The 19 things that weren't nearly as good as you remember them

Telegraph

11-07-2025

The past is a foreign country – and, according to most people of a certain age, they do things differently and almost certainly better there.
With those rose-tinted spectacles on, everything from our youth seems glorious: the music, the cars, the fashion, the tech (or lack of). But was it? Or are we just extremely good at blocking out the bad bits of life from several decades ago?
Sometimes our nostalgia radar gives off some wildly inaccurate readings. Here are 20 things which are capable of inducing sickly sentimentality but were, we believe, entirely rubbish, even at the time.
Pre-digital TV
Kenneth Clarke's Civilisation series remains, over half a century on from its initial broadcast, the BBC's high water mark of arts and cultural programming. But before any rants about the demise of the 'Golden age of television' gather steam, it's worth remembering that, directly before the first episode, BBC Two broadcast The Jimmy Logan Show, a godawful cabaret-type shambles with a Caledonian theme, featuring the eponymous presenter singing the likes of I Love A Lassie and Song Of The Clyde.
For every Civilisation there were two dozen Jimmy Logans on the BBC and ITV in the analogue era. We've filtered Little and Large, Strike It Lucky and The Grumbleweeds from our memories – and quite right too. There is more good television on demand available at the click of a remote today than you would have found in a decade of watching Granada or Tyne Tees in the pre-digital era. Having only three or four channels was rubbish. And the introduction of a fifth in 1997 really only made things worse.
Woolworths
We bought our first seven-inch singles, our worst-ever shoes and our own body weight in cola cubes and gobstoppers from Woolies. But that was only because there was nowhere else to go on a Saturday morning, unless you fancied hanging out at the butcher's. There was always something slightly Soviet about Woolworths: low-quality goods on rickety shelves, staffed by people with all the motivational zeal of an elderly sloth. The truth is, if Woolworths re-emerged tomorrow, you'd never, ever go.
The BBC test card
Daytime television may be a Pot Noodle for the eyes – seemingly designed to keep the old, infirm and unemployed in a state of energy-sapped apathy. But it's positively stimulating compared to the past reality of staring at a still image of a small girl playing noughts and crosses with a pernicious-looking clown, set to a soundtrack of Ersatz Bossa Nova performed by an orchestra too tepid to land a cruise ship gig. If Orwell had lived into the 1970s, you can bet that something like the test card would have flickered on Winston Smith's telescreen between the Two Minutes Hate and bulletins from the Malabar Front.
C&A
The real surprise is that C&A didn't shut down in this country much sooner, given the risk of electrical fires sparked by the sheer weight of polyester, acrylic and nylon packed into every store. Picture an episode of Are You Being Served?, put the entire staff of Grace Brothers on a course of Xanax, add chrome to every surface, and you have a typical C&A: racks of clothes so frumpy that even Dot Cotton, were she around today, might decide she'd do better on Vinted. The fact that branches of C&A still exist – and thrive – in towns and cities across provincial Germany tells you everything you need to know.
Landlines
We should never feel nostalgic for an era when etiquette (in middle-class homes, at least) meant starting a conversation not with 'Hello', but by trilling 'Banbury, 35712' in a voice uncannily like Thatcher's before she hired a voice coach. Expensive, unreliable and thoroughly uncomfortable if the phone was stuck in the downstairs hallway, the real curse of the landline fell on teenagers. They had to stretch the cord into the downstairs loo and try to chat up the object of their affections, all while dreading the moment someone upstairs might pick up another receiver and bellow, 'Get off the line!' Dating under those conditions was hell – the kids don't know how lucky they are.
Compact discs
'They'll withstand anything', went the credo at the time of their launch. It turned out there were a few caveats to 'anything' – like a bit of dust or dropping them on a soft carpet. CDs are unfairly placed on a nostalgic pedestal as the last hurrah of music as a physical product. But in reality, their heyday coincided with the final greedy push by record company bosses, who slept soundly while charging upwards of £13 for a single disc in 1996. Executives from that era are, if there's any justice, now working in Carphone Warehouse, while we listeners wallow in 27-hour Spotify playlists that cost less than a tenner a month. Consumer revenge, it turns out, can have a most seductive melody.
The A-Team
To paraphrase Mr T, pity the fool who feels nostalgic for this odious gruel, dished up on ITV on Saturday teatimes. Genuinely, every episode was exactly the same. If you were lucky enough to avoid every series but are still curious, here's what happened: a helpless person turns to a vigilante gang, who cobble together a homemade weapon and then toss the bad guy around the floor in a Benny Hill–meets– Scarface crescendo of cartoon violence. That's it. You can go back to watching This City Is Ours now. You missed nothing.
Britpop
Just as punk gave us two good bands (the Sex Pistols and the Clash, obviously) alongside a barrage of horrible noise, so the Britpop era – now three decades behind us – produced about half a dozen decent songs (Common People, Girls and Boys, Live Forever, and you can pick the other three yourself) and an astonishing amount of limp, student disco dreck that wouldn't have scraped onto a Searchers B-side in the Sixties. If you remember Sleeper, Kula Shaker, Cast and, heaven help us, Menswear, then you're unlikely ever to feel too misty-eyed about this cynical musical moment. For everyone else, dig around on Spotify and remind yourself just how weak and thin the vast majority of it really was.
The weekly music press
Across the country, groups of elderly men can be found in pubs lamenting the demise of Q, Record Mirror, Melody Maker and the NME over pints of real ale, their tote bags stuffed with Steely Dan live albums. They're wrong. The music press may have given us Nick Kent and Julie Burchill, but it also inflicted Tony Parsons and a blitzkrieg of some of the most pretentious drivel ever put into print. At its worst (roughly the mid-Seventies), albums were always 'sonic cathedrals', a band's second album was invariably described as 'a sophomore effort with a more widescreen sound', and drummers in live reviews were inevitably 'no slouch behind the kit'. Insufferable bilge – whose demise remains one of the internet's greatest victories over conceit, tedium and unwashed hair.
Telegrams
Imagine waiting for an email telling you you didn't get the job you were gunning for. Now stretch that wait to four hours or more, delivered by a 14-year-old on a bicycle, then endure the extra indignity of trying to decipher a message written in a style that makes cuneiform look straightforward by comparison. Punishingly expensive and often incomprehensible, telegrams were only useful at weddings when the best man could announce, to everyone's relief, that 'Uncle Hector and Aunt Phyllis sadly can't make it, but send their congratulations,' from their converted pigsty in the Fens.
'Spend, spend, spend!' shouted Viv Nicholson when she won £152,300 on the pools in 1961. Playwright Jack Rosenthal wrote a brilliant dramatisation of her story. But it also helped cement the myth that 'doing the pools' was somehow more ethical and pure than today's National Lottery. It wasn't. The football pools were absolutely rubbish. The odds of winning were usually worse than the Lottery's, and the payouts were comparatively small. If you want proof that life was duller and more parochial not so long ago, look no further than a pools coupon.
Blue Peter
Those who claim Blue Peter represents 'proper and appropriate television for children' are only saying so in a desperate attempt to manage the ongoing psychological trauma of their own school days – when they probably spent most break times with their heads forcibly submerged in the lavatory pan. Nobody liked Blue Peter, and admitting you watched it was about as helpful to your playground popularity as having BO and eating fish paste sandwiches for lunch. If you have children yourself, part of ensuring their future health and happiness is to mete out strong punishment if they're ever caught whistling the theme tune.
The 'old' Radio Two lineage of DJs
The truth about Radio Two is that it never really changes; you just get older and start appreciating it more. There's nothing wrong with the new crop of DJs like Vernon Kay and Scott Mills – in fact, they're a vast improvement on the old guard. Never get nostalgic about Derek Jameson, whose voice sounded like he had halitosis capable of clearing a football stadium. Wogan proved that innocent listeners can suffer psychological injury from passive whimsy, and as for Jimmy Young and his 'recipe of the day,' it's hard to feel sentimental about an era when reading out cooking instructions for ham and banana hollandaise was considered a proper use of licence fee payers' money.
Town centre cinemas
Yes, you could walk to them, and they were cheaper than a trip to the multiplex at the edge of the retail park. But the ABCs, Cannons and Odeons of yore were pretty filthy, seedy places all told. Try as you might, you'd struggle to consider the reclining seats in today's air-conditioned picture houses as anything less than a luxury compared to the ordeal of visiting a one-screen town-centre flea pit. The seats seemed made of horsehair and cardboard, the only drinks on offer were flat orangeade and coffee that tasted as if it had been scooped from a pig trough. Then you'd have to tolerate the bloke sitting next to you, invariably smoking a pipe and fiddling furtively with the inside of his raincoat – a distressing sight at any time, but especially during screenings of Last Tango in Paris.
Crackerjack
'It's Friday, it's five to five, it's… time to consider emigrating to any part of Papua New Guinea without television reception.' If you only caught this BBC kids' variety show in its final, early Eighties death throes – hosted by the maniacally creepy Stu 'Crush a Grape' Francis – consider yourself lucky. The true horror was dealt to kids of the 1970s, whose Fridays were ruined by the likes of Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart, Don 'Yes, I had a bath this morning' Maclean, and Peter Glaze, whose rendition of David Bowie's Golden Years (which you can find on YouTube) is a gargantuan musical mismatch.
Teasmades
They never went off on time, brewed vile-tasting tea, were heavier than a bookcase, and everyone who owned one gave up after about three weeks – because you could never remember to put milk in the mug the night before. We'd all love to be woken up with a brew in the morning, but by now we should have realised the best way to do this is to have a partner who anticipates your needs – or just train the kids to use the kitchen kettle.
Parkinson
The recent AI-generated Virtually Parkinson series confirmed what those unclouded by nostalgia always knew: being dead might actually have improved his interviewing style. Watching original episodes of Parkinson is a harrowing ordeal, as he repeatedly manages to reduce conversations with some of the most fascinating cultural figures of the late 20th century into a pseudo-avuncular snooze-fest, peppered with questions that carried as much intellectual heft as an ice cream van jingle. As an interlocutor, Parkinson made Lorraine Kelly seem like Christopher Hitchens – only with a Yorkshire accent and infinitely worse suits.
Cigarette machines in pubs
You didn't actually get 20 cigarettes in a pub vending machine pack. You got 16 or 17, wrapped in cellophane that proudly displayed the reduced number – just to make absolutely sure you knew tobacco companies were laughing at your addiction while charging you for a partially empty pack of Rothmans. These machines weren't convenient. They were an outrageous con.
Dinner parties
'I used to like it when people invited us over to dinner,' is a common refrain among the misguided and deluded, usually muttered as they wait for the Just Eat man to deliver California rolls from three streets away. This yearning for the era when we'd don high heels to stand in our own kitchens, creating nouvelle cuisine that looked like wallpaper stains on square plates (and tasted even worse), is a monstrous failure of memory. Dinner parties were the nemesis of the 1980s: a three-course brag-a-thon among Alpine-altitude social climbers whose only redeeming feature was the possibility they might choke on their poached pears with red wine before regaling you with yet another anecdote about their Sinclair C5.