Scarred For Life Volume Two: Television in the 1980s

 

Scarred For Life Volume 2: The 1980s Part One – Television by Stephen Brotherstone & Dave Lawrence et al (2020 Lulu.com softcover 530pp)

 

Unfettered nostalgia is often a cause of a lot which ails our modern society – why try to do something bold and new when it’s easier to wallow in warm comforting memories? But what about those half-remembered moments and snippets of media from our childhoods which give us the chills and still just don’t seem quite right? This is where the Scarred For Life team have stepped in to provide us with guidance. In the three and a half years since their first volume (which covered all cultural aspects of the 1970s) was released, so called ‘Hauntology’ and or ‘The Haunted Generation” has become a ‘thing’ online and beyond. People in roughly the same generation as myself (forty-mumble) have been falling over themselves to read, watch and listen to those weird little things that seemed to have collectively influenced our early lives in the 1970s and 80s.

With a surfeit of material to deal with in regards to the 1980s the SFL creators have decided to confine themselves to covering only the decade’s televisual output in volume 2 with a further volume covering books, movies and so on promised in the near future.

Volume 2 consists of roughly 70 articles grouped together in mainly by genre or other themes – there’s Kid’s TV, Surreal Drama, Science Fiction and so on. One section concentrates on the event of the arrival of Channel 4 in the UK and how its output shock things up. Another section concentrates on mass unemployment and how it was portrayed on 80s television. A fairly lengthy section covers UK Public Information Film (PIF) ‘fillers’ of the decade.

This brings up one problem that some readers might have with the book – its very UK centric. As a bit of an anglophile New Zealander, I could follow most of it. I estimate about 70% of the UK television mentioned ended up screening here eventually but things like the PIFs trigger no memories for me and end up being more of academic interest.

On the whole the writing style is fun and jokey and I like it that way. Its not a dry survey of the contents, the authors have their own memories and often put what they cover into context which is often enjoyable to read. However, it is sometimes obvious that this book was written piecemeal over several years – there are references to the current year being anything between 2017 and 2020, some things are repeated and what probably seemed like a clever turn of phrase is often over-used. A few typos raise their ugly heads and there’s a couple of odd layout issues in my copy at least. The book is very information dense and sometime the format works against easy reading – long lines of text run across the page and into ‘the gutter’. A dual column format like that used in the PIF section might have been a good idea for more of the volume.

It took me a while to make my way through all the of the material but I think it was worth the effort. There’s a lot that will trigger memories and quite a lot more to seek out and view for the first time on the likes of YouTube. I look forwards to Volume 3.

Scarred For Life Volume 2 is NOT available from your usual bookseller or bookseller website. So far at least, it can only be found as a print-on-demand book or pdf file via Lulu.com.