The way we watched: the last decade when TV gripped the nation

Missing an episode of Grange Hill or Blackadder could make you a social pariah in the playground at school, while there wasn't a boy in my class who didn't see Ricky Villa's memorable goal for Tottenham in the 1981 FA Cup final replay.

Until a few years ago, the 1980s were widely regarded as the decade that taste forgot, but now its renaissance is in full swing with Hollywood producers falling over themselves in the rush to remake classics like the A-Team and The Karate Kid. This revival has even spread to our high streets which are awash with teenagers wearing tight fitting stonewashed jeans, ra-ra skirts and luminous socks that don't match. Which, for those of us who wore this clobber the first time around, is a sobering reminder of both the passage of time and the folly of youth.

But in an ever-changing world it was the TV programmes we watched that acted as the common thread binding our lives together. Although British television 30 years ago was a far cry from today's breathless round-the-clock coverage – as LP Hartley once noted: "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there."

Back in the early 1980s, there were only three channels, there was no such thing as daytime TV, everything stopped at midnight and the biggest prize on TV wasn't the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? jackpot, but a speedboat on Bullseye. It was a weird and wonderful world that gave us Dallas and Dynasty, Scott and Charlene, Allo' Allo and The Young Ones. Each of which are mentioned in Tom Bromley's

new book All in the Best Possible Taste – Growing Up Watching Telly in the Eighties. Bromley's memoir is a warm and nostalgic account of growing up in the decade in which television irrevocably changed.

"It seems quite backwards now, but at the start of the decade there was no television on in a morning. You had Play School and Pebble Mill at One and then television shut down in the afternoon and re-started with children's programmes and continued until about midnight when the BBC played the national anthem and people went off to bed," he says.

The '80s brought the curtain down on the so-called golden era of television with the passing of comedy heroes like Eric Morecambe, Tommy Cooper and Leonard Rossiter. It was also the decade that witnessed the beginnings of TV as we know it today. In 1982, Channel 4 became the first new terrestrial TV channel in almost 20 years and by the end of the decade Rupert Murdoch's Sky Television was vying to become Britain's first multi-channel network.

Bromley agrees that from a TV point of view it was a pivotal decade. "People look back on the 70s through rose tinted glasses as this golden age when everyone sat around watching Morecambe and Wise and the 80s was the end of that. It was a period of big change and by the end of the decade people had video recorders which meant they could watch a programme later on rather than have to sit and watch it at the same time. It was a period of greater choice, although arguably less quality."

Bromley, a writer and self-confessed TV addict, grew up in York and one of his earliest memories stems from the small screen. "I remember seeing Johnny Ball at a church fete in York and because I'd seen him on the telly it stuck in my memory." The '80s produced some of our most treasured TV moments such as Live Aid, JR Ewing getting shot, and Del Boy falling over in the wine bar scene from Only Fools and Horses.

But as well as producing crowd-pleasing shows he argues that the '80s was also quite a forward thinking period. "YTV was actually very innovative, it was the first channel to run through the night in 1988 and it trialled breakfast television before anyone else, while Calendar used to have Countdown before it started on Channel 4."

Yorkshire itself was also the setting for some of our best-loved and most iconic series. "There was All Creatures Great and Small, Last of the Summer Wine and Brideshead Revisited, and I think Yorkshire was seen as somewhere that reflected a bygone era that a lot of viewers hankered after."

Back then, television was a shared national event, Bromley says. "Watching TV is one of the few things where you have a shared experience. There's the

old cliche of the whole family sitting down to watch Top of

the Pops even though

parents didn't like the new

music, but now it's not even on telly anymore."

This was also the era before sport-only channels were available to the masses and when the idea of pressing the red button would send most people into a blind panic. "All the big sporting events, like the famous Ian Botham cricket match at Headingley, were either on the BBC or ITV so everyone could watch them, whereas now the Ashes matches are on Sky with 40 minutes of highlights on terrestrial TV."

Bromley makes the point, too, that television viewers are spoilt for choice these days. "You don't get the big audiences in the same way. Teenagers spend more time on social networking sites or playing computer games than they do watching TV. So there are fewer people watching TV and because there's so many channels to choose from there are fewer people watching the same thing. There are still shared TV experiences like watching the final of The X-Factor, but they are few and far between."

He believes that the recent retro trend among programme makers reflects the eras they grew up in. "When you're younger the programmes you watch feel more significant. There have been a lot of TV shows celebrating the '70s in the last 10 years, like Life on Mars, and I think that's because many of the people commissioning programmes grew up during that decade and now we're seeing programmes made by people who remember the '80s more fondly."

It seems unlikely, then, that TV land will ever be the same again. "I don't think television will have the same reference for future generations, not due to the quality of programmes, but because fewer people will watch the same thing," he says.

"I think it's nice to have these shared memories and discussions but perhaps future generations will get them through the internet rather than TV programmes. Facebook recently said it now had more than 500 million members which is far more people than ever watched those TV programmes in the '80s."

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n All in the Best Possible Taste is published on August 19, by Simon & Schuster, priced 12.99. To buy a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. P&P is 2.75.