The neon glow of 80s nostalgia...

I'm currently basking in the neon glow of 80s nostalgia.

Don't worry, I'm not going to indulge in recreating the fashions of the era.  Sporting large hair, a power suit with American Footballer-style shoulder pads and blue eyeliner is going to be a little excessive for a trip to the shop to get my bread and paper.

But the decade of excess seems to be appearing all around me.

My musical tastes have always been influenced by this era, as this is when I became a teenager.  I love those compilation albums, and sing along heartily with all the songs much to daughter's dismay.

I've also become a fan of The Goldbergs.  This too annoys her as she discovered it on E4, but now I also watch it which of course makes it instantly uncool.  She carries on watching it though because it's so good.

The Goldbergs is a comedy about the family dynamic and contains huge chunks of key 80s music, films, fashion and gadgets (e.g. Rubik's cubes and top-loader VCRs). 

Adam Goldberg writes the show, and his childhood-self is the main character.  He filmed key moments from his childhood on a camcorder in a sort of visual diary, and this provides the source material for the storylines.

Then there's the more high-brow study of the time, courtesy of historian Dominic Sandbrook.  He has a three-part series about The Eighties, the first of which managed to portray Delia Smith as the leader of a revolution.

I have to be honest, when I think of revolutionaries it's probably Che Guevara rather than Delia which springs to mind, but it was an interesting viewpoint on how our lives forever changed in those ten years when Mrs Thatcher ruled from Downing Street, and Delia was Queen of the TV cookery shows.

I'm a big fan of Delia, but quite how her teaching us the wonders of cooking dried pasta was more of a turning point than Mrs Thatcher selling off the social housing stock and the privatisation of major companies is perhaps open for more discussion. 

As for her being a revolutionary - I can't imagine many young people wearing t-shirts with Delia's face emblazoned across them, can you?!