The decade now known as the 1980s was a simpler time.
There were no grey areas. Things were black and white.
Everybody knew what side they were on.
My houseboy at the time called himself Mr D - in fact, his name was Dennis, and he had bad breath, a pallid complexion and a disease of the mind that left him unable to use prepositions in his speech.
I always had the very devil of a job understanding his narratives in terms of time and space.
But that is another story.
I was in my 80s at the time - coincidentally.
But Dennis kept me up with the news, reading to me about Mr Reagan, Mrs Thatcher, the nuclear arms industry and such.
Such bad people.
Nowadays, everybody seems so terribly nice - Mr Obama, that nice Mr Key, young Aaron Gilmore ... But the decade is brought back next Sunday, thanks to the nice people at the National Geographic Channel.
The '80s: The Decade That Made Us begins on that channel at 7.30pm. It sounds a winner.
There are interviews with David Hasselhoff and Joan Collins, Michael J. Fox and Jane Fonda.
It covers the likes of Pacman, Sony Walkmans and MTV.
Sadly, considering the possible depth and breadth of the subject matter, it is truly disappointing.
It begins with moving pictures of young people riding skateboards, of Ronald Reagan being shot, of Mr T, of cocaine and of J. R. from Dallas.
Then, forgetting the rest of the world exists, it gets stuck for about 20 minutes on an ice hockey game at the 1980 Winter Olympics between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The protagonists (on the US side at least) were working class kids, apparently, struggling with high inflation, high unemployment and the shame of terrorists being mean to US citizens.
But they win through - they beat the Ruskies!''Emotion - guys just huggin' each other, cryin','' one player remembers fondly.
''If I could bottle that, I'd like to see our country feel that way again,'' another emotes, patriotically remembering a better, simpler time.
Hit Me with your Best Shot, by Pat Benatar, plays in the background.
And it doesn't get any less Americo-centric.
Episode two is titled The Revolutionaries - and it is not about the September 1980 Turkish coup d'état.
Instead, it covers the rise of Steve Jobs and the launch of 24-hour news (in the US).
From there we cover Madonna, shopping, gadgets and Wall Street, before episode 9 brings us coverage of the fall of the Iron Curtain, ''leaving America as the world's sole superpower''.
And all that leaves us with only one conclusion: The '80s: The Decade That Made Us has quite a different understanding of us than we have.
- by Charles Loughrey
