RETRO: New Year Special

7:10am Thursday 1st January 2009

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HAPPY New Year to all Retro readers. Is your head throbbing as you try to read this? Is the text before your eyes swirling? Is there a pink elephant sitting next to you?

If your answer to all three questions is yes, you’re probably enjoying a wild New Year’s Eve. If your answer to just the last question is yes, you’re probably suffering some sort of breakdown. Hooray!

Is there a better way to celebrate the new year than looking at News Shopper’s first editions from 1972, 1982, 1992 and 2002?

Of course there is, but News Shopper doesn’t pay me to drink, despite my attempt to make it a clause in my contract, so let’s look at those newspapers.

Readers picking up the first News Shopper of 1972 were alarmed to see a social services chief strangling a teddy bear while glaring at them from the front page.

Fortunately he hadn’t become crazed with power and embarked on a teddy bear massacre, and was merely collecting toys for needy children as part of a News Shopper campaign.

The first edition of News Shopper in 1982 publicised the launch of the acting career of Jude Law.

Jude, just eight years old at the time and living in Lee, played the titular egg in the pantomime Humpty Dumpty at the Eltham Little Theatre.

He has of course gone on to star in many big Hollywood films, but personally I think it has been all downhill for him since he played an egg that could not be put back together again in Eltham in 1982.

There was grim news in the first News Shopper of 1992 with a report on the suicide of a 29-year-old man.

The headline of SKIPPING ROPE FOR SUICIDE conjured images of the man skipping until he died from exhaustion, but the painful truth was that he hung himself with the rope.

Photographs of people throwing frozen turkeys greeted readers of the first News Shopper of 2002, and it was not a unique way of criticising mother’s Christmas dinner.

Staff and customers at the Lord Holmesdale pub in Bromley took part in a turkey-throwing contest to raise £400 for firefighters affected by the September 11 terrorist attacks.