Shoulder pads, synthesisers and big hair... why it's the '80s all over again

While the City fell under the control of a new breed of champagne-drinking yuppies, the rest of us had to make do with the Berni Inn, Angel Delight and Crispy Pancakes. We wore snow-washed denim, pedal pushers and puffballs. No one, bar perhaps Madonna, ever looked good in the 1980s.

However, time is a great healer and 25 years or so since the last snood was sold, the decade most were happy to see consigned to history is on the verge of a comeback.

The first signs of an '80s revival were seen last year. Shoulder pads returned to the catwalk, leg warmers enjoyed a renaissance and even the Kevin Keegan perm briefly came back into fashion.

Pop acts like Little Boots and La Roux dominated mainstream music, finding an audience who were too young to remember synthesisers and big hair the first time around. Both wore their '80s influences proudly on their sleeve and now the revival is spreading from the world of music and fashion to film and television.

A quick glance at the list of forthcoming releases shows just how tight the '80s grip on the cinema is about to become.

Sequels to Tron and that defining, dark satire of the 1980s Wall Street are due out by the end of the year. A film version of The A-Team looks set to be the blockbuster of the summer, and remakes of Footloose and The Karate Kid are also in the pipeline.

On the small screen, with Ashes to Ashes continuing to prove a ratings winner for the BBC, Channel 4 is about to get in on the act. The broadcaster has commissioned a four-part drama picking up where Shane Meadow's '80s inspired film This is England left off and it has also helped fund a new film about Bradford's Andrea Dunbar whose play Rita, Sue and Bob Too, was one of the decade's cult hits.

But what exactly is driving this cultural revival? Professor Duncan Petrie from the department of theatre, film and television at the University of York, believes a number of factors are at work.

"The powerful people in the cultural industries and the media are always nostalgic for their own youth," he says. "The studio executives who commissioned these films were teenagers in the 1980s and it's natural they want to remake the kind of films they remember fondly. Something like Footloose was what we call a great date movie, and now they're trying to make the format work for a young audience today.

"Also, Hollywood responds to whatever else is happening in culture at any given time. If music and fashion is '80s inspired, then the big studios also want a slice of it."

The '80s are often described as a decade of greed. Given the recent backlash against bankers' bonuses and politicians' expenses, its guiding principles should now seem horribly flawed. However, Prof

Petrie believes the period's driving ambition continues to strike a chord.