Chris (Marshall Lancaster) mentions "pedalos", referring to the two-man boats operated by pedal-power, akin to the mechanism used in children's toy pedal cars at the time.
Chris (Marshall Lancaster) says he is against animal cruelty when asked by the students. He qualifies it by saying, "Well, like them P.G. Tips ads, some of those monkeys in dresses are actually blokes-well not blokes-no, monkeys in dresses, it's not natural", referring to the famous UK TV ad campaign for P.G. Tips tea which featured anthropomorphised chimpanzees wearing human clothes. The best remembered versions in the 70s were the monkeys shifting a piano ("Mr Shifter") and one featuring a Tour de France setting finishing with the line "Can ya ride tandem?". Later 80s/90s ads had a James Bond theme.
Whilst Chris (Marshall Lancaster) is reading out details of a bomb attack in 1975, Gene (Philip Glenister) says, "what is this? Jackanory?". Jackanory (1965) was a daily (Monday-Friday) fifteen-minute programme first broadcast on BBC1 in Jan 1965 at 4.45pm. It was designed to give kids an interest in reading and featured celebrities of the day reading from well-known and new books for children, and has become synonymous with telling tall tales.
Catching Ray (Dean Andrews) combing his moustache Gene (Philip Glenister) says "Sorry, is this an incident room or the make-up counter at Kendals?" referring to Kendals, Deansgate, Manchester, a department store established in 1832.
Alex (Keeley Hawes) watches Tony Hart on the BBC TV art series for kids, Take Hart (1977), and gets involved in the Morph sequence, though the show was not running in May 1982. Tony Hart was an artist/cartoonist who presented art shows for kids on BBC TV. His TV career began in 1951, contributing art and illustrations for Saturday Special (1951), a BBC kids' show presented by Peter Butterworth. This led to other early shows such as Playbox (1955), a BBC kids' panel game, Ask Your Dad (1959), Stories in Pictures, Blue Peter (1958), and Tich & Quackers (1963) with ventriloquist Ray Alan. He first became well known in his own right for co-presenting Vision On (1965), a series aimed at deaf children, with Pat Keysell. In 1977 he began the first series of his own, Take Hart (1977), for which he invented the character of Morph, a piece of Plasticine that morphed into a man-shaped figure. The stop-frame animation was carried out by the now-famous Aardman animation studios. Morph was so popular amongst the kids that he was given a series of his own in 1980, The Amazing Adventures of Morph (1980) and later The Morph Files (1995). Hart continued to appear with Morph in such series as Hartbeat (1984) and Smart Hart (series 1 and 2: 1999/2000). Vision On is mentioned in Series 1: Episode 3 of Life on Mars (2006).