Media

I don't remember much about the things I used to watch at that age. I think it was probably because I didn't watch a lot of TV, I made my own entertainment, played with my barbies, read books, painted, drew or made dens. I liked cartoons though, catching them after school or on weekend mornings. My favourites were old favourites, the Loony Tunes and Tom and Jerry. I remember running downstairs whenever the theme tune came on for the Loony Tunes, excited by the prospect of another fun short where animals talked and bunny rabbits outwitted sneaky hunters in very funny ways. I also liked the Pink Panther, another smart animal that made humans look hilariously stupid. Of course I had no Idea at the time that these cartoons were ages old and just happened to be repeated occasionally when I was growing up, I only knew that I liked them a lot.


I do remember more recent cartoons, such as 'The animals of farthing wood' which were nice but they didn't interest me as much, I liked the animals, and the fact that they talked, but they were still to real I guess, not interesting enough, they weren't funny enough. And after watching Watership down, a film so similar in its style to the animals of farthing wood, I could never go back to it. The rabbits die!

When it came to films I was open to anything with animals in it there seemed to be a lot with talking rodents, The secret of Nimh, Fifel goes West, The Rescuers, The rescuers Down Under, American Tail. I guess it must have been a craze or something at the time, but I loved them. I also loved anything that Disney made. We used to go to the video shop up by my school with a huge array of kids films. We watched them all, my sister and I, at least one a week.


We didn't have a PlayStation till they were cheap enough for me and my sister to go halves with our birthday money and buy one for £100 from that same video shop as the owner began introducing games. I was around 8 or 9 then I think so I won't go on with that. We did have a computer though, I'm sure at that stage. A really old DOS model with no mouse, only a keyboard. Games came on floppy disks and everyone in the household was addicted to lemmings at one stage or another.


I think 7 year olds now would be more in tune with media entertainment than I perhaps was at that age. Of course Barbies still exist and I used to play with those, but I liked setting up their houses rather than actually playing houses with them. I would make Items of furniture for them, dress them up and decorate the rooms but had little desire to actually act out anything with them. I preferred life sized roleplay even if it was the fantasy 'ebwa' world, I could pretend I was something else. I also loved to dress up, we still have the fancy dress costume today, full to the hilt with ex charity shop goodies that me and my friends would dress up in and be whatever we wanted to be, princesses, space explorers, witches, monsters... anything. We'd perform plays or puppet shows that we'd invented for the adults to watch. I tended to choose social fun and interaction while at home rather than be stuck in front of the TV or computer. It seems times have changed, screens have got bigger, more colourful, less static and with better quality sound and picture- theres more now that will pacify an active child with all the bright colours and theme tunes like sirens.