Margate. It’s the perfect example of Morrissey’s seaside town they forgot to close down. Except now it’s coming back. I spent last weekend at Dreamland, the theme park established in the 1920s but which reached its peak during the 80s when it was one of the UK’s most-visited attractions. Margate’s a strange place. Handsome on the one hand – though morphing into Hackney-on-sea with Swedish coffee kiosks – but on the other: empty shop fronts, closed pubs, 64% Brexit.
Still, you go to the seaside and you forget about things. If there’s one great thing about eating chips from a newspaper it’s that you are not reading the newspaper – which, at present, could be ripped from the 1980s itself.
Labour has a leader popular with acolytes but unfathomable to the wider electorate. “He’s popular!” Corbynites say, as though Michael Foot wasn’t popular with the home crowd before losing 52 seats in the general election. As though Orange Juice weren’t one of the best bands of the 80s without ever scoring a No 1. Strikes are screeching the brakes on Southern rail. Phil Collins, too, is circling (announced in a New York Times article with the headline “Phil Collins Is Very Much Alive”). Horrifically, we’ve even seen Militant’s Derek Hatton back on our screens. A guy who took over Geoffrey Howe’s “managed decline” of Liverpool then disappeared to Cyprus to earn a fortune from property deals.
Across the pond, Donald Trump, who is so 80s that he should still be carrying a brick mobile phone a la Michael Douglas in Wall Street and wearing a double-breasted suit, is unavoidable. He even nicked his campaign slogan from Reagan (the 1980 version was: Let’s Make America Great Again).
But this apparent harking back to the decade that decent architecture forgot has to have some good points, right? Of course: that Jürgen Klopp might restore Liverpool FC as a dominant force. There’s the matter of “mum jeans” being back in fashion; a pass to wear what is basically a stonewashed, cushioned denim nappy with all the comfort that suggests. But the best thing about this #TBT to the 80s? The programme I settled down to watch on my return from Margate: Stranger Things.
You need to watch Stranger Things too. It’s the Netflix series that brings together the best of the decade, the Smash Hits, if you like, of the 1980s. You’ve got Winona Ryder; Winona Ryder’s cheekbones; kids riding unimpeded on bicycles, grassy of kneecap and allowed out past 5pm; Joy Division; the two Stephens (Spielberg and King). It’s as if you have stepped out of a poster Blu-Tacked on to a prefabbed wall and straight into recording the radio on a C86.
Stranger Things is hugely comforting in its sci-fi creepiness. Yes, it’s about a disappearing child and aliens. But at least children disappear because of special effects and not because they’ve been obliterated into dust by an Assad rocket. Sure, bullying happens; but it’s silenced with the school bell and doesn’t carry across apps into blue-screened evenings. The friendships in Hawkins, the fictional town in which it is set, are pure John Hughes. Guys with quiffs never take their hands out of their jackets or the gum from their mouths, and their idea of fun is mucking about with the lettering on the “Now showing” board at the cinema. There is not a Jigglypuff (that’s a Pokemon reference) in sight.
The Duffer brothers, creators of the show, summed up its appeal when they said of their childhood: “There was this sense that we might find a treasure or whatever, and go on this huge adventure.” It’s this appeal of childish huge adventure that has seen a fan mural pop up in Salford.
Best of all, the show is (so far) just eight episodes long. So you can watch the whole thing in the week, and still have time on the weekend for some Trotskyite Twitter banter and a night at an ironic roller disco. Nostalgia: it’s made a comeback, and Stranger Things is perfect respite from our own strange times.
