Nostalgia Week: Boys of the Nineties

As a fully qualified kid of the Nineties, I have to say I’m loving the revival that’s going on at the minute. 80s nights are gradually being supplanted by 90s nights flush with high top runners, brightly patterened shirts and Boom Shake Shake Shake The Room. So naturally I’m delighted that Culch.ie have decided to go all retro on our asses with Nostalgia Week.

Now to the topic at hand. I’ve decided to focus on some of the boys of the 90s. At least, the boys that I found myself blu tacking to my bedroom walls as I entered the adolescent minefield of crushes.

Saved By The Bell was a show that gave us comedy, questionable fashion, “serious issues” episodes where they’d crowbar in a moral message about smoking, alcohol or drugs, but most importantly to my eleven year old self, it gave us Zack Morris and AC Slater. Dreamboat alert! Zack was all blonde preppy charm and backfiring schemes, often with the supernatural ability to freeze the scene around him so he could address the camera in a manner that Wikipedia have likened to a Shakespearean aside. Which might be slightly generous on their part. AC Slater, (I have recently discovered that the AC stands for Albert Clifford) was the dark haired and ripped jock, wrestler, athlete and all round ride to boot. These boys had me at hello and there was no competition from any of the other American teen sitcoms that followed, like California Dreams, Hang Time or USA High. Those shows could suck it, Saved By The Bell was the only one worth watching.

The first album I ever bought, having saved up my pocket money for weeks on end was Boyzone’s debut Said and Done. Embarrassingly, they were the first band I ever got really into, as I was just that bit too young to give a toss about bare chested boys in denim waistcoats when Take That were on the scene. But Boyzone’s timing was perfect, as I found myself smitten and enthralled by bad boy Shane Lynch. The jet black hair! The piercing eyes! The hint of danger! The weird shaved bit of his eyebrow! It was all very nearly too much for my burgeoning girl senses.

But of course, the 90s was the era of the boyband. Five were another favourite of mine, especially spiky-haired buffoon Scott. Not to mention East 17, OTT (remember them?), Hanson, and whoever else Big and Smash Hits featured on their giant double sided posters. Always double sided. At times it was an easy choice, if one side featured some inferior band like A1 or 911, but making a young girl choose between a picture of Five having a playful food fight (probably) and Dieter Brummer’s cheeky come hither grin was just cruel. CRUEL!

Anyway. Do share your own hotties of the 1990s in the comments, I know I’ve left out loads, but these were just the ones that consumed the pages of my homework diaries in endless compatibility calculations. (You know, the ones where you somehow work out a percentage by crossing out the letters your names had in common. Something like that.) Did you want to marry Jared Leto after watching My Co Called Life? Was Fergus from War Of The Buttons the one for you? Or maybe Jonathan Taylor Thomas, better known as the good looking middle brother from Home Improvements did it for your teenage self. He certainly did for me.