Timeslip moment again...
Our trusty TARDIS has thrust us headlong into 1991 - the year of the final demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the "Cold War", the creation of fifteen new post-Soviet states, Boris Yeltsin climbing atop a tank in Red Square, end of apartheid in South Africa, Sunday trading, Canary Wharf, Tim Berners-Lee, Truth or Dare, the IRA mortar attack on 10 Downing Street, Operation Desert Storm, The Commitments, Jack Kevorkian, the collapse of Yugoslavia and ensuing war, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) fraud scandal, Edward Scissorhands, Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, Chancer, the Mount Pinatubo eruption, Rodney King, France's first female prime minister Édith Cresson, civil wars in Sri Lanka and Ethiopia and El Salvador, Magic Johnson, Stella Rimington, and (Everything I Do) I Do It for You being at #1 for fifteen weeks; the births of Johanna Konta, Jedward, Louis Tomlinson, Sonic the Hedgehog, Pixie Lott, PC World, the National Gallery's new Sainsbury Wing, the Big Issue, the Citizen's Charter and bloody Ed Sheeran; and the deaths of Freddie Mercury, David Lean, Margot Fonteyn, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Lee Remick, Dr. Seuss, Miles Davis, Robert Maxwell, Michael Landon, Gene Roddenberry, Yves Montand, Graham Greene, Eric Heffer, Thames Television and TV-AM.
In the news in May 1991: HM The Queen's official visit to the USA, the trial of Winnie Mandela, Croatia's declaration of independence from Yugoslavia, the Israeli rescue of thousands of Ethiopian Jews from that country's civil war in "Operation Solomon", Sony's announcement that it was to build a new factory in Bridgend with 1,400 jobs, and the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi; in the ascendant (literally) was first British person in space Helen Sharman (who spent eight days with the researchers on the Russian Mir space station), but we bade a very sad farewell to "that effing lady" Miss Coral Browne, and to TV comic Bernie Winters. In our cinemas were Misery, Mermaids and Silence of the Lambs. On telly: the snooker-based game show Big Break; Lynda Bellingham and James Bolam in Second Thoughts; Richard O'Brien's The Crystal Maze.
And what about the UK Top Ten this week twenty-eight years ago? The eternal Cher was at week three of her five-week reign at #1 with The Shoop Shoop Song (It's In His Kiss), and also present and correct were Crystal Waters, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Cathy Dennis, Electronic, Beverley Craven, Blur, Zucchero featuring Paul Young, and a re-working of Tainted Love by Marc Almond.
And this one!
Fab-u-lous!
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