Britons enjoy Christmas spree

Press, 24 December 1986, Page 6

Britons enjoy Christmas spree

NZPA-AP London It’s a Christmas of glitz. Talking teddy bears and silk underwear for men — endorsed by Princess Diana — are seasonal hits with Britons on a spending spree for the exotic and the traditional. Even in Britain’s recession-hit North and Midlands, department stores are predicting their biggest Christmas bonanza, with up to a 30 per cent increase in spending over last year. “If the trade continues at the present level, it will be a record Christmas,” said a spokesman at Harrods, London. Harrods is featuring such Christmas goodies as a . £12,000 ($33,360) hamper filled with turkey, caviar, raspberries in cognac, truffles with goose liver, Stilton cheese, champagne, a silver tray and crystal

decanter with six matching glasses. For those great holiday occasions, the hottestselling dresses in Britain are glitzy gold and silver creations, often shimmering with beads and sequins — with matching bows, shoes and even lingerie.

“People seem to be spending hand-over-fist,” said lan Harwood, chief economist for the stockbrokers, Warburg Securities, citing an unexpected 2 per cent jump in retail sales figures for the pre-Christmas period from September to November. All over Britain, stores reported a big demand for expensive presents such as compact disc players, video-cassette recorders, microwave ovens and televisions. Princess Diana set the stage for one of the hottest-selling items

when she visited a London design studio in October and extolled silk boxer shorts, asking: “Why shouldn’t men’s underwear be fun?” Now Billy Kehoe, a salesman for the French company, Hom, whose silk boxer shorts sell for $B9, says he can’t keep enough in stock at London’s main department stores. Children are not being left out of the spree. Well-heeled British kids, it seems, are moving away from the computer screen and back to mechanical toys this Christmas. Toyshops in the West End can supply scalemodel helicopters, ranging between $1856 for a Hiribo Shuttle $9730 for a one-fifth size Aerospatiale Lama. These are exact scale replicas of the real thing, even down to flight specifications. How about trains:

microchip-controlled engines with a couple of metres of track and a few carriages and signals start at $lll2. Or cars: Last Christmas it was considered chic to have a driveyourself model of daddy’s Rolls. This year it is a model of the Porsche 959, one-twelfth scale, precision engineered, and capable of breaking the urban speed limit of 50km/ h. All for $750. For children who find Christmas in the fast lane passe, discerning parents can choose a bat-tery-powered robot capable of actions as precise as pouring drinks and picking up a bail-point pen ($1024). Computer - controlled models, with “arms” controllable in three dimensions, are less chummy, but more useful in schooling children in robotics. They start at $729.

Those bent on a career in communication or graphic design would be urging their parents to buy them a do-it-yourself hologram kit ($2176), complete with heliumneon laser.

Children who prefer a good old fashioned game of chase or hide-and-seek will never again need to argue over who has been tagged.

An American firm is making a compact little gun called Lazer-Tag, which shoots an infrared beam at the target up to 30m away and can register hits on an electronic display panel. A giveaway at $lOB.

Gentler still are the animatronic soft toys carrying concealed tape recorders that can automatically repeat in their own voices anything said to them. The better ones move their mouths to match the words.