80s films 'more than Patrick Swayze writhing around'

Dirty Dancing, Ghostbusters, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Top Gun, The Breakfast Club... Many popular films made in the 1980s are dismissed as cheesy - and lacking in artistic merit.

But Hadley Freeman credits such films for teaching her “more about life than any library or teacher ever would”.

Dirty Dancing is about much more than “Patrick Swayze writhing around”, says the Guardian columnist and author of Life Moves Pretty Fast.

“It’s about feminism, the importance of having legality of abortion and it’s about female sexuality,” she says.