There are plenty of things in my childhood that no one else seems to remember. Sometimes, late at night, when everyone else is asleep, I think about these Things, and I try to find them using Google, typing in things like, “Hello Google, I’m looking for that one thing from the 1990s where there was a boy and a thing happened,“ but there are no results.

Maybe you can help me. Maybe you’ve heard of one of the things on my list. Maybe you too, fellow person, have experienced the same things I have, seen the same things I have seen, have the same memories of the same crap that I do.

Wizard of Oz game

I have a memory of my dad helping me to play a computer game at school. I was only around four or five years old at the time. I don’t know why my dad was at school and why he was showing me a computer game. He wasn’t a teacher. I can only guess that he volunteered to help teach kids how to use a computer. Though it is also possible that he broke into the school to steal things and he decided to show me a computer game while he was there.

The computer game he was based on The Wizard of Oz. All I can remember is a puzzle where you had to help Dorothy, the Scarecrow and the Tinman cross a dangerous ravine. The solution was really easy – I think you just had to lay a plank of wood across the ravine and then the characters could use it to walk across – but I was little and crap at the game and I didn’t know what to do, probably because I’d never played or even seen a computer game before, but my dad tried to stay patient, trying to stay patient with his idiot son who doesn’t even know to place a plank down to cross a ravine.

Anyway, I am not sure what game it was exactly or even if I am remembering it right. There were several Wizard of Oz games out back then, but none of them seems to involve a puzzle where you have to cross a ravine with a plank of wood. None of them has my puzzle.

Flying sofa advert

This was a TV advert in the 1990s. Two boys are sitting on a sofa. One boy pulls out a snack (I think it was crisps – maybe Wotsits – but it could have been a drink like Tango?) and eats it. But this is no ordinary snack – as soon as he takes the first bite, they're transported to another world! They're still sitting on the sofa, but now the sofa is now flying through a canyon! They see weird shit, and the kids are like, "Wooooah! This is AWESOME!" Then suddenly the effect wears off and they're home again.

Despite hours of googling, hours and hours of googling until my fingers were raw and dripping with blood, I could not find this advert anywhere online.

Book about a video game

I read a book about a kid whose dad is a video games designer? And the dad disappears – I think he had been framed for a crime he didn’t commit? And the police was after him? And the kid receives a video game on a floppy disk from his missing dad? And the kid is supposed to play the game and beat the final level because when you beat the game, it unlocks files that prove the dad’s innocence? But the kid never realises this, not until the end of the book? This kid had the evidence all along, the entire time?

I remember being very impressed by the idea that a dad could make a video game. I wanted to make video games myself. In fact, I think I wanted to be a video games designer, but then again, so did everyone.

Anyway, I can’t remember what this book was.

There was another book I remember (or maybe it was the same book) where there are a bunch of kids who have never seen a smiley before and they don’t know what smileys are (smileys, emails and the internet were new back then) and one of the kids realises that you have to turn your head to see the smiley proper ("It’s a SMILEY FACE!" one kid gasps in amazement) and they’re all happy like they’ve discovered the secret to reading hieroglyphics.

Keen Types

This is not one I remember, but something my dad remembers.

He says he is in the opening credits of a TV programme called "Keen Types". This program aired in the early 1980s, I guess. It was a programme about weightlifting? My dad was an amateur weightlifter (v. amateur as this photo attests).

Anyway, I have googled all kinds of variations of the words keen types and have found nothing. I’m beginning to think he’s made it up just to sound a bit famous.

He says it was presented by a man called Tom McLean. He says this man does panto now.