Nostalgia just like it used to be
EVERYTHING SUCKS! NETFLIX, FROM TODAY
IN TIMES of great uncertainty, nostalgia becomes ever more popular.
This, it’s probably fair to say, is a time of great freakin’ uncertainty indeed. That’s one of the reasons why Stranger Things proved to such a breakout hit.
Apart from the fact that it’s a bloody cracking little show, and Millie Bobby Brown is a genuinely magnetic new star in the making (she’s even great in The xx video for I Dare You), the harking back to the 1980s has provided a sort of emotional comfort blanket for those of us old enough to remember the time.
This trend for nostalgia can work, and it can also go off the rails.
The recent adaptation of IT, for instance, was a hugely disappointing mess for a variety of reasons, but it also proved that just sticking some BMX bikes into a scene for the sake of it won’t cut it with viewers.
Now nostalgia is creeping ever closer to the modern day with Netflix’s latest show, the 1990s-based Everything Sucks!
Set in 1996 in the town of Boring, Oregon – which as every pub quizzer knows, is a real place – this has been hailed as a sort of post-Grunge The Wonder Years with a dash of My So Called Life thrown in.
That’s a seriously high bar for any new show to reach because both of those programmes have now rightly earned legendary status, and they’re heavy garlands to lay on the head of any newcomer.
On first view, it looks like Everything Sucks! may just about be able to pull it off, if only because Peyton Kennedy, who plays central character Kate, seems like a fine piece of casting...
If the 1990s were still too recent for your taste, Sky Arts continues with its excellent series The Eighties (tonight, 9pm).
Tonight’s episode deals with two-term US president Ronald Reagan and the changes that came about in American society during his terms.
There is a plethora of such shows around at the moment, and I highly recommend Apocalypse: Cold War which turns up on the Yesterday network.
But people who were born in the 1970s be warned – I watched their coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall and had an existential crisis when I realised one of the most vivid memories of my teenage years is now fodder for history shows.
Which means all of us of that age are, officially, irrelevant old farts...
Of all the teenage subcultures to have horrified the oldies, few were ever as misunderstood as the skinheads.
Seen by many as bovver boys and fascists, there was also the SHARP (skinheads against racial prejudice) movement and tonight sees Don Letts and Pauline Black explore The Story Of Skinhead (BBC4, 9pm).
Say what you like about skinheads, at least they were never hippies...