Edwina Currie - Or Should That Be "Eggwina"?!

From the "Sun", 18/11/1988: junior health minister Edwina Currie was famous for opening her mouth and not engaging her brain. Here, she avoids a parking ticket, but there is more than a touch of "let them eat cake" in her advice to a humble traffic warden to buy silk long johns, £26 a pair from Harrods! Somehow, I grew to like Edwina. I don't really know why. The 1980s were far more varied than simply "greedy". By 1988, the decade had gone from being a poor, recession hit deelybopper wearing, Rubik's Cube twirling geezer, to being a garish, big haired, big shoulder-padded, extragavantly fund raising yuppie, to being an absolutely off-its-rocker old weirdo, playing host to the likes of acid house and Edwina...

One of the big political scandals of the late 1980s involved Junior Health Minister Edwina Currie and her assertion that most of Britain's egg production was infected with salmonella. Cue hasty resignation and lasting fame.

I blamed all the fancy food we commoners were able to scoff in the 1980s. We were getting dead posh as the decade progressed, eating grub we'd never had before, some of which involved undercooked or even uncooked eggs. Before the 80s, your best chance of getting egg-related quilly-quobbles was if you took Fanny Cradock's advice and made an omelette that was "wet in the middle", as she insisted: 

"Then it's really delicious!" 

My word for it was "poison". 

But in the 1980s we, the great unwashed, ate things like fresh mayonnaise, soufflé, Oriental soup with uncooked egg dropped in it, and all kinds of other strange and wonderful eggy things.

I personally believed there was little wonder we were having problems.

Was there something to what Mrs C said about salmonella? Some readers of the Sun, 22/12/1988, certainly thought so... 

The arrogance of farmers is unbelievable. They pollute the water, the food-stuffs, the atmosphere and now chickens.

Because they are too mercenary to feed unfortunate battery hens with anything other than the ground-up bodies of slaughtered birds they have created a salmonella crisis.

They even have the gall to ask for compensation because Edwina Currie told a few home truths... 

Battery hens had been a controversial issue long before the 1980s... 

Why this sudden hysteria about eggs causing salmonella? It is simply because Edwina Currie talked about it.

In the Sixties people like myself warned that eggs could be a health risk.

At last the hen may be getting her revenge. The problem will not go away until these poor caged birds are kept in a more humane way, where they are not able to peck at sick or dead hens... 

UGH! 

I cannot understand why, after poisoning a number of people, the egg industry should see fit to sue Edwina Currie. She acted in a responsible fashion by exposing the industry for what it is, and those who have issued writs are contemptible. 

Still, not everybody was convinced that the eggs woz bad... 

I am 90 years old and have eaten an egg every day of my life. I have only had to see my doctor once in the last 20 years, and that was with flu. Not much wrong with eating eggs, I'd say...

1988 - Environmentally Friendly, Red Nose Day, Clause 28, Lesbians Invade BBC News, Acid House, Roger Rabbit, Eggwina, Political Correctness,

In the June 1988 European elections, the Greens won an unprecedented number of votes. The Green Consumer Guide was published, soon becoming a bestseller, and we were worried. There was global warming, rising sea levels, a hole in the ozone layer... something must be done. It was around 1988/1989 that I noticed the new environmentally friendly products in the shops. They were all completely bio-degradable, no harm to anything. I, in common with many others, bought LOADS. Great - the only trouble was, they didn't clean things. My sink cleaner left a chalky deposit all over it and had the bog cleaner really got the bog hygienically clean? I had my doubts.

Still, something had to be done. When our mothers had gassed us with excessive amounts of hairspray in the 60s and 70s, we'd thought nothing of it, but now we did. "It's all your fault, Mum!"

Thank heavens for mousse and hair gel!
 
Acid House enthralled the kids and worried the grown-ups.

Militant lesbians, protesting at the introduction of Clause 28, burst into the BBC News studio on 23rd May 1988. Having evaded BBC security, they arrived as Sue Lawley and Nicholas Witchell began the bulletin. Nicholas battled with them off-screen, famously sitting on one of them, whilst Sue struggled on with the news. Read all about it here.
 
Political Correctness seemed a bonkers thing in 1988. The trend for being sensitive about whatever you said seems to have started with that poor excuse for misandry, the feminist movement. Around 1987, we began to hear of Political Correctness. A few examples: prostitutes were suddenly sex workers, which was perhaps fair enough, but pets were now animal companions; mentally and physically handicapped/disabled people were to be referred to as physically or mentally challenged and woe betide you if you were sizeist or fattist. 
 
It didn't do to offend anybody at all after the horrible Bernard Manning years of the 1970s and early 1980s, so a bald person should now be called follicularly challenged. Actually, this was usually said tongue in cheek, but I did come across several social workers at work in the late 1980s who used it perfectly seriously.

Some devotees of Politically Correct language I've met since then are honestly intent on not offending anybody. Others are prigs, pure and simple. 
 
Nowadays the PC scene is far more confusing, corrupt, and much further removed from logic. It started off as a commendable concept, in theory, but like so many things put to use by people has become warped and distorted.

It's almost like a form of mental illness, with 'in' words being 'out' at the drop of a hat. Trying to negotiate it is a nightmare.

Somebody apt to put her foot in it in the late 1980s was Junior Health Minister Edwina Currie, who briefly became known as EGGwina Currie over the salmonella in eggs scandal. Read more here. 


On the telly, the genius of Cosgrove Hall brought us a new hero - vegetarian vampire duck Duckula - more here.
 
In the ads, we were fascinated by Texas Tom, of the Texas DIY superstores chain, somebody who quite definitely was not what he seemed! Meet him here.