Staying alive in 85: looking back on a fascinating end-of-year roundup | Life and style

The Observer Magazine’s end-of-year round-up for 1985 riffed on an anti-nuclear Katharine Hamnett slogan T-shirt of the time: ‘OK, you stayed alive in 85, now get a fix on 86.’

A picture of a newborn baby just about staying alive days after the disastrous earthquake in Mexico City was a reminder of the dozen or so such ‘miracle babies’ that were rescued.

‘If the lasting images of the year turn out to be of Bob Geldof at Wembley, Princess Diana in the White House and Nancy and Raisa holding hands in Geneva, this will merely demonstrate once again humanity’s happy knack of partial recall,’ stated the editorial.

Which was more than could be said for Ronald Reagan, who apparently addressed Princess Diana at her first White House visit in October as ‘Princess David’ and then ‘Princess Diane’. The next month he was in Geneva to meet Soviet Union leader Princess Michael – sorry Mikhail – Gorbachev for the first time.

Domestically, there was the miners’ strike, inner-city riots and that staple of the decade, football hooliganism, but better news for the beleaguered BBC, ‘beset by Thatcher and Murdoch’, which ‘looked to a rat to save the ship, and signed up Roland from ITV’.

A ‘casualty list’ brutally dispatched Sir Clive Sinclair, who ‘wheeled out his £399 C5 pedal dodgem. Would lorry drivers see it? Would anyone? The receivers cycled in.’ And there was the rather alarmist reaction to the £1 note being discontinued and replaced by the £1 coin: ‘The £1 in the wallet gave place to the £1 in the pocket – designed to erode the toughest Terylene.’

A young Tim Roth was correctly tipped to be big after his screen debut in The Hit and forthcoming appearance in King of the Ghetto, and Joanne Whalley didn’t do too badly either, featuring in Dennis Potter’s brilliant Singing Detective the following year.