Angel Delight
If the manufacturer, Birds, asked for two words to perfectly sum up what just happened in your mouth after placing a spoonful of this weird substance into it, neither Angel nor Delight would enter your mind. This 'instant dessert' begins its life as an innocuous powder whose horrific destiny remains cloaked in anticipation and whimsy. However, you then have to get off your arse, go to the fridge, open the fridge, remove a bottle of milk, open the milk, add a specifically measured out quantity of milk to the powder, whisk the abominable marriage of liquid and powder that acts like it doesn't want to be in the liquid until your arm gets really tired (8 seconds) and then leave it to slowly congeal for ten minutes whilst you put the top back on the milk, put it back in the fridge and then put the empty Angel Delight packet in the bin. Under which trades description act is this considered instant? Instant shouldn't involve all that manual labour and waiting around. Even instant coffee requires the boiling of a kettle!! A twix is instant! Maybe they should start calling them Instant Twixes? However, I digress... Once you've managed to concoct this pink gloopy violation against nature which looks more like something that would fall out of the back of a unicorn, you can finally tuck in. Angel Delight always reminds me of the day I discovered my gag reflex. I'm aware that some people find this entire debacle acceptable and eat tons of the stuff but consider this: There's the pink flavour but they've also sold it in the following flavours : Black Cherry, bubblegum, popcorn and butter mint - it's as if the texture wasn't enough to send you to the bathroom to shave your tongue.
American Cream Soda
The pop man (a bloke with a drop-side flatbed pickup with various bottles of fizzy drinks on the back) came in many guises in the 1980s. There was the Villa pop man, the Corona pop man and the Armani of the fizzy drinks delivery vehicles, the BARR pop man. They would travel around the neighbourhood hawking glass ridged bottles with metal screw caps in crates of as many litres as your sinuses could handle before you passed out from the resulting nosebleeds. Then, the following week, you'd return your empties and receive a deposit of ten English pence as a kind of delayed discount. Flavours were as exotic or as common as you'd like; whether you were a straight lemonade person or a dandelion and burdock person (nobody has ever seen a burdock in the wild by the way, they're a complete myth), they catered to your taste and removed your teeth by slowly dissolving them in sugary volcanic fluids over a period of weeks. The milkman tried to get in on the act towards the back end of the 80s by delivering orange juice in milk-bottles with orange foil lids but we knew better - that was healthy and we were buggered if we were putting anything other than he-man jellies, chewits and flying saucers in our mush, all washed down with non-diet extra-caffeinated double strength Panda Cola. Then came Asda and Kwik Save with their smart price cola by the gallon and the memory of the pop man faded. One thing that never faded however was the memory of American Cream Soda. Whether you loved or hated it, you never forgot the flavour. It was called cream soda because it was meant to taste of ice cream and some lunatics would actually put ice cream in the drink itself so that you got a lovely greasy film on the top and ruined both things at the same time. The original drink back in the 1800s was made with egg whites and flour, which the Victorians believed were the ideal ingredients for a refreshing drink. Idiots.
Arctic Roll
It's bad enough combining sponge and ice cream in the first place (or 'crossing the streams' as I call it) without choosing sponge which tastes like it's been infused with Michael Owen's personality and the ice cream equivalent of being punched in the face. The ice cream I talk of is the type you find in Screwballs; it stays frozen for about twelve seconds after taking it out of the freezer before the whole dessert collapses into a kind of vanilla sponge puree. I think people bought them in the 80s because they were 3p each and had the word 'arctic' in it, which sounded exotic, Like Polar Bears and Eskimos. Quite who allowed them to call this a 'dessert' however, needs to be removed from the dessert naming council along with whoever allowed Macarons to exist. These people are the true enemies of society.
Babycham
There were quite a few ways to achieve underage drinking with a degree of legitimacy in the 80s. Top Deck, Rum Raisin Chocolate, Chocolate Liqueurs at Christmas and what was advertised as 'a bit like champagne but a 'baby' version so it's alright to give to your kids on new years eve', Babycham. It had Bambi on the front for a start and it was sweet and fizzy! In what world did they think kids wouldn't be interested? Their advertising campaign featured a bloke who looked like he could bench-press a polar bear going up to the bar, overhearing someone order a babycham only to interject, look meanly at the bar tender and say (in a voice so butch, it had it's own set of testicles) 'Hey, I'd love a babycham'. 'Wow', I thought, 'it's not just a drink for those of a feminine persuasion, even huge blokes into weightlifting and wrestling (both of which involve spandex and one of which involves sweaty men sitting on other equally sweaty men) like it'. So, at the age of thirteen on New Year's Eve, I'd wade through four bottles of the stuff and pass out under the kitchen table with half a melted wispa stuck to my face. Good times.
Ice Pops
Ah, the days of thinking that 10ml of diluted cordial, pumped into a long thin plastic pouch which had been frozen could satisfy your every need. When you analyse the humble icepop, it becomes apparent that, had someone charged you 5p then defrosted one and served it to you in a thimble, you'd be outraged. Yet here you were, trying to get the thing open, losing two teeth and an eye in the process, borrowing your dad's band-saw to finally get the NASA sealed polythene open then sucking all of the cordial out of the mixture, getting brain freeze three times and then tipping it upside down to drain the last droplets of overflavoured syrup into your now furry gob. And to this day, nobody knows what flavour the blue ones were. Some will try and convince you that they were raspberry but don't believe them - raspberries are not blue. I've seen one. Ice pops of course had an evil cousin, that was the 'tip top' carton which was sold in some underground corner shops at room temperature. It masqueraded as a drink and allowed you to pop a thin red straw through its thin plastic lid to 'enjoy'. However, proper, wholesome corner shops froze them into a fat short ice pop. Sucking at one of these for about three days removed all of the cordial and left behind a small block of ice which was no use to anyone. Still, for 10p, it gave you something to do and you saved loads of money on actual meals. The modern equivalent of the Ice Pop and the frozen Tip Top is the Callipo - somehow managing to combine the horror of both at fifteen times the price.
Lucozade
Whenever I think about being ill in the 80s, it reminds me of two things - Heinz Tomato Soup and Lucozade. Lucozade these days is all isotonic this and sports drink that but I remember when it came in one flavour; woodlouse. Wikipedia describes Lucozade as a 'slightly orange-flavoured' drink. It was as slightly orange flavoured as the inside of my belly button. It came in a horrible orangy-yellow bottle wrapped in the loudest cellophane known to mankind. I think Lucozade might be a descendant of that 'cure all ailments' tonic that travelling salesmen would sell outside the circus in cowboy days. It was originally called 'Glucozade' in the 20s before diabetes was invented and then marketed as an energy drink in the 30s with the slogan 'Lucozade aids recovery'. It took Daley Thompson to convince people you could drink it if you were healthy and John Barnes to convince us that it was in balance with our body fluids. Let's just take a minute to think about John Barnes' body fluids. Done that? Good. I was always suspicious of drinks that wouldn't tell you what flavour they were. Tizer and Vimto were like that - they'd sneak things into your body before it was law to put the ingredients on the back and then when they were forced to by the nutrition police, they made things up like safflower and black carrot. Nobody knows what they are! Cosmetic products these days advertise on TV with phrases like 'Now containing Splankadank bean extract and hydro-anti-firming-night-agent-ahol'. We lap it up because we assume it must be good for us. Not me however, I'm still suspicious of things that aren't named after their ingredients. If it's not called Lemon drops or beefy fingers, I'm not eating it.
Um Bongo
I'm not so sure the advert for this fruity drink was accurate you know. It told us that it was concocted by a Hippo, a Rhino, a Python, a marmoset and a Parrot. The reason I don't believe this is that I don't think that lot would get on without eating each other never mind form an effective and efficient team where they respected each members choice of fruit to enter the cocktail. Just imagine trying to make an alcoholic punch for your house party by canvassing opinion as to what should go into it, then ejecting the person who suggests putting Baileys and Tequila in it. If it was up to me, the Python would be out of the committee because it picked the Passion Fruit which has no business here or anywhere there are civilised people. Also, the Rhino was given exclusive naming rights probably because nobody argued when he said 'I know, we'll call it um bongo'. There's also no empirical evidence that anyone in the Congo actually drinks this stuff.
Tab Clear
I used to love it when this was available in the shops because I could do my 'packet of tabs' joke. It would probably still be funny today if it was still on sale. It was purported to be Coca Cola but clear. I never understood what that was all about - why sell a drink that tastes exactly like another drink but change the colour? Whatever the reason, I had exactly one can of the stuff, thought it tasted like being thrown off a bus and then it disappeared from shops within the year. Most people obviously agreed!
These would be great in a zombie apocalypse or in a nuclear winter. I think the use by dates are about fifty years in the future aren't they? Tinned pies. Who thought of putting a pie in a tin? In fact there are worse things I've seen in tins. For beginners, tinned 'burgers' (covered in lard), which reminds me of that meat you can buy that's in the shape of a bear's face to get kids to eat it! Anyway, back to the point; canned whole chicken(!), ox tongue(!) and prawns(??). You. Don't. Put. Prawns. In. A. Tin. If memory serves, you don't even open the Fray Bentos tin to cook it. They always came in one of those hampers you ordered to come three weeks before Christmas which always had one of those disgusting caramel jelly puddings that would sit at the back of your cupboard until you had a new kitchen fitted twenty years later. You'd find it sitting on top of the Fray Bentos pie which was still in date and looked strangely tempting.
Orangina
The slogan for this was 'Shake it to wake it'. The last thing I want is my drink becoming sentient before I imbibe it. The selling point for this was the funky shaped bottles which masked the fact you were getting just two sips for three times the price of fifteen time the volume of comparable orangeade. It was the Perrier of fizzy orange and it had bits floating in it. You have to shake it to fluff up the bits so they didn't all come out in a disgusting lump of orange pulp like drinking from a spittoon. It's only weirdos who buy orange with pulp and only the really weird weirdos who pay over the odds for a barely discernible hint of fizzy orange with floating debris.
Capri-sun
Sardines. Has there ever been a product whose contents are as unworthy of the amount of effort you have to put in to open it? A tin of sardines is like one of those 'escape the room' games. You have to locate a key, attach it to a sliver of metal which is cunningly hidden under the livery and once attached (using your degree in physics) you can begin the 'unwinding' process. It takes at least an hour to complete, makes both of your hands spasm into a kind of claw which you're unable to move for at least another hour and creates a razor-sharp metal edge that could make light work of a coconut. Then you look inside the tin, wretch, and tip the contents into the bin and go and get an apple instead. There were many products on sale in the 80s that were near to impossible to open, especially if you couldn't find the tin opener and found yourself stabbing at the top of a can of soup with a carving knife. These days of course they have ring pulls and other genius solutions, however, Capri-sun continue to persist with the quasi-foil packet which is impossible to pierce. They give you a straw and they've helpfully shaved one of the ends into a scalpel to make it 'easy' to pop into the 'entry point' which is signified by a small round silver target. However, when you finally manage to exert enough force to penetrate this foil disc, your grip on the pouch is such, all the liquid inside comes squirting out into your eyes, disorientating you, covering the lino in slippy fruit juice and sending you to A&E via the air ambulance. Either that or you can snip the top off with a pair of scissors; of course, you'll just need to free the scissors from the hard plastic clam-shell packaging and diamond strength twist-ties clamping the scissors together first.
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