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Nostalgia Ain't What It Used to Be

© Allan Lee

There's a good chance that if you're reading this, your life has been influenced by the media in a way that has never been seen before the planet. If, like me, you're a baby boomer (well, late baby boomerism, anyway), you'll have grown up with I Love Lucy, Hogan's Heroes, Lost in Space or Green Acres wherever you live in the world. If you grew up in Britain, or the former colonies that looked to Britain as 'mother country', you'd have fond memories of Dr Who, The Power Game or The Avengers. Now the baby boomer generation is running Hollywood, perhaps it's no surprise that there's a sudden resurgence in interest in these shows from the sixties and seventies.

But what was it really like watching TV in those days? It's hard to explain to younger people who've only ever been used to the multiplicity of choice offered by cable and satellite channels, by video and by the internet that we all used to watch the same programme at the same time and then talk about it the next day. Television was a shared national experience. From common-or-garden soap operas like ATV's Crossroads to more high-falutin' experiences like the BBC's Play for Today, the choice was positively digital in its choice, you either did or you didn't. No video timeshifting, no catching the repeat on another network, no internet website filling you in on the missing details. If you missed it when the broadcaster sent it out, you missed it forever. (Or at least until the re-run, if there was one).

But while many programmes from the sixties live on in the shape of videos, or re-runs on satellite TV, there's one part of the broadcaster's art which had gone for good - at least until the birth of the internet. And those are the bits in between. The 'mortar' between the programme 'bricks' that gave a network its flavour. Trails, channel idents, regional news programmes, no-one ever thought to keep them for posterity. And yet, researching this week's article has stirred a host of memories for me which I never realised I had. Once I started the research, I found I had to restrict it to just the UK because (a) I knew about it and (b)Suite101 doesn't like articles a million words long.

So this week we're not examining the upper reaches of the broadcasting arts, we're getting down and dirty in an un-ashamed nostalgia-fest.

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