If this is being young today, I’m glad to be a Baby Boomer
Who’d be young again? Not me, I’m certain of that. I haven’t got the energy for it. Flatmates Charlie and Becca (Tanya Reynolds and Melissa Saint) are best friends in their late 20s, and it looks exhausting.
Their lives, in the sitcom I Hate You (C4), teem with frustration and chaos. Neither has a clue what they want. They have nothing but contempt for the boys they date, they loathe their jobs, they live in squalor, they’re trapped in a cycle of casual sex and alcoholic excess that they neither desire nor enjoy.
If that’s what youth is really like for the Millennials, Baby Boomers like me can count ourselves lucky. We might be turning decrepit at the edges now, but at least in our prime we weren’t held hostage to dating apps and dead-end jobs.
The girls have an inkling that their pointless and very expensive degrees offered no educational value, because they’ve started going out with older men, just for the conversation.
Almost everyone’s more mature than Millennials, of course, but these chaps really are older. Becca’s friend Leonard (Michael Cochrane) is 72, a man of infinite urbanity with a treasury of engrossing tidbits about Etruscan civilisation. he’s also happy to pay for dinner, with a good bottle of wine.
And while most young men won’t bother to text after a Tinder date, Leonard sends flowers. of course he does — his generation knows how to behave.
Charlie pretends to sneer, bombarding Becca with adverts for stairlifts and funeral deals. But her latest boyfriend thinks humans evolved from bears, and his idea of eating out is a raw tomato from the fridge. In a fit of jealousy, she finds her own dapper septuagenarian, Ralph ( Joseph Marcell), and discovers the old-fashioned pleasure of being wined and dined.
Both young women are traditionalists at heart. Charlie wears cardigans with lace collars. If only she could have been born a Boomer — she’d have loved Laura Ashley.
The problem with getting older, of course, is you don’t have time to waste. Leonard and Ralph realise after a couple of dates there’s little prospect of what today’s youth call ‘the next level’ and what post-war teens termed ‘third base’.
The girls get dumped. Sex was never a serious possibility, though Charlie thought it could be ‘probably quite exciting, like never knowing when he’s going to have a heart attack’.
Served in double doses, this comedy by Robert Popper — creator of the much- missed Friday Night dinner — is stuffed with throwaway lines, some brilliant and some wildly off target.
The second episode is worth watching just for its gag about Einstein’s famous formula, ‘E equals MC Squared’, and a deft moment with a mug of coffee.
And if you are inspired to revive some of the vigour of your bygone youth, think twice before you tackle sea-bathing, as a group of ladies did on the Scottish coast.
one minute they were jumping into breakers on the shore, the next one of them had been seized by the current and swept away. Cameras caught the emergency response of the RNLI lifeboat crew, on Saving Lives At Sea (BBC2).
The ladies were probably asking for trouble when they called themselves the Seafield Sinkers. Karen was back on dry land before hypothermia could claim her, but it was touch and go — trying to spot her in the choppy waters, the crew nearly rescued a seal instead.
Their good humour and modest courage is almost as impressive as the action sequences. one lifeboatman described how, when his pager went off, ‘I’d just opened a Magnum. And those things aren’t cheap.’