1990s School Summer Holidays Were All About TV

Parental guilt springs from an inexhaustible source. Even if your kids go to sleep every night safe, clean and fed, there’s still plenty to beat yourself up about. Are they creative enough? Excelling enough? Getting enough Vitamin D to stop their bones from crumbling like Oxo Cubes and their adult teeth from coming in like a splayed hand of playing cards? 

Are you, in short, doing everything you can to give them The Best Possible Childhood?

In online parenting circles, The Best Possible Childhood has recently had a rebrand. Bloggers have looked with concern at the device-blue light illuminating the faces of kids who hiss like a pointy-toothed Bilbo Baggins hissing for the One True Ring whenever an attempt is made to separate them from their phone. They’ve decided that what today’s kids need is what they had: the 1990s. 

In an act of collective amnesia, or perhaps having confused children for cattle, the new wisdom has declared the 90s a golden age of meadow-romping and rockpool dipping for kids. Building dens! Riding bikes! Catching fireflies in jars, taking your Tamagotchi to the beach, and playing impromptu games of rounders with the kids on your cul de sac! Learning the dance moves to Whigfield’s “Saturday Night” and performing them unselfconsciously in a shell suit for fun, not digital likes. In other words: halcyon days.

They’re misremembering. School summer holidays in the 1990s were about one thing and one thing only: watching TV.

Okay, two things: watching TV and walking to the Spar to buy the occasional Push Pop. Plus pretending that your living room was a cinema by charging your friends and siblings 10p to watch a VHS of The Mysterious Island introduced by Jon Pertwee. So that’s three things. Also: the Radio 1 Roadshow. Four things and four things only then, but no more.  

Thank the broadcasters, and thank parents whose understandable and pressing need to go to work led to the ballsily optimistic belief that a 10 year old could be adequately supervised by the family dog. Done right, a typical day’s viewing of school summer holiday might include:

Cow and Chicken/Johnny Bravo/I Am Weasel et al.

Making good on its promise to “Fill you up ‘til lunchtime”, The Big Breakfast offshoot The Bigger Breakfast kicked off at 9am with chat and a revolving carousel of Cartoon Network shows. Cow and Chicken, Johnny Bravo, I Am Weasel, Dexter’s Laboratory… nutritious, anarchic US comedy was the first course of the day.

Maxie’s World

Who was Maxie? Just your average straight ‘A’ student, cheerleader and surfer girl who solved crimes and hosted her own TV show, and one of a range of Hasbro fashion dolls. Maxie, as the song explains, is a girl on the go. She wears bikinis, takes her surfboard to school, rides dolphins, and cures eating disorders with friendship. According to the somewhat insipid promise of the theme, “good times are happening in Maxie’s world” and you know what, they probably were.

Pugwall/Pugwall’s Summer

Peter Unwin George Wall: he’s got a dream, he’s gonna make it. If there’s a chance he’s gonna take it. Long before Fleabag broke the fourth wall, Pugwall did in this upbeat Australian teen series about a boy, his annoying little sister Marmaloid, and his band the Orange Organics.

Saved By the Bell

Such a stalwart of UK summer school holiday TV that by the late 90s, Saved by the Bell came with the label “Classic”. This high school-set teen comedy needs no introduction here. It’s Saved by the Bell, if you’re reading this, it probably was your childhood.

Bug Juice

American summer camp felt like an unbelievably glamorous prospect to British kids whose only comparable experience would be a Scouting/Girl Guides Jamboree. This late-90s reality show about teens in Maine provided a tantalising taste.

Sister, Sister

Sassy, hat-wearing American teenagers were a seam the US sitcom mined well in the 1990s. This twins-separated-at-birth sitcom starring Tia and Tamera Mowry was the aspirational backdrop to many a summer holiday morning.

Renford Rejects

With a theme song by the Manic Street Preachers and guest stars up the wazoo (Another Level and Harry Redknapp: together at last!) this British Nickelodeon show knew football was life before Ted Lasso was even a twinkle in Jason Sudeikis’ eye.

Madison

This Canadian high school drama is so rich with thoughtful discussion about sensitive themes that it’s no surprise it started life as an educational aid for real-life schools.

California Dreams

More beautiful Americans of the surf-dudes-with-attitude variety. These fellas were feeling mellow and living a life that wasn’t just kinda groovy but also wildly inaccessible to a Year 8 living in Peterborough.

Hang Time

Before Cobra Kai gave us American high school teens learning life lessons and the importance of teamwork, there was Hang Time, about an Indiana basketball team shootin’ hoops, chillin’ out, maxin’, relaxin’ and what have you.

The Secret World of Alex Mack

Larisa Oleynik played teen Alex Mack in this US sci-fi about a creepy town dominated by a shady chemical plant that gave our hero super powers after an accident that, by rights, should have had Alex sitting pretty on compensation money for decades.

Eerie Indiana

Another apparently wholesome American TV town that hid dark secrets, this anthology-style show about weird happenings was the spiritual descendant of The Twilight Zone. No 1990s childhood was complete without it.

Light Lunch

A pre-Great British Bake Off Mel and Sue here, larking about in their midday spot.

If you’d made it this far through the day’s programming, then it would have been rude not to catch the lunchtime airings of Home & Away and Neighbours, before spending the rest of the afternoon playing Disney’s Aladdin on the Sega Mega Drive and then hurriedly tidying up all the empty supermarket-own-brand crisp packets, unclipping the bulldog clip from the living room curtains, letting the dog out for the first time since breakfast, and pinching your cheeks to pretend to your parents that you’d just returned from an invigorating day of gadding around meadows and were now ready to settle down with the family in front of the, what do you call this dusty thing again, a tel-ev-ision? Sounds fun, let’s see what’s on.