Back in what we fondly call the Cream era,4 the summer holidays were longer and hotter, sweets were cheaper and bigger, and toys were there to be played with – abused, battered… broken, even. They weren’t bought as an investment, to be squirreled away in storage for collectors and completists, or auctioned off thirty years later, ‘mint on card’, ‘brand new in box’ or ‘factory sealed’. The toys you’ll find in this book are the ones that had us wide-eyed with anticipation, tearing down the stairs at five in the morning on Christmas Day; the toys we hoped to find among a mountain of wrapped-up boxes; the toys we’d rip recklessly from the packaging and put straight to work.
What we’ve tried to do is capture at least some of that experience5 but without being too earnest about it. They are only toys, after all. On the one hand, there’s the catalogues and, on the other, there’s cataloguing (in the most dry, joyless way imaginable). We hope the next couple of hundred pages will illuminate the difference. Along the way, there’ll be some mildly interesting trivia (did you know that the original Sooty was just a mass-produced Chad Valley bear puppet?), some weak observational jokes (such as: why is it that Monopoly is only made by one company?) and far too many references to Doctor Who. If that’s not your cup of tea, we’ll chuck in some tortuously extended metaphors, just for good measure.
Why? Because what we’re trying to do is reclaim our childhoods, like so much silt from the fens. Rising from the wetlands of that original online top one hundred, this book examines in detail the seven score or more toys we most yearned for as youngsters (plus a good couple of dozen others that get a mention in passing). These are the peerless playthings of a nation’s youth, the ones that encapsulate a time and place to which we can never return, no matter how many mini-desktop versions The Gadget Shop churns out. Neither a definitive history of the toy industry nor a stat-packed collector’s price guide, TV Cream Toys is the Christmas morning you should have had when you were young enough to appreciate it.
And that’s it really. All you need to know to use this book. So hold firm, St Paul, as it’s now time to unpack those childish things for one last circuit around the living room carpet.
1 None of this is true. In fact, in common with much of this book, it’s an old stand-up routine we pinched (in this case, with permission, from the very lovely Richard Herring). We’re hoping that the quote from The Bible is out of copyright. Mind you, what the hell does ‘spake’ mean? We can’t find that on our Speak & Spell.
2 The award was Yahoo! Find Of The Year 2003 (they found us after six years, bless ’em). What’s with all this ‘we’ business? Well, we’ll come to that in a bit. In the mean time, get used to these footnotes; the book is riddled with them. They’re the paper equivalent of a director’s commentary.
3 Gawd, how dated is that sentence going to look in two years’ time? Don’t get us wrong, we’re not trying to be curmudgeonly or wring our hands at ‘the youth of today’ (although, c’mon, they really don’t know they’re born, do they?). There are plenty of future classic toys and games for twenty-first-century children. They’ll just have to write their own nostalgia book, that’s all.
4 Your own Cream era is the period in your life that created the most vivid and enjoyable memories, the ones that conjure an indescribable yummy feeling and that don’t need to be validated by Kate Thornton gurning away on some godawful TV talking heads compilation Alternatively it’s that year – any time from the ’60s to the ’90s – when you hit ten years old. Whichever definition suits you best… Watch out for 1977, though. That’s the year Star Wars (and a flood of merchandise spin-offs) changed the toy business forever.
5 This book is a collection of shared experiences. No single person can claim them. You can’t claim them. Steve Berry can’t claim them. Even TV Cream itself can’t claim them. They belong to us all. Just look at the list of contributors for one thing! The toy and game floor of TV Cream Towers is inhabited by a sort of gestalt creature. So, because we’re all in this together, this book has been written in the first person plural (or, as our Queen would prefer, the royal ‘we’).
Training the housewives of tomorrow
This is how it begins–with a none-too-subtle reinforcement of gender stereotypes for the Daily Mail readers of the future. Many are the generations of little girls that were saddled with ‘minimum’ plastic ironing boards and carpet sweepers from an early age (all the better to brain your little brother with), and many the house that was cluttered with all the paraphernalia of pretend cleaning without any real cleaning actually getting done.
Reminding us once again that a woman’s place is in the home, this particular primary-coloured party-pooper was a complete kitchen set comprising oven, hob, sink and, erm, washing machine on a handy moveable cart–hence it’s ‘A La Cart’, geddit? Quite why the more predictable inclusion of a kitchen fridge was omitted is anyone’s guess.1 However, the toy was successful in ingraining itself on the nation’s collective memory primarily because of an extremely enduring TV advert. Briefly, this featured a small girl who got up unfeasibly early in order to potter around for a few hours, knocking together bits of plastic in a brisk but pointless way and eventually arriving in the parental bedroom to feed her dad cold baked beans and arctic roll from a plastic saucepan (Wake up Daddy, breakfast’s ready!’). He at least had the unshaven grace to pretend to look happy–we can only imagine how a genuine parent might’ve reacted.
Although this sorry display surely says something rather serious about the division of household labour in the late twentieth century, we’re not quite sure exactly what (although we’d love to know the whereabouts of ‘Mummy’). Besides, if that child is so keen on household chores, surely ‘Daddy’ can find a chimney to shove her up?
Manufacturer Bluebird continued to expand its range of authentic, though slightly strangely juxtaposed, culinary workstations on wheels with the Walford-inspired ‘East End Market Stall’,2 one side a fruit-and-veg trader’s stand, the other a burger bar. All the major food groups well-represented there, then. Conspicuous cuckoo in the nest this time was a bright-red telephone stuck in the middle. Even in those pre-mobile days, we can’t envisage a market trader installing