Best in show

“The retro-futurist look of this mash-up of a BMX bike and ZX computer could only have come from a drawing board in the 1980s.

It is firmly in the tradition of popular television shows of the time, such as Knight Rider and Airwolf, with their talking cars and helicopters, but it was essentially a bike for children.

It had a red LED control panel from which young riders were able to check their speed and the distance they’d travelled, listen to the radio and unleash a flurry of arcade-style sound effects to frighten the lives out of unsuspecting pedestrians.

Although the Vektar was a cool thing at the time, the flip side was that it weighed around 20kg, which made it far too heavy for whizzing around BMX-style or riding over jumps. I can’t imagine many nine-year-olds being able to even get this thing up a gentle slope; it must have lost some of the cool factor when you had to get off and push it.

Another issue was its price tag, which was £300 back then, around £900 in today’s money. 

Raleigh spent around half a million pounds developing the Vektar and the build quality was certainly good. But ultimately it had a lot in common with another iconic and short-lived mode of transport of the time, the Sinclair C5, which was supposed to be a one-person battery powered car, but looked like a giant slipper.

Interestingly, the use of bike computers has proliferated in recent years and anyone who is even a half-serious cyclist has technology on board, so perhaps the Vektar was just a bit ahead of its time.

One big difference is that modern bikes have displays mounted on their handlebars, whereas the Vektar’s technology was on the bike frame, forcing riders to look away from the road while operating it. 

The 1980s were my formative years and the I Grew Up 80s exhibition looks back at how children played, what they collected and how they were entertained throughout that decade – a period of great change with the introduction of video games, microcomputers and films full of whizz-bang special effects.

But it’s not one of those 1980s nostalgia-fests and there are none of the miners’ strikes or Falklands war references that usually spring up when those years are revisited.

These were the pre-internet days, when all your birthday wishes could be found within the pages of the Argos catalogue.

But some of the objects reveal the decade’s dark side. Among my favourites are sweet cigarettes and Top Deck shandy. Beer and fags for children – what were they thinking?”