Something a little different now. Sometimes when you look in old cupboards you find unlikely things. A while back I found an old edition of the London Evening Standard from May 1995. No idea why we still had it, there are a few pages missing so maybe someone wanted an article and mislaid it so it ended up still being around for years afterwards. So I have decided to have a look through some of the pages and point out a few things that you might find interesting and give something of an idea of where the Evening Standard and the world in general was almost 20 years ago, long before social media.
Page 1. The main headline on the front page is “NATO WAR JETS STRIKE BACK”. The Evening Standard (“incorporating The Evening News“) cost 30p in those days, of course it is now free. The weather? “Rain”. As it’s a Friday there’s a plug for the magazine (“Why London will be top of the world”) but unfortunately I haven’t still got that. There’s also a gamecard that could make you a millionaire! 
Page 4. It’s surprising now to look back and realise how few pages are in colour. Celine Dion is very pleased that her single “Think Twice” has gone triple platinum and there’s a Tower Records advert for Alison Moyet’s new album.
Page 8. Features a political cartoon by “Adams” (“JAK is on holiday”). Could anyone ever decipher what was supposed to be going on in these? This isn’t something that you don’t get in the Standard any more. 
Page 13. There’s a full-page article on Peter Cook who had died earlier in the year, with a picture captioned “shortly before his death”. Better than a picture of him taken just after his death I suppose.
Page 22. A piece on “The OJ Trial” which has now entered its 17th week.
Page 29. The “Weekend” section starts, featuring the latest TV and film news. Because the Standard isn’t published on weekends or Bank Holidays, we get four days worth of TV and radio listings, hoorah!
Page 31. The “Mr Pepys” column. Seemingly one of those gossip columns. Among other things, Mr Pepys predicts big things for an up-and-coming 23-year-old TV presenter. I wonder whatever happened to her? 
Page 35. The Victor Lewis-Smith column. He was a TV critic in the Standard for many years and known for being very bitter, hardly liking any of the shows that he reviewed and making lots of bad taste jokes. But today… gosh… he really likes the show that he has reviewed! It’s the sitcom Men Behaving Badly, described as “a perfect mix of speed and timing” and “brim full of quotable lines”. He concludes by referring to the production company that made the show Hartswood Films, which was part of Thames. “You remember Thames, from the days when London had a TV station it could be proud of?”. On the same page there’s an edition of Gary Larson’s crazy one-panel cartoon strip The Far Side. 
I’ll bring you the second half of this review including looking at the TV listings, business news and sport pages later.
ADAM'S NOSTALGIC MEMORIES 