Eighties life still ideal for some

Masterton fanboy AJ Hunter, who went to the 1985 world premiere of Back to the Future in LA, with then girlfriend Laurie de Santis atop the DeLorean from the film. FILE PHOTO

YOU SHOULD never underestimate the energy and nostalgia of those who lived through the eighties.

Yesterday a TV film crew visited Masterton to film those who were attending the screening of eighties cult flick Back to the Future, on the day and time the hero was supposed to appear in the future.

Star Wars technically had its origins in the late seventies but thrived into the eighties. Now the hype around the seventh Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, is colossal.

It is also obvious, when viewing the Times-Age Facebook comments, particularly around Thought of the Day, that we have plenty of eighties fans. A basic question on Best Movie Line earlier in the year yielded more than 100 offerings, the bulk of them from eighties classics.

It is likely the second movie of Back to the Future, set in 2015, postulated a world without newspapers (and a world with hoverboards). We assumed computer technology would advance to the point of Star Trek. Yet we continue with newspapers, just as we do with internal combustion engines, watches that tick, paperback books and knitting.

The inertia, the weight of several generations, and the values we have, means that civilisations do not simply surrender the past just because the digital age can make things easier.

And I think that this is instinctive. I suspect deep down we know that to completely embrace a digital environment would be to surrender to the strengths that make our species viable. In short, we would become soft and coddled - and probably illiterate.

The newspaper model continues because it is a model that suits the generations who are natives to reading from paper - they'll read books the same way. The future will offer integrated digital newsfeeds, combining radio and print, and obviously news websites are hardly new. Right now, it may feel that news comes to you for free, but in the eighties, you paid for it - it wasn't online. Paying for news you value, it seems, is one eighties item we've easily shed.