bros' manager had in mind when he first came up with the idea for a super cash money spin-off book for the tween Christmas market. But, since he probably ran out of everything else, including dodgy photo fillers, the boys trying to pass off pages from some cook book he found in a charity shop as their own would have to do. Hey, they're all girls, girls love cooking, it'll be fine.

Next up we have a 'maze'. Spot the deliberate mistake in this picture -

If you said "that's not a maze, that's just stupid. That's just a bit of the London A-Z they've torn out and edited a bit" - congratulations!

After some more dodgy photo filler, like this charming example, in which the boys are singing about the dangers of amputating your own hands -

- we come to the 'fashion' section, which contains not one, not two but three crotch shots, and a lovely jacket featuring the name 'Bat Man' -

Next up - Jokes! 

I do love a good joke, even if I didn't pay good money for a Bros annual only for it to contain knock knock jokes that have fuck all to do with Bros. But never mind, I'll stick with it, I'm sure the jokes are good, I... wait, what?

If anyone knows how that joke is supposed to work, or why the hell there are question marks at the end, please let me know. It gives me nightmares.

After all the hilarity we move on to the 'When will I be famous?' board game -

Which the authors obviously put loads of effort into - 

You start at 'Start', and finish at the abstract concept of fame, and inbetween you try not to kill yourself.

Next up - Bros Talk, in which Bros slag off all other bands, and are in turn met with a sweeping wave of indifference from popular figures of the time - 

Last but not least, a photoshoot with Bros' loyal fans -

Bros are so nice - they really appreciate their fans, and take time out of their busy, London Pie cooking schedules to meet 'n' greet all their adoring supporters, and all for nothing but a small fee of £1000 per fan. Of all the assorted lunatics and bored housewives who turned up for this photoshoot (without one word of a lie, I accidentally just wrote 'photoshit'. Maybe I should have left the mistake in), my favourites are these three -

1. The girl who looks angry at Bros, probably because she thought this was going to be an Echo and the Bunnymen photoshoot -

2. The girl who looks vaguely disgusted at having to be touched by members of Bros -

3. Alan Davies -

Well, I hope you enjoyed this journey through the Bros annual as much as I did. Actually, I hope you enjoyed it more than me, because I didn't enjoy it at all. 

5 old adverts I love part 3

I used to think I wasn’t the kind of person to be influenced by adverts. Recently I’m starting to see how wrong I was. I did backflips in Asda the other day, because they’d started selling Um Bongo again, which I’m 99% sure was down to the Um Bongo song. I don’t know what it is that makes me so happy about watching companies from yesteryear trying to flog me their tat, but it does.

Since this seems to be accidentally turning into a series, you can find parts 1 and 2 or my adverts extravaganza here and here. Today I’m going to write about five adverts with insanely catchy songs attached to them. The genius of these adverts was that people (and by people, I mean me) are still singing the accompanying jingles twenty years on. It’s all very well having an expensive and arty ‘concept’ advert, but what good is that if no one can ever remember what's being advertised? If I was making an advert, I’d go for a catchy tune and a cartoon character singing the name of my product a million times over a dolphin having sex with a chessboard, or whatever.

I present to you, in no particular order – five advert jingles they really should release as singles –

1. Milky Way

I know they brought this advert back in recent years. However, they brought it back in a stupid cropped form, thus taking all the context out of the advert. Nowadays it’s just a red car and a blue car having a race. Not much happens, and in some versions we don’t even get to see the part where the bridge collapses, thus negating the whole point of the advert, which is ‘if you eat Milky Ways instead of lard, you won’t get fat’. Still, at least 7/10 for effort.

2. Sunkist

Late 80s/early 90s summer power ballading at its best. You’ve got surfboards, you’ve got hair gel, you’ve got guys called Brad frolicking in crashing waves with girls called Cindy. And, bizarrely, a can of Sunkist balancing on a girl’s bottom. No doubt cashing in on the Neighbours/Home and Away inspired ‘everyone wants to be a beach bunny’ wave of hysteria, the Sunkist ad managed to inject a wave of real sunshine into our gloomy British days.

3. Birdseye potato waffles

Undoubtedly, the only part anyone ever remembers from this song is the last line, followed by the cuckoo clock chime. But had you been paying attention to the rest of the song, you’d have learned that Birdseye potato waffles go with all kinds of things, from cheese to chilli to burgers to eggs, with about a bajillion things inbetween. You could probably eat them with raw petrol and they’d taste nice.

4. Crisp N Dry

A badass jazz/blues/skiffle number complete with singing nuns. Ok, the nuns aren’t singing, but if they were they’d be awesome. Let’s face it, nuns liven up any advert. The main message of this song is that with Crisp N Dry cooking oil, your food won’t end up tasting like it’s smeared with lard and therefore from the North of England.

5. Lilt

A cool reggae journey through your average Carribean village. Apparently, in your average Carribean village, not only does everyone stand around all day doing no work, but they also have a ‘Lilt-man’. I’m assuming this is in place of a milkman, and that the residents of this village substitute Lilt for milk in all areas of their life. I’m assuming they have Lilt in their tea, and Lilt on their cornflakes.  This is all well and good, but at least a milkman wouldn’t just ride around throwing bottles of milk at your head, which you just happen to be lucky enough to catch.

5 creepy idents

Sorry for the gap in posts this last day or so - I've been out getting a new job and such, and am now writing this on the mister's clunky, unfamiliar laptop. It's only clunky because I'm too stupid to use any laptop but mine. Anyway, due to my inability to type more than three words without it looking like a monkey sat on the keyboard, today's post will be small. I would like to share five creepy as hell TV, video and game idents that scared the crap out of me as a child. I present to you - even more reasons why I am such a massive wuss.

1. BBC Video - 1990s

2. BBC Video - 1980s

3. Channel 4 - 1982

4. Sega - 1991

5. ITV Nightshift - 1992

5 things that gave me nightmares as a kid

Do you want to laugh at me being a wuss? Of course you do. I’m a massive scaredy cat. For example, this morning I came downstairs to find a hooded demon staring at me from across the road –

It’s pretending to be a picnic umbrella, but I am not fooled. Given this, imagine my chicken tendencies transplanted into the body of a 5 year old with terrible hair, and you have an idea of me in the 80s. I was scared of everything as a kid. I was forever hiding behind settees, teddies and my Dad. Yet somehow the things that scared me also kept drawing me to them, like I had some morbid desire to be plunged into a world of evil and then to have nightmares. I was obsessed with the things that disturbed me, and I guess I still am. Some of them, I’ve come to realise, were standard nightmare fuel, but to be honest some of them were just plain odd.

This list will probably be in multiple parts, because if I listed everything I was scared of in one post I might break the internet.

Are you sitting comfortably? Good, then I’ll begin scaring the shit out of you. And by you, I mean me.

1. Max Headroom

My number one biggest irrational fear as a child. Despite what I said in this post, I’ve warmed towards Max Headroom (or ‘Snap Snap’) as I used to call him for some reason) recently. I particularly like his mini backstory movie, 20 minutes into the future. 

25 years ago, it was an entirely different story. I would cower pathetically behind the settee whenever his glitchy, stuttering face appeared on TV. As it was the 80s, this was all the fucking time. To make matters worse, comedy impersonator and all round 80s staple Bobby Davro did a Max Headroom spoof. This was tragic because I actually loved the rest of Bobby Davro’s show. Another thing Max Headroom robbed from me, with his stupid isocahedron face.

2. The TV being interrupted

This still gets me now. A few months ago I was working a night shift, and BBC News 24 got interrupted in the early hours. It was bizarre - for minutes there was just a long shot of the newsreader, not saying anything at all, then it would cut to a live shot of a deserted road in London for ages, then back again, and so on for about ten minutes. Then they just resumed the news like nothing had happened, the giant bastards. By the end of the ten minutes I was convinced that terrorists had taken over BBC headquarters, and were planning to film themselves bombing London. I guess that wasn’t the case, but they never did explain why it happened.

Any time a programme gets interrupted you immediately think something terrible has happened. This is especially true at night, because everything is automatically worse at night. Even when it’s just a ‘technical fault’, I still tend to assume the technical fault is caused by a nuclear explosion, or an alien invasion or something.

If I had my way I’d find some other way to deliver breaking news without interrupting the programme. My nerves just can’t take it. Maybe I’d have a little cartoon cow dancing across the screen, holding a balloon that says “Hey guys, why not have a peek at the news? There’s something rather exciting going on!” Mind you, then I’d just learn to dread the arrival of the cartoon cow. Maybe Spongebob would work better, I don’t know.

3. Policemen

I wasn’t some kind of toddler anarchist wanting to throw my used nappy at the state; I had my own reasons for being terrified of nipple headed law enforcers. When I was three, my dad got me arrested. Well, it was sort of an arrest. I was being a bit noisy in the back of the car one day, so my dad called over a passing policeman and got him to ‘have a word’ with me. The policeman leaned into my window and told me, in a very stern voice, that if I didn’t behave he’d put me in prison. I was so petrified I was actually trying to crawl under the driver’s seat to hide. These kinds of things can affect the way a girl thinks. Even my dad now agrees it was a bit extreme as toddler taming goes. But you know, this was the 80s in North Wales – policemen back then were about as scary as pasta.

4. The ghost train at Bridlington

I never actually rode this, which probably made it all the more scary. It stood just back from the prom, so impressionable children at the kiddies’ fair across the road could view the exterior and imagine what went on inside. While I was waiting to ride the carousel or the Mini Apple roller coaster, I’d gaze over at it, waiting for the one visible part of the ride to make itself known. It was part ghost train and part roller coaster; the roller coaster part involved riding the track along the exterior of the building and down a dip before going back in for some more mortal peril. The dip itself was actually pretty tiny, but to my inexperienced eyes it looked like Kingda Ka.

As I looked, all I’d ever see was a train full of frightened people emerging into daylight for a few seconds before going back in to meet their doom. I was a bit obsessed with what happened inside the building; several times I had dreams about it at night, and in my dreams it was everything from an empty warehouse with a roller coaster in it (which was more frightening somehow) to the fiery pits of hell. Sadly I never did get to ride it for myself since it’s now been removed, but I did manage to find this on ride video –

5. Sonic The Hedgehog

Let me say now that I did love these games and I still do. But back then it was a love tinged with stomach churning, sweaty palmed fear. I’m not exactly sure what disturbed me so much when I played Sonic, but every time I jumped into that weird, floating dystopian world it unsettled me. Maybe it was the feeling that if Sonic died, he really died, which gave me a crippling sense of responsibility. This hasn’t been helped in recent years by the creepypasta about Sonic springing up all over the place. Maybe it was the music – even the supposedly happy music of Green Hill Zone gave me a slight feeling of unease. It still does, and I can never quite put my finger on why.

But out of all of this, by far the most gut-mangling aspect of the game was the infamous drowning music, particularly during Labyrinth Zone in Sonic 1, and Chemical Plant Zone in Sonic 2. Sega knew the effect this music had on children right from the start, which is why they’ve included variants of it in most of the Sonic games.

Obviously I was never very good at Sonic as a kid. Which is why I always ended up drowning, and always ended up hearing that bloody music. Maybe it was never anything more than the feeling that once that music started playing, I’d have to start the whole level over. Again.

Well, that’s it for now. I’ll write a part two on this subject soon, when I’ve stopped shaking and having to lie in a dark room drinking neat brandy.

The best car boot haul ever - prepare for a pile of awesome

LOOK AT THIS!

I'll just give you a minute to take it all it. Maybe you'll want to go build a shrine to the picture, I don't know.
I got all this stuff for under 15 quid. Again, I'll give you a minute to take that in. Apart from Screwball Scramble, which I'm pretty sure is a newer version, all this stuff is from the 80s or very early 90s. And that makes me very happy, because now I own it all.
Regular readers will immediately spot one or two things that are destined to get their own posts, but for now I'm just going to dive into this barrel of smashingness. Look upon it, and if you don't weep, at least do the Macarena or something.

Board Games

Screwball Scramble, Dingbats and Atmosfear 2. I know Screwball Scramble isn't technically a board game, but I plan to play it when I'm bored so it counts. 

I've never played Screwball Scramble before, but I look forward to losing at it for years to come. I always loved Dingbats, the lateral thinking game, as a child, but was always too young and stupid to appreciate it properly. Now I am no longer young, so everything works out. I've also never played any of the Atmosfear games, but now I own the first and second so I look forward to a night of beer and shitting myself over those videos with the mister.

Snoopy flask

Complete with cup and internal lid, but thankfully not containing any 20 year old Um Bongo. I was brave enough to take a sniff inside, and it still has that plasticky smell that lunch boxes and flasks are supposed to have. I am not stupid enough, however, to actually attempt to drink out of it. I value my life.

She Ra figure

I've wanted a She Ra for years, but have always felt too guilty to buy one for full price on Ebay. So imagine my joy when I found her in a box of junk for 50p! Admittedly, she looks like she's had a wild night out followed by sex in a hedge, but I plan to straighten her hair out and give her boots and boobs a lick of paint, and return her to her former glory.

Roland Rat

Or "Rogul" as I used to call him. Roland was introduced to TV-AM the year I was born, so you could say we grew up together. I had this exact toy as a toddler and I don't know what happened to him. I like to think that this Roland is my long lost Roland, and now that we're together again we can go round the country spouting cockney vermin based puns at unsuspecting people.

Annuals

Bros annual 1989, Neighbours annual 1989, and a Home and Away 'special' from 1990. All three are stuffed with quizzes, pointless trivia and terrible photoshoots. I'm not sure what made me more excited when I got them home - finally getting to find out what the other one in Bros was called, remembering there was a character called Des in Neighbours, or finding a three page feature on Craig McLachlan of "Hey Mona" fame.

Pencil cases 

This is the find that really made me piss in my pants with excitement. They're all in excellent condition, but to be honest I would have bought them if they'd been ripped in half and covered in poo. I've numbered them for handy, cut out and keep reference -

1. 'Pencil Pouch' (this is generic but it's definitely old, because it comes with one of those round pencil sharpeners you don't get any more)

2. Transformers

3. Roland 'Rogul' Rat

4. A-Team

5. Bassett's Liquorice Allsorts

6. Munch Bunch yoghurts

7. Masters of the universe

8. Count Duckula

9. Generic Dracula pencil case, but from WOOLWORTHS if you please

10. A-Team

11. Hula Hoops

12. Wotsits

Now I'm going to go and bask in the glory of owning all these items. I'll probably stop short of getting naked and rolling around in them, but it will be a pretty close thing.