Most families probably had a home computer at some point, normally bought for the kids by Dad who used the excuse “it’ll help with their homework” to get it passed Mum. Of course, he wanted to fiddle with it himself really.

I think you could probably count the number of times it helped with my schoolwork on the fingers of one hand, but it taught me to program and I loved playing games (and still do).

This week I’m expecting the final answer to be a landslide victory…

Apology out of the way here’s todays whimsical offering - John Kettley is a Weatherman, by A Tribe Of Toffs.  This little ditty was released in 1988 and although many people will remember it even now it only actually made its way to number 21 in the UK charts.  The chorus lyrics were simple and straight to the point:-

The main verses went through a series of well known people at the time and a little something about them, such as Johnathan Ross collects moss (possible I guess?), Andy Crane has no brain and Simon Parkin is always larking.  Amusingly enough whilst Simon Parkin was a childrens TV presenter at the time of the record he is now, wait for it, a weatherman on ITV!

The record first got noticed when A Tribe Of Toffs sent a recording to Andy Crane.  Despite insulting him my insuating a lack of grey matter Mr. Crane showed the tape around and it was seen by Paul Smith, the producer of BBC kids show But First This.  Must admit I don’t remember that show at all, must have been one of the more terrible BBC Saturday morning shows that aired when Get Fresh was on ITV.  From the YouTube clip below though it looks like it was presented by some bloke and the girl who played Johnny Briggs sister in the CBBC kids show, and later went on to be an ambulance worker on Casualty.

Anyway, back to the song.  Paul Smith got the band in to record a video and from there they went on to appear on other shows including Terry Wogan’s chat show.  The video even featured John Kettley right at the end, as the band leap through his weather map and start wrestling with him.

Sadly this was the only s0ng that the band got into the charts with.  They tried to launch a few serious songs but with little luck, so were forced into making a second novelty record, entitled Terry Wogan’s On TV (Again), but it sank and the band split soon after.  However, the bands memory is kept alive today thanks to the A Tribe Of Toffs website, where you can even buy their albums (which appear to have been self published).

In those days just about every computer you could buy had a built in version of the programming language BASIC (who will be first to post the answer as a comment I wonder?).  This meant that you could write your own programs (which normally meant games) if you could be bothered to learn all those weird commands like PEEK, POKE and GOSUB.  For those that didn’t want to learn all that rubbish, there was always the type in listing.

Back then magazines such as Your Computer (remember that computer buffs?) printed pages of listings for you to type in yourself at home.  Normally these were written in BASIC but occasionally they were written in machine code, as it was referred to, which was the native instruction set of the central processing unit.  On many computers this meant typing in a BASIC listing first which then let you type in thousands of hexadecimal numbers.  What joy!

There were also entire books devoted to computer listings, many of which had titles like “50 Amazing Games for the ZX Spectrum“, which had a picture on the cover of some awesome looking game, which you soon found out wasn’t one of the games from the book, but I’ll come to that in a minute.

So, you sat there typing in page after page of gobbledy gook, searching the keyboard to see how to produce that checkboard graphic or the image of a white heart on a black background.  If you were lucky you could coax someone into reading out the listing for you so you didn’t have to keep looking back and forth, which sped things up a bit.  I remember my Dad helping me on many occasions, which was quite amusing as we invented our own shorthand for some of the characters, such as “dog ears” for speech marks, “wiggly A” for the @ sign and the rather less clever “comma with a dot on top” for semi-colon.

Several hours later you had typed the entire thing in and it was prudent at this stage to save everything to a blank cassette before entering the magic word “RUN” and pressing enter.  There was a hush from all around, followed by a groan as the screen displayed:-

SYNTAX ERROR IN LINE 450

Great!  What the heck did that mean?  So it was back to the listing to find line 450 and enter it again.  Wind the tape back, save again, enter RUN and up would come a title screen saying “PRESS A KEY”.  You pressed a key and…

UNDEF'D ERROR IN LINE 630

Nice.  So the cycle repeated re-entering lines until finally you had them all correct and the game could finally be played.  And what a disappointment that was.  You usually ended up with some poor Space Invaders or Pacman clone (if you were lucky) or failing that a game of Hangman.  The graphics were made from whatever built in graphical characters your computer had, and if there was any sound at all chances it would just be the odd beep.

The thing that was most amazing though was that although that game would keep you enthralled for all of five minutes, you would then reset the computer, and for some unfathomable reason, start to enter another listing, in the undying hope that maybe, just maybe, then next game would be as good as the ones you bought from W.H.Smith.

First of all take a piece of electro pop music that sounds like it’s been ripped straight out of an old computer game.  Add in a few robotic sounding vocals and top it all off with some flying frozen chickens and a little animated guy made out of some fried eggs, sausages and a couple of cucumbers.  For that final finishing touch end with a repeating phrase consisting of just two words - “and on”.

Sounds pretty dreadful right?  Well, yes, but so dreadful that you find yourself glued to the television.  Whether Ariston sold more washing machines or not I have no idea, but it must have been fairly successful since they used variations on the “and on and on and on” theme for several years to follow.

Check out the clip below for our fried egg sausagey cucumbery friend, and also his mate the pots and pans man with cups for eyes and plates for lips.  Classic!  If that’s the right word…

Would I want to? I’m not sure. Perhaps if I could be a kid again then yes, I think I would, but would I want to be an adult in the 1980’s? I’m not sure to be honest. What do you think? Vote below, and leave us all a comment if you have any views one way or the other that you’d like to share.

Jackson was the seventh of nine children, and first shot to fame at the tender age of 11 with his brothers Jackie, Jermaine, Tito and Marlon as a member of The Jackson 5.  In 1971 he began his solo career but it was the eighties when he was at the height of his fame, with the release of albums such as Bad and Thriller, the latter of which is still the highest selling album of all time.

He was not only a great singer and songwriter but also a fantastic dancer.  His most often imitated dance step has to be the moonwalk, where he appeared to be walking forwards but moving backwards.

His eccentric behaviour earned him the nickname Wacko Jacko, and he is famous for having had a large amount of plastic surgery, most notably on his nose.  His skin colour had also lightened over the years, which many claimed was due to this surgery but was in fact due to a disease called Vitiligo.

His private life was drawn into question with the much publicised court trial for child molestation that was supposed to have occured at his home, the Neverland Ranch, which was more of an amusement park than a home with its fairground rides and roller coaster.  Jackson was acquitted of all charges.

His death comes just before he was due to perform a massive series of concerts at the O2 in London, which were set to begin in July and go on until 2010.

What I liked most about Downfall were the dials on the main playing board.  These reminded me of the dials on safes that you always saw people twiddling, ear up to the door, when trying to rob millionaires on films (the safe was always hidden behind a picture for some reason).

The idea in Downfall was to get all your coloured counters from the top of the playing board to the bottom by twisting the dials, which had little holes in them that could pick up the counters.  In the meantime your opponent was trying to do the exact same thing on their side of the playing board.

Players took it in turns to twist one of the dials, although you weren’t allowed to twist the dial your opponent had just twisted.  As you twisted the holes in the dials past counters in other dials the counters would drop into the lower dial if two holes were alligned.

What made Downfall such a good game was that it was such an incredibly simple idea, but you could sit there agonising over which dial to turn in case you inadvertantly helped out your opponent by dropping some of their counters down the board.

The original version of Downfall was made by MB Games, but is no longer in production.  Hasbro now own the MB Games name and have a new version on the market though, called New Downfall (original eh?) which has slightly more modern styling to the playing board but is otherwise pretty much the same game.  There is also a smaller travel sized version available.

Being a bit of a sucker for anything set in space when I was a kid (and to be honest, I’m probably still a sucker for such fare today) it’s surprising I don’t remember Captain Zep more fondly.  I certainly remember watching it, but only because there was nothing better on the other side (i.e. Children’s ITV).

The idea behind the show was the titular Captain Zep and his cronies Jason Brown and Professors Spiro or Vana (depending on which series you were watching) zipped about the galaxy solving crimes.  It wasn’t quite as passive as that though, as the programme was also part game show.  The adventures of Zep and company were actually being used as training aids for young space detective recruits, in other words a studio audience who had all been forced to slick back their hair and don ridiculous jump suits.

You watched the adventure picking up clues along the way with which to determine who the crook of the piece was.  At least, that was the idea.  Personally when it came to the reveal I sat there confused as they explained what strange piece of evidence had incriminated the Verocious Spratblatter Beast for nicking fuel cells from the Imperial Galactic Alliance Fleet.  OK, I’m making up the names here, but hopefully you see what I mean.

I think the reason why I could never work out the crime was because I was too busy laughing at the slick haired kids and the strangely drawn aliens.  Yes, that’s right, drawn.  Zep, Brown and the Profs were human actors chromakeyed onto a variety of alien landscapes with cardboard looking aliens superimposed over the top.  I’m pretty sure the aliens were not animated in any way, so it was quite amusing to watch these people talking to aliens that responded with out moving their lips, assuming of course that they had lips.  Strangely enough the BBC were quite proud of these special effects for some reason…

As well as the main puzzle there was also a viewer competition where you had to solve a secondary mystery from watching the show.  If you sent in the correct answer you could win a Captain Zep Space Detective Badge (woooh!).  Needless to say I do not own a Captain Zep Space Detective Badge.

However, there was one cool thing about the show, and that was the theme music which sticks in my mind to this day.  The YouTube clip below features this theme song, but sadly the visuals are just from Windows Media Player by the looks of it.