Authors Electric

1980s me! I was born in 1964, so most of my supposedly formative years were in the 1970s and 1980s. I remember our family having the first colour television on the street – hired from Radio Rentals as were they all back then. I remember having just three TV channels and the excitement of the launch of Channel 4 in 1982. I also remember the launch of Brookside , the new hard-hitting Channel 4 soap set in Liverpool. I’d just started at Liverpool university and if you got up early enough at university, you could watch them filming in the city.  Brookside was supposedly targeting ‘gritty social issues’ – did it? I honestly don’t know. I didn’t watch any other soaps, so I had nothing to compare it with. I had vague memories of the local charming-but-deadly gangster Tommy McArdle, and then of course there was the infamous body under the patio and the first televised lesbian kiss, both of which catapulted actress Anna Friel to fame.  But compared to modern soap, Brookside  is ...

Sunday lunch — someone I know (in real as well as virtual form) posted a photo of her daughter under this heading (or hashtag) a few weeks back. Reminded me of when our daughter was that age and stage: long hair, beautiful smile… and preteen angst in spades! Yesterday, someone I (hardly and virtually) know, responded to my describing my novels as “contemporary”, and then proposing that maybe, since today’s kids (such as that daughter above, at Sunday lunch) are taught the 1980s and 1990s as “history”, I maybe qualify as writing “historical” fiction. This fellow writer even indicated that I would need to do plenty of research! Time flies (and as my great aunt, born in 1876, used to say with a smile, you can’t, they fly too fast! in true Victorian and Edwardian humour style). Sunday lunch — for an example of 1980s living: first, off to the (organic) butcher’s to buy the joint on Saturday. Then on Sunday morning, prepare the veg and the batter, put joint into hot oven, disappear t...