Big beds, short skirts and hard crosswords (From News Shopper)

Big beds, short skirts and hard crosswords

11:29am Thursday 11th December 2008 in

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JUNE 1985 saw dozens of people pushing beds through the streets of Bromley at a frantic pace, and not because an economic downturn had forced them into stealing a place to sleep.

They were taking part in a charity bed push, a contest which saw teams from local pubs racing to be the first to push a bed from the Crown Inn, Shirley, to the Swan Inn, West Wickham.

Each team was sponsored and around £10,000 was raised for local hospitals and fire services.

There was also a best dressed bed contest, with many competitors taking a trip to their local slimming club to find a dress as big as a bedsheet.

Bed pushing sounds great fun, but nobody had as much fun as News Shopper readers in 1985, with the introduction of a colouring-in page in the newspaper.

That’s right, readers were given a pretty picture to colour in with their crayons, and I’m told if they coloured within the lines they could phone the editor for a congratulatory message.

There was also a crossword on the page, with picture clues. I’m stuck on seven across — there are seven letters, starting with an O, and a picture of a sea-creature with eight legs. If you can help, get in touch.

Many adult readers who had excelled at colouring within the lines were disappointed when they first noticed the Junior World title at the top of the page.

Most chose to ignore it — why let age classification spoil your fun?

News Shopper’s Night Life columnist Neil Taylor didn’t care if people looked down upon his idea of fun in 1985: encouraging women to wear mini-skirts.

Some people called the adults doing the colouring-in sad. Some people called Neil’s campaign sad. It didn’t stop them and it didn’t stop Neil.

In his May 16 column he featured a photo of two women in tiny skirts and wrote: “The campaign will feature all sorts of articles and photos.”

So, with bed pushing, colouring-in and mini-skirt campaigns, News Shopper was the newspaper to read for hard-hitting, serious news in 1985.