Success for Blackadder and Sting in 1983
WE step back to 1983 for this week’s trawl through the Sunday Sun archive.
We hope the last 35 years have been good to the girls in our front page picture.
Lynne Laws, Jane Aubrey, Monica Carroll, Catherine Wallace and Lynne Gilmore were posing for a publicity photo in November that year.
Balloons at the ready, they were celebrating the official opening of Leazes Arcade.
Located on Leazes Park Road, not far from St James’ Park, the arcade contained shops and, for a while, a restaurant and live music venue called the Jewish Mother.
The building had started life as a synagogue in the early 1900s.
Gutted by a fire around 1990, these days the wholly refurbished building plays host to flats.
Thirty-five years ago, in the wider world, the Tories under Margaret Thatcher won a landslide victory at the General Election, with the voting public shunning Michael Foot and Labour.
This was also the year of the £26m Brinks Mat robbery at Heathrow Airport; the Walton family stunned the world of medicine when healthy sextuplets were born at Liverpool’s Oxford Street Hospital; and the prolifically successful racehorse Shergar, was kidnapped in Ireland, never to be seen again.
In news from overseas, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space when she joined the crew of the space shuttle Challenger; a terrorist attack by a suicide bomber destroyed the United States embassy in Beirut, killing 63; and the world’s population was estimated at 4.72 billion - and rising.
Back in the UK, this was also the year seatbelt use for drivers and front seat passengers became law; an IRA bomb exploded outside Harrods in London; and CND organised marches and rallies against the deployment of US cruise missiles at Greenham Common, an RAF base in Berkshire.
In the world of entertainment, 1983 saw us flocking to the cinema to see films like Flashdance, Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, and Educating Rita.
In pop, North Shields-born Gordon Sumner - otherwise known as Sting - and his band The Police had one of the biggest hits of the decade with Every Breath You Take, while there were big-sellers for Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie.
And on television in 1983, November brought a new comedy-drama series, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet charting the exploits of three Geordie bricklayers and their workmates in Germany. Other new offerings included Blackadder, Blockbusters, and rival news programmes Breakfast Time and Good Morning Britain.
Finally, in the United States, Motorola was selling the first mobile phone for a cool $4,000 (£2,600) - or nearly £9,000 in today’s money!