 | | | | by Brendan O'Neill |
Remember the good old days, when the only people who banged on about the good old days were politicians and the over-60s? When you could leave your TV on all night without worrying that some C-list celebrity would steal into your living room and bore you rigid about decades gone by?
| Not any more. These days you can't switch on the box, tune in the wireless or flick through a copy of Vogue (not that I ever do) without having the past rammed down your throat. And we are not talking ancient history here, like the 1960s or 70s. Today's trips down memory lane are more likely to stop off at the 1980s and 90s. For real (common phrase to emphasise credibility, circa 1999).
| Take BBC2's I Love the 1980s series (1), where twentysomething and thirtysomething dial-a-mouths remember that Rubik's Cubes were, like, really really hard, and The A-Team was, like, really really stupid. On 24 February 2001 the series reached 'I Love 1985', significant for me because that is the first whole year I can remember. I know where I was when it began (grotty junior school run by sadistic nuns) and I know where I was when it ended (grotty secondary school run by sadistic nuns). Somewhere in between came Live Aid, U2, A View to a Kill and my brother being attacked with a crowbar by local tinkers.
| And already such memories have become the subject of a Saturday night nostalgia show, as if they happened in some distant black-and-white past rather than 15 years ago. So what gives?
| It looks like we're all suffering from 'extreme short-term nostalgia' - a disorder where the sufferer gets teary-eyed about events that happened years, months or even weeks ago, and says things like, 'Remember Bagpuss? They don't make 'em like that anymore'. This isn't the nostalgia of the old and infirm, who want society to be more like it was in the past. This is the nostalgia of the young and fearful, who can't quite let go of their childhoods.
| Consider how all the memories on I Love the 1980s are selective and uniform. All of the contributors (between the ages of 25 and 35) only recall certain things about the 1980s (missing out huge chunks of history in the process), and remember them in exactly the same way. So they laugh heartily while recalling that Blue Peter spent the 1980s encouraging children to make fire hazards (otherwise known as advent candles) out of a coat hanger, four candles and tinsel. But none of them seems to remember a more memorable thing about Blue Peter in the 1980s - that it had a resident cerebral palsy sufferer called Joey Deacon, to raise awareness and funds for disabled people, whose name then became a term of abuse in playgrounds across the nation. What total Joeys.
| | | How long before the nostalgia industry eats itself and brings us a noughties revival? |
| But that is the point. All those heavy trippers who criticised 'I Love 1984' for spending 10 minutes discussing Transformers ('robots in disguise') and no time at all on the miners' strike are missing the point. These programmes are not historical documents aimed at an older generation who actually remember the 1980s; they are nuggets of nostalgia, the TV equivalent of comfort food, for those of us who were kids in the 1980s. Hence the hazy, selective, flashback nature of the memories - childhood memories presented in the style of a childish memory.
| In the past, people got nostalgic about important historical events, like the Second World War. Today, twentysomethings go all nostalgic about things and fads, like He-Man dolls and leg-warmers. How sad.
| But the nostalgia train keeps on rolling. BBC2's own Open University has outdone I Love the 1980s with Whatever Did the 1990s Do For Us?, a year-by-year collection of images and songs from a decade my 10-year-old brother can remember. And BBC Online allows sad and lonely twentysomethings to relive their childhoods with Retro Fads, Retro Toys, Retro BBC, and a Bagpuss gallery. How long before the nostalgia industry eats itself and brings us a noughties revival?
| 'Because childhood is wasted on children', says BBC Online, justifying its retro obsession. And Saturday night primetime slots are wasted on adults who still want to be children.
| 'It's only nostalgia', says one of the contributors to I Love the 1980s. Which would be fine if the 1980s really was the best thing since leg-warmers, sweatbands, Prince, Madonna, Thatcher, strikes, riots and Hillsborough. In truth, the decade was a bit of a lemon (common phrase to emphasise lack of quality, circa 1985). And according to my retro (1978) Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, nostalgia is 'a form of melancholia caused by prolonged absence from one's country or home; severe homesickness'. Some of today's young adults might want to dream about their childhood 'home' - I prefer that other 1980s phrase: 'Wherever I lay my hat…that's my home.'
Brendan O'Neill is coordinating the spiked-conference Panic attack: Interrogating our obsession with risk, on Friday 9 May 2003, at the Royal Institution in London.
(1) I Love the 1980s, Saturdays, BBC2, 9.05pm
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