With Christmas now out of the way for yet another year and the chance for us to start paying off the credit cards over the next 12 months, maybe it’s time to reflect on a time when life seemed so much simpler. The time when an air of excitement buzzed throughout every household whenever Santa delivered the latest must-have toy on Christmas Day. By this, I’m not referring to a Playstation 2 or Nintendo Gamecube, but the joys of un-wrapping your pressie and finding maybe a Rubik’s cube, Connect Four or Operation.

Isn’t it amazing how toys have developed over the years? In fact a number of the popular board games of yesteryear are still available today. I know. I’ve bought most of them, in a desperate attempt to recapture my youth. The earliest toy I can remember must be the classic red-framed ‘Etch-a-Sketch’, released originally in the states in 1960 having been designed in France. Nowadays there are over 100 million units in circulation and to this day drawing a perfect circle still remains almost impossible. An interesting challenge for any late night party after a few beverages. One interesting fact that I did find out about this little masterpiece of engineering however was that on its 25^th Anniversary in 1985 the company released an ‘Executive Etch-A-Sketch’ model. It featured a hand-carved signature on its silver frame and each knob was covered in jewels. It’s price a mere $3,750. Even I’m not sad enough to spend that much money. To find out more www.etch-a-sketch.com

Remember the Little People? Fisher Price took responsibility for this. It was your chance to let your imagination run wild. Not only was there the classic Fisher Price garage with working lift and car ramp, but also an aeroplane, hospital and many other accessories available. Fisher Price were also responsible for that really stylish record player, that didn’t even play real records. It was a music box wind-up device that played you a choice of about 10 tracks available on 5 coloured plastic platters. My career spinning discs, as you can see, began from an early age.

Two great recent films to have helped many people, including myself, relive memories of stuff which we all kept in our toy boxes as youngsters, are Toy Story 1 and 2. Bringing back those memories of plastic parachuting soldiers, ‘Etch-A-Sketch’ and ‘Mr. Potato Head’, to name but a few. But also featured is the View Master. Remember that? A very simple camera-style toy, through which you could watch stories as a 3-D slide show. Simple, but effective and it’s still available to buy.

Lego for many children also played an integral part in growing up and still does today. Lego is sold nowadays in over 100 countries and it’s estimated that to date, over 300 million children have owned Lego sets and at present 68 million sets are owned worldwide with pieces to be found at home, at the bottom of the family fish tank or buried in the garden for no apparent reason. It’s amazing how we could spend hours on end building something amazing, only to crash it into the carpet or wall and have it end up in pieces minutes later.

To be honest, remembering exactly which toys I grew up with isn’t that easy; some come instantly to mind, whilst other memories seem rather fuzzy. Did I ever have one of those or did I just stare at the television every time the advert came on and wish I had one to play with. I may have owned one of these, I can’t recall, but it was cool (or at least the advert told me it was). MB’s Big Trak. You could make it do anything you wanted. Turn here, move there, fire weapon, fetch me my lunch. It was simply a computer controlled dumper truck. You programmed it and told it what you wanted it to do. As a result, you could successfully smash it into your parent’s furniture and then get sent to your room for being naughty. Growing up in quite a small house in Birmingham, it wasn’t a very clever purchase and at the time it was also quite expensive. MB’s other electronic release around the same time, proved to be more successful, ‘Simon’. An electronic game which could be played by 1 or more players and you simply had to follow Simon’s lead and copy the series of colours placed around Simon’s almost flying saucer like body.

Another electronic wonder which you may remember was ‘Merlin’. It was red and looked somewhat like a rather large mobile telephone with a 10 digit keypad and speaker. It was an innovation of it’s time as far as I was concerned as a kid and gave you the choice of a number of games, such as Tic Tac Toe, Blackjack and others, including the ability to be able to program it to play popular tunes. If you fancy downloading a copy of a Merlin emulator for your PC, complete with all the original sounds, check out www.neilcarter.net/DownloadsPage.htm It kept me happy for hours.

“What walks down stairs, alone or in pairs,
And makes a slinkity sound?
A spring, a spring, a marvellous thing,
Everyone knows it’s Slinky…”

Eighty feet of coiled spring and to be honest, it couldn’t really do that much. All it did was as the jingle said “walks down stairs”, but it was cool nevertheless. It was designed by a naval engineer by accident when one of the tension springs he was working on fell and started to “walk”. The original Slinky to date has remained pretty much unchanged for about 50 years, so they must have got something right. What fun we had, my brother and I, annoying our Mom and racing our Slinkys down our stairs. Nearly as much fun as playing marbles. Playgrounds provided the perfect battle field. However adding to your marble collection took many hours of dedicated decision making, what do you buy with your pocket money? Gobbies, Pearlies, Cat’s Eyes, clear ones, small ones, and the choice was endless, as was the names given to each different type over the years. The most heart breaking game though was playing for keeps, not if you won, but if you ended up losing all your marlies.

It sounds too simple really, a game where 2 people play each other and try to get 4 colours in a row, be that in any direction (horizontal, vertical, or diagonal) and outsmart their opponent (and try to put in 2 discs of the same colour at the same time if they weren’t paying attention). ‘Connect Four’. God bless Milton Bradley, MB Games. If you’re ever up for a challenge, just let me know. I pride myself as a bit of a player in the ‘Connect Four’ world. You’ll never know what hit you. Please let me win, otherwise I’ll cry.

Other classic board games included ‘Operation’, where you had to remove various body parts using a pair of tweezers and you weren’t allowed to touch the sides otherwise the patient’s nose would light up and the buzzer would sound. The good ole days eh? ‘Monopoly’, ‘Cluedo’, ‘Mouse Trap’, ‘Buckaroo’, ‘Ker-plunk’, ‘Hungry Hippos’, ‘Guess Who?’, ‘Hangman’ and many others I’m sure bring back fond memories, however I think I’m running out of space. So we’ll leave these maybe for another time.

Before wrapping things up though, there are still 2 more things I have to mention, without which, growing up may have proved a little boring.

The Rubik’s Cube, invented by Hungarian, Ernö Rubik, really hit it big in the early 80’s when it was brought to the US. The challenge was to jumble and then unjumble the 6-sided cube to a point where each side was a different colour. To some, or to be honest, to most of us, this sometimes reached a level of annoyance only overcome by taking it apart and then realising the last cube wouldn’t go back in or where the floor ended up being covered with coloured stickers as they were ripped off in desperation and put back in the right places. The Cube has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different possible configurations. One, and only one, of these possibilities present the 'solved' Cube. If you allowed one second for each turn, it would take you 1400 million million years to go through ALL the possible configurations. To unscramble it the current world record stands at 16.5 seconds. I personally used to be able to do it, but having forgotten most of the required moves I now only manage 3 sides competently. To prove how much of an impact the cube had on our culture the term ‘Rubik Cube’ even has its own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.

And finally. Twister. Where players take turns spinning the little plastic arrow provided around a small board with four quadrants - right foot, left foot, right hand, and left hand. If your arrow lands on a green square in the “Right Foot” corner, for example, you have to find the green spot that is the easiest to reach with your right foot. It’s amazing what positions you can get the human body into nowadays. From its original release back in 1966 to date it remains a household favourite and a must have for any party planner. Anybody fancy a game of naked Twister?

[Next month Neil Carter takes a look at Classic Children’s TV shows and you can catch Neil on BFBS Radio 1’s Weekday Breakfast show from 6 til 9am. Check out his website @ www.neilcarter.net ]