Past dished up on a plate
AT THE weekend my son agreed to watch a film with his mother and myself, provided it “wasn’t another old one like last week”. The film last week was Titanic, first shown in cinemas in 1997. New and old, it’s all relative and I suppose BACK IN TIME FOR DINNER (BBC2) had to reach the Eighties at some point.
In a way, perhaps, recent history is the best kind of history there is. You’re forced to take another look at a world you took for granted, to see the nuts and bolts, or the beans and chips, of your own humdrum life as part of something bigger.
Part of something different to now as well, as the experiences of the Ellises of Bradford proved time and again. The kids baulked at drinking a certain well-known fizzy drink after an exercise session. Later, exposed to the delights of Ice Magic, they wondered what terrible chemicals must be in the stuff, to make it freeze on contact with ice-cream.
I don’t remember having such fears as a child at the time. I just thought, “Great, a choc ice in a bottle.” We live in a less-trusting age now and with good reason. If the Eighties could be boiled down to one theme, it seemed to be a feast, to which not everyone was invited. Easy terms on easy loans gave families up and down the nation the chance to own new sofas, chest freezers, microwaves and sandwich toasters.
An economic plan, based on valuing profit rather than people, saw half the population sending back their consumer desirables and signing on the dole.
When Yorkshire families were receiving food parcels from Soviet Russia, something clearly had broken. Alongside the emotional testimony of former miners and the tragedy of the Bradford fire, the Nineties couldn’t really compete.
They rushed through that most recent bit of the recent past in 10 minutes, pausing only to take in Manchester’s music scene, pyramid tea bags and some bloke called Tony Blair. “Wasn’t really your scene was it?” said Mrs Ellis, when her husband failed to remember the name of a legendary Northern nightclub.
That was, in its way, one of the most important things anyone said all series. Framed as a social history of the North, this wasn’t everyone’s North, or everyone’s history.
Glancing through my TV guide I misread WILD BRITAIN (Channel 5) as “Wild Brian” and have spent many hours since wondering what sort of a programme that might be and how much I might have enjoyed it. I enjoyed Wild Britain too as a reminder that on our small and crowded island, you’re never far away from nature.
Battling stags, swooping eagles, wild ponies and flesh-eating plants all served to remind us what a diverse place we dwell in. The word “remind” of course suggests that we’ve been told before and unfortunately, quite a few of last night’s examples, as well as the basic idea, felt a wee bit over-used.
An exception must be made however for the feral goats of Mull, a population sometimes suspected to have swum to the shores of this Scottish island from the wrecked ships of the Spanish armada.
This probably romantic explanation added to the romantic exploits of the goats themselves, who communicate by a mixture of head-butting and urination. Next time I see a wine connoisseur, head aloft, nostrils twitching, eyes glazed in concentration, I shall be forever reminded of a feral Billy goat falling in love.