Chapter 104 - Spirograph
Chapter 105 - Squirmles
Chapter 106 - Star Bird
Chapter 107 - Star Wars
Chapter 108 - Stay Alive!
Chapter 109 - Sticklebricks
Chapter 110 - Stop Boris
Chapter 111 - Strawberry Shortcake
Chapter 112 - Stretch Armstrong
Chapter 113 - Stylophone
Chapter 114 - Subbuteo
Chapter 115 - Swingball
Chapter 116 - Tank Command
Chapter 117 - Tasco Telescope
Chapter 118 - TCR
Chapter 119 - Terrahawks Action Zeroid
Chapter 120 - Test Match
Chapter 121 - Tin Can Alley
Chapter 122 - Tiny Tears
Chapter 123 - Tip-It
Chapter 124 - Tomytronic 3D
Chapter 125 - Tonka Trucks
Chapter 126 - Top Trumps
Chapter 127 - Transformers
Chapter 128 - Trivial Pursuit
Chapter 129 - Twister
Chapter 130 - Up Periscope
Chapter 131 - Vertibird
Chapter 132 - View-Master
Chapter 133 - Walkie-Talkies
Chapter 134 - War of the Daleks
Chapter 135 - Weebles
Chapter 136 - Whimsies J
Chapter 137 - Yahtzee
Chapter 138 - Zoids
Chapter 139 - ZX Spectrum
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.
‘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?’1
Back in 2004, TV Cream – the UK’s most popular and award-winning nostalgia website2 – 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