Post-Christmas Sales

From the collection of

Launched in 2000, Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive spans from 1897 to the present day and currently contains an ever-expanding catalogue of 13,000 items. It comprises material from a variety of depositors including feature films, sport, documentaries, animation, amateur footage, light entertainment, and a significant proportion of broadcast material from the UTV Archive.

Post-Christmas Sales (Good Evening Ulster)

Northern Ireland Screen's Digital Film Archive
Belfast
1984-12-27
Sound

Brave bargain hunters.

Queueing up outside shops for very limited post-Christmas sale items used to be something of a tradition for the hardiest of shoppers determined to find the very best bargains.

At the year end of 1984, among the electrical goods being offered are vastly reduced colour televisions and video cassette recorders. This Good Evening Ulster report shows some shoppers who have started queueing up on Christmas Night to be in place when the shops open again after Christmas.

Conditions are obviously cold and not helped by snow, as those waiting huddle together with sleeping blankets, umbrellas and gas-burning Super Ser heaters. Some of the shops featured, however, reward the suffering shoppers with a full breakfast provided at tables.

One young man explains that he stands to make savings of £400 on a TV and video set, while another highlights a microwave reduced from £179 to just £9. Such incredible savings were incredible and explains why each year people were prepared to endure the elements.

Good Evening Ulster was the weekday tea-time local news round-up for Ulster Television throughout much of the 1980s and helped to launch the careers of household names such as Gloria Hunniford and Eamonn Holmes.

How We Shopped

From the high street to the information superhighway: shopping undergoes a makeover.

The 1980s heralded a sea change in the way we shopped - and what we shopped for. Reflecting the growing impact of new technologies, from the arrival of credit cards to the consumer electronics boom and ultimately the internet shopping age, this collection also journeys through the changing face of our high streets into the 1990s and beyond. This is the era of out-of-town supermarkets and supersized shopping malls muscling in on the traditional town centre trade. Many smaller villages faced the loss of local shops entirely, but they didn't give up without a fight. Alongside these existential threats, local news reports investigate such emerging issues as convenience food labelling, shoplifting and the campaign to 'Buy British' as domestic manufacturing continued its long and painful decline. Glimpses of long-lost chain stores, brands and products that once dominated everyday life across the UK may inspire more than a whiff of nostalgia. Yet this collection also tells a story of continuity: despite the all-powerful internet, we do still seem to want to come together to shop in the 'real world', not least at Christmas, and those seasonal shopping moments are here waiting to be unwrapped

33 videos in this collection

Shopping

Newcastle upon Tyne
1999-02-23

Shoplifting Is On The Increase

Chelmsford
1983-12-06

Dog: Dog Days