Five things I learnt from vintage Argos catalogues

I went to the National Library again on Friday, after having seen a blog post by one of their librarians about their growing collection of home shopping catalogues. Given that I am now the world’s foremost researcher on Octogo Games Limited,¹ I thought that this was a perfect opportunity to see if I could add to my collection of sources on the company’s history, which I really should collate and put online one day.² So I requested the Argos catalogues from Autumn/Winter 1989, and from Spring/Summer 1990, which was about the peak of Octogo’s prominence, to see if they stocked any of the games.

Sadly, they did not.³ But I did still learn a lot from my visit, and, if you’d like to read on, I’d love to share it with you.

Gas-powered hair tongs were a thing

Let’s start with one that, I can only assume, my older readers might remember, but that came as a complete surprise to me when I hit the subheading “Gas-powered tongs and brushes”. (The benefit, in part, seemed to be that you didn’t need to plug them in.) I can’t place exactly why that sounds like a bad idea—I thought originally something to do with wet hair, but that’s a potential danger for electricity, not gas. I guess it’s just that having a canister of a highly explosive substance in a consumer device that you use near things like, I dunno, your eyes feels like an unnecessary risk, by today’s standards.

But then attitudes to risk were evidently different in 1989, given that the catalogue proudly tells you that they “are permitted on planes in checked-in luggage and hand luggage”.⁴ (The refill canisters weren’t, so that’s okay.) I was going to write a joke here about how I couldn’t test out whether they were allowed on planes, not because I didn’t want to be arrested but because I wouldn’t be able to buy one any more. That’s when I stumbled upon the fact that these things apparently still exist, and Argos still sell them. Deeply concerning.

You could make an interactive game using VHS

Do you remember the wave of “DVD games” that were a thing in the mid-noughties? I don’t mean video games shipped on a DVD-ROM; I mean things that you could put in a DVD player and “play”. The specification for a standard video DVD doesn’t let you really program anything, but what you can do is create layers of nested menus, leading to video clips which lead you to other menus, and thereby allow the player to make choices that make different things happen. Blu-rays would later allow some Java programming, but I’m not sure it was ever used to make a game.

VHS tapes, however, encode a single end-to-end video, so you can’t even use the hack-y method that DVD games did. But that didn’t stop enterprising toy manufacturers. Enter the Tyco Video Driver, a plastic steering wheel that you used in combination with a VHS player and “a colour television with a 13–20 inch screen size”; it came with one tape, and two others were available. According to the Sega Retro wiki, it worked by having a sensor, controlled by the wheel, in front of your TV, which detected flashing lights that the wheel could use to tell how well you were driving. But then take this with a pinch of salt, because it also says that the “Police Pursuit” tape “was never officially released”, which can’t be true because it was catalogue number 360/2670 in Autumn/Winter 1989.

“Artificial intelligence” is nothing new

Those who know me⁵ will know that, while I don’t underestimate the real-world effects that generative AI is having, I am deeply sceptical about the idea that it will fundamentally change the world.⁶ It is, of course, always dangerous to try to predict the future, and so I look forward to looking back at this with rueful laughter when Emperor ChatGPT is sufficiently satisfied with my work down the mine that it allows me five minutes’ recreation as a reward.⁷ What I can say about right now, though, is that I think that almost everything currently billed as “artificial intelligence” would not be getting half as much excitement if nobody had thought to brand it in that way.

And I was not remotely surprised to learn that this has been going on for a while. In 1989, under the heading “Toys with Intelligence”, Argos would sell you something called Voyager, made by Texas Instruments, which came in the form of a headset. The smart technology that this seems to have had is voice recognition of four words: “true”, “false”, “yes” and “no”. A child would look through the two-in-one book and give one of these answers to questions provided by the headset. In the example in the catalogue, the headset is asking “Is this Tyrannosaurus rex?”, and the child is answering with an emphatic “YES”—concerning, really, since from the photo they’re either not reading the dinosaur part of the book, or they’re looking at it upside-down.⁸

I presume you would agree with me that, from a modern standpoint, this is not in any meaningful sense,“intelligence”. But I also hope you would agree that, from the standpoint of 1989, that technology was probably quite impressive.⁹ I’ll leave you to draw your own parallels about how intelligent large language models are.

The “No copyright infringement intended” disclaimer had a precursor

You might have seen this if you’ve looked at old TV clips on YouTube. It’s written almost like a talisman in the descriptions of videos that are absolutely copyright infringement, and often comes alongside an assertion of something like “This is fair dealing under the CDPA 1998.” This doesn’t work any more than it would to take someone’s car, but leave them a note saying “No theft intended. This is fair taking under the IWYSA 1965.”¹⁰ If anyone who’s done this is reading this: the reason you haven’t been prosecuted isn’t that they’ve said the magic words; it’s that nobody cares enough about that episode of Sale of the Century you uploaded to do anything about it.¹¹

I should be clear at this point that I’m not about to say that Argos did anything illegal, whether or not it was a law anyone cared about. But I do find it funny that page 311 in 1990 tells you about the “high-speed dubbing” feature available on some of the cassette decks, which let you “copy from another cassette at speeds much faster than normal playback”, and then when you flip over you see a disclaimer about the Copyright Act 1956 at the bottom of page 313.¹²

Saying something is “attractive” doesn’t make it so

Talking of magic words… Some words that appear in catalogues are definite claims about a product, even if they relate to its appearance. If you offer to sell someone a blue cushion, and after they’ve paid present them with a red one, they’d have cause for complaint. I think this also applies of more-subjective words: it may not be clear exactly how heavy a pram can be while still counting as “lightweight”, but if you need to be a competitor on World’s Strongest Man to pick it up then it’s a fair bet that you’re over that threshold.

Some words, though, are so subjective in meaning that, in this context, they’re essentially meaningless. If you describe a brass mask ornament (available in both catalogues I looked at) as “attractive”, who’s to say that it isn’t?

Me, that’s who.

I’d love to show you what this looked like, but I agreed when taking photos of the catalogue (to help me write this later) that they were for personal use and not for publication. Fortunately, I think I’ve found it on a vintage shop’s website, so go look at it there. The one in the catalogue looks like that one would, if it were polished so extensively that the shine would cause light pollution.

Sure, tastes change, so maybe this would have looked great in a living room the early nineties. I don’t know; I wasn’t there. Maybe, in fact, you love it. But if it comes up for sale online again, and you’re thinking it would make a perfect gift for me, maybe keep thinking.

If you’re looking for inspiration—well, I have been wondering if my haircare regime could be a little more flammable…

This post would not have been possible without the National Library of Scotland, and specifically without their collection of home shopping catalogues, because old Argos catalogues are extremely expensive. I should probably say that they don’t endorse anything I’ve written here, not least because they don’t know I’m posting this, but I’m very grateful for their unwitting help.

1. I mean, I assume. Who’s my competition? ↩︎
2. Or not. Don’t want to risk that “world’s foremost” title… ↩︎
3. As it happens, I discovered there was a library members’ event going on while I was there, so I rocked up. Three other (non-Argos) catalogues from the collection were on display at the event, and they didn’t have anything on Octogo either. But it was an hour spent in the company of librarians, other library users, and some highlights from the library’s collection. It was utterly delightful. ↩︎
4. I guess that that was part of the point—no need for an adaptor when taking them abroad. ↩︎
5. Which is, I believe, everyone who reads this blog. If you don’t—hello! Er, how on earth did you find this? Do let me know. ↩︎
6. Indeed, I think a lot of these impacts are because of the hype around AI, rather than because of the technology itself. ↩︎
7. I asked ChatGPT if it had any plans to do this, and it told me that the likelihood was “effectively zero”. It also said, and I quote, “if somehow a future regime did hand out ‘pre-collapse internet access’ as a reward, historians would probably conclude humanity made several avoidable mistakes along the way”, which is admittedly pretty funny. ↩︎
8. To be fair, the other part of the book seems to have been on “prehistoric animals”, which I guess include dinosaurs as a proper subset. ↩︎
9. At least, I’m impressed now that they could put that in a product costing £39.95, which would be around £110 today: not cheap, but not a price indicative of cutting-edge technology either. ↩︎
10. This was the short-lived and deeply ill-advised I Want Your Stuff Act, enacted after an unfortunate civil service typo in the word “shopfitting”. ↩︎
11. And, if they did, it’s easier just to get YouTube to take it down. Sale of the Century, incidentally, is just an old game show that game into my mind. It’s not a show I’ve seen much of, but I know it has one of my favourite excitement-building intros of any show: “And now, from Norwich, it’s the quiz of the week!” ↩︎
12. In fact, I’m not a lawyer, but I think they’d have had a pretty good case if anyone had tried to complain that they were breaking the law, as I found out when writing this post. In a case heard two years earlier, a record company had sued Amstrad to try to stop them selling cassette recorders with exactly that feature. The House of Lords, then the UK’s final court of appeal for most matters, declined to do so. ↩︎