Tomorrow's World weren't 100% correct to say that CDs were indestructible. But at least they were more robust than what preceded them.
Vinyl records were so easy to scratch (remember giving the record player a nudge in order to get it to stop looping over the same bit of the song over and over?).
And cassettes were great, although in any quiet sections it sounded like you had a load of pythons in the room given that ubiquitous hiss in the background.
But every once in a while we'd be bopping away... happy as larry (who was Larry? and why was he happy?) only for things to go horribly pear-shaped.
Please, no! Don't let it have jammed.
Fingers crossed...
We'd stop the tape player... push the eject button... pull out the cassette... and our worst fears would be realised.
While we'd have the body of the cassette in our hands, it would have been disembowelled.
Its entrails would be dangling from it and entangled in the mechanism, of the stack system.
Do you remember when a music centre like this was one of the most desirable objects in the world?
And the ones with the twin cassette decks in no way encouraged music piracy... heaven forbid!
Anyway, we'd gingerly try to ease the long, concertinaed (that doesn't look right to me but spell checker says it is!) tape out of the machine in order to try to rectify the situation as best we could. Easing it to try to avoid stretching or breaking it...
And with one final tug it was out... and we'd be sitting there with yards of tape at our feet. And the only way to restore normality was to wind it back in to the cassette.
We'd start with our fingers but they were too large to turn the cog properly. The little finger was the best of them but even that didn't really do it.
Felt pens? No... too round... they didn't get any grip.
There was only one thing that I ever found that was really up to the job. It was perfect. And fortunately it was a standard item in pretty well every house in the land...
A Bic biro.
It was as though it was designed for the purpose...
as well as writing...
and, as invariably happened to me, leaking hideously, stickily and permanently in my pocket.
In a minute or two the Bic would have done its job and the cassette would be almost as new again.
Just one last thing to do...
Put it back into the player and hope that everything sounded ok.
Fast Forward... Rewind... Play...
And all was great... until the particularly scrunched up bit where it now sounded like the Martians had landed.
But after about the 20th play even that just became normal to me...
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