You will need:

- Cardboard box card
- A pair of old trainers that you won’t need again
- Sticky tape
- Scissors
- Pen
- Newspaper
- PVA glue
- Tissue paper (or loo / kitchen roll)
- Paint

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Bluebird A La Cart Kitchen None-too-subtle reinforcement of gender stereotypes for the Daily Mail readers of the future Ah, another rough diamond from the school of “training the housewives of tomorrow”. Many is the generation of little girls that was saddled with plastic ironing boards and carpet sweepers from an early age (all the better to brain your little brother with), and many the house that was cluttered with all the paraphernalia of pretend cleaning without any real cleaning actually getting done. This particular primary-coloured party-pooper was a complete kitchen set with oven, hob, sink and fridge on a handy moveable cart - hence it’s “a la cart”, geddit? However, it’s ingrained itself on the nation’s collective memory primarily through the advert, in which a small girl got up unfeasibly early in order to potter around for a few hours, knocking bits of plastic together in a brisk but pointless way, and eventually arriving in the parental bedroom to feed her dad cold baked beans and arctic roll in bed from a plastic saucepan (”Wake up daddy, breakfast’s ready”). He at least had the unshaven grace to pretend to look happy - we can only imagine how a genuine parent might react. However, whilst this sorry display surely says something rather serious about the division of household labour in the late 20th century, we’re not quite sure what (although we’d love to know the whereabouts of “mummy”). Besides, if that child is so keen on cleaning, surely “daddy” can find a chimney to shove her up? NB - We know the product illustrated left is not yer original Bluebird kitchen, but for some reason we couldn’t track down a photgraph of the blessed thing. Has all record of this estimable gender reinforcement plaything been wiped from the Earth? If you have evidence, we’d love to hear from you.

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70

Tonka truck Mini JCBs Tonka was THE name in building site toys. The hardwearing, hard-hitting (particularly if one was dropped off a wall onto your head) playthings were the delight of young boys (and tomboy girls) everywhere. Best known for their trucks, Tonka made rock solid, die-cast metal vehicles, with real rubber tyres and tough-as-old-boots paint jobs. To paraphrase Henry Ford, they came in any colour you liked, as long as that colour was yellow. Unlike the toys of today, they were genuinely built to last. If you were to play “chicken” with a Tonka Truck and any other vehicle of the time, there was absolutely no question who was going to come off worst. You could smash them into anything and though they’d get chipped and dented, they would still outlast your parents’ car. You could even leave them out in the rain. Although they would eventually rust, by such time you’d have grown up, moved home and forgotten about them. Every boy wanted one, to be in charge of such a destructive construction vehicle - but such engineering quality came at a price. If you were lucky enough to get the Fire Engine or Dumper Truck for Christmas, you probably didn’t get much else that year. But it was worth it, because they’d still be there the following Christmas, battering hell out of any new trucks on the block. Eventually, we’d all grow out of them, but somewhere out there is a scrap yard, filled with the six-inch high hulks of slowly degrading Tonka trucks. Presumably there’s also a driver, sitting bored in the cab of the huge Caterpillar bulldozer that’s shifting them, who can’t see the irony.

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80

Rainbow Brite Lurid squidgy rag-doll and all her friends Like the Care Bears, My Little Pony (q.v.), and many many more, this overpriced doll and her garish companions were more like a worrying cult-in-the-making than a toy, born of an obsession with pretty colours and rainbows and cutesy names and everyone being bloody happy all the bloody time. According to the mimsy flimsy back-story, Rainbow Brite lived in Rainbowland in a rainbow-shaped house (available separately) and had seven individually coloured friends, including Redd Butler (can you see what they did there?) and Patty O’Green (we can hear the cod Oirish accent still, begorrah). Each doll also came with a “Sprite”, which was sadly not a free can of fizzy pop but in fact a sort of over-engineered pet gonk (Ms Brite’s was called Twink). In the obligatory cheapo cartoon tie-in, she would fight the dismal forces of Murky and Lurky and bring happy colours to the world. In the real world, however, her nasty squishy consistency and scratchy glittery texture made her a doll that even the soppiest of softies would find it hard to love. She lacked the homespun patchwork cosiness of Holly Hobbie, the novelty air-freshener stinkiness of Strawberry Shortcake, and even the leftfield Angela Rippon involvement of Victoria Plum. She was, basically, just too darn dull. And it didn’t take the most imaginative of brothers to start dreaming up alternative variations on her surname, either.

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