Anti-Retromania

[wingco]

Something I posted on Facebook but I thought I'd throw it open for discussion over here too.

Can't remember if I've posted about this before but one significant Thing That's Different Today That Wasn't The Same In My Day Because Things Were Different Back Then is as follows. When I was growing up and watching telly, it wasn't just all the supposed Golden Age stuff I watched - the Morecambe & Wise, Dad's Army, Steptoe. As a matter of course, I watched, on TV, stuff stretching back to the 1920s (there was a weekly series called Golden Silents, presenting by Michael Bentine). That's how far back the terrestrial schedules went, so you inevitably collided with this sort of programming. Plus there was Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy, Bilko, The Three Stooges, The Marx Brothers, The Munsters, as well as masterworks like Tom & Jerry, Droopy, Road Runner . . . then there were the films. From Hitchcock, Clark Gable Cary Grant to The Battle Of Algiers, a host of (I.A.L) diamonds, as well as a fair bit of dross, from across the 20th century. This state of things persisted up until about the 1990s - but since then, this has all dropped out of the schedules altogether, into DVD box set land. No one's ever going to encounter it by accident. All that's left on the TV landscape is a perma-now, in which an old episode of Two And A Half Men on channel 147 is as vintage as it's going to get. I know schedulers developed a fear of black and white at one point, afraid that channel-hoppers would flick over such programmes with a "bo-ring!" - hence the colourisation of things like Laurel & Hardy. But given how retromaniacal our culture is in other ways, this does seem a rather odd, and sad state of affairs, an example of an enforced incuriosity imposed on the young by their scheduling elders.

[Alderman Barnes]

Anti-Retromania

Absolutely. I bought the Laurel and Hardy box set on your recommendation (at a ridiculously cheap price: thanks again by the way) and I occasionally sit down with my daughter to watch it. She enjoys the films, but it does have a bit of an "eat your greens, it's for your own good" feel about it, and I have to physically stop her putting on the colourised versions.

I'd much prefer it if she'd discovered this stuff by herself, but she can't. You're lucky to even find Looney Tunes or Tom and Jerry on the television these days, so I have to dig it out myself. It took some searching on YouTube to convince her that Snoopy was more than just a commercial logo like Hello Kitty or something.

It's a real shame.

[ad hoc]

Anti-Retromania

There's a cartoon channel called Boomerang which reshows old cartoons (and some which are not old by my reckoning, but are by my daughter's) Maybe the best we can hope for is a couple of boomerang for adults channels.

These days what counts for retro TV seems to be episodes of CSI with Grissom in.

[Bored Of Education]

Anti-Retromania

It is amazing the amount of stuff, usually from the last two decades, that is on constant repeat on TV now and the stuff, as you mention, that you hardly see.

For all the "It's always on on Christmas Day", I have still never seen "It's a wonderful life", "The Sound Of Music" or "Casablanca". I once saw a brilliant adaptation of "A Child's Christmas In Wales" with Denholm Elliot and I stress the 'once' as it has never been repeated and isn't even on DVD in this country. I had to buy a DVD of The Magnificent Seven as it is never repeated. I am fairly sure that "Cool Hand Luke", "Citizen Kane" and "To Kill A Mockingbird" have only been repeated once in the last two decades, the latter only on the 50th anniversary of its release. "Pretty Woman" was on TV on Friday and it seemed like a lost classic.

Similarly, on TV, even fairly recent successful mainstream comedies like "Cheers" and "Roseanne" are rarely seen. This would be fine if there was all new stuff and no repeats but "QI", "The Big Bang Theory" and "Friends" seems to have an every increasing frequency of repeats.

Mind you, if this means I never have to sit through another "Laurel & Hardy" and "Charlie Chaplin", I am happy with the status quo

[Gangster Octopus]

Anti-Retromania

Alderman Barnes wrote: I bought the Laurel and Hardy box set on your recommendation (at a ridiculously cheap price: thanks again by the way)

Ditto. Actually, I bought two copies; one for myself and one for my brother to introduce his children to the boys. It worked.

By the way, they're showing Looney Tunes on Channel 5 at 11 o'clock on most weekends. I've got the opera one recorded. "Kill the wabbit"...

[Felicity, I guess so]

Anti-Retromania

We've had to remove German Expressionism from a 1st year film intro as the students simply refused to watch it/give it any consideration: I tried to convince them by putting Edward Scissorhands on the week after, freezing the frame on Edward's attic and saying 'see...?' but no- they have no patience for silent cinema.

The next front is black and white/ 'old', 'boring' films generally. They moan about classic westerns being 'predictable' and then write essays about Die Hard...

I am attempting to shoehorn 'Django' into the lecture on the Western since they'll all have seen it, but it'll fail like the Burton example: they expect recycled parodic hommage, doesn't mean they're interested in the originals- let Tim and Quentin watch it for them.

[Gangster Octopus]

Anti-Retromania

Bored of Education wrote: Mind you, if this means I never have to sit through another "Laurel & Hardy", I am happy with the status quo

You, sir, are a vacuous heathen and not even worthy of my used 'kerchiefs...

[Bored Of Education]

Anti-Retromania

The next front is black and white/ 'old', 'boring' films generally. They moan about classic westerns being 'predictable' and then write essays about Die Hard...

..which turned up in a lecture yesterday about mathematical problem-solving, bizzarely

[tee rex]

Anti-Retromania

Yeah, this is another of those "Wingco plagiarises my head, only with the proper words and that" threads.

If you didn't want to do your homework on Sunday afternoons, you got John Mills and Dicky Attenborough. Which never did me any harm, etc.

[Jah Womble]

Anti-Retromania

(there was a weekly series called Golden Silents, presenting by Michael Bentine)

I used to watch this every week, and loved Bentine's model-based explanations of how (for example) Harry Langdon was able to dive through a suitcase or whatever. (IIRC, it used to run on BBC1 at 8.30 on a Friday evening, straight after Wendy Craig vehicle Not In Front of the Children, which - ironically - was one of the few sitcoms I was allowed to watch as a seven-year-old.)

I remember 'holiday viewing' would often throw up a ninety-minute silent comedy spectacular, usually a compilation featuring clips of the Keystone Cops, Laurel & Hardy and Messrs Lloyd, Langdon, Turpin and Chaplin, etc. An utter joy, as far as I was concerned.

[Felicity, I guess so]

Anti-Retromania

a lecture yesterday about mathematical problem-solving

Now trying to remember whether McClane has any trouble working out how many charicature germans he has left to kill!

[Felicity, I guess so]

Anti-Retromania

There is a material explanation for this, of course: they had the rights to show the cartoons and silents free as they were out of copyright. There must be some similar reason for the (particular) endless re-runs on Dave

[Felicity, I guess so]

Anti-Retromania

Just rereading the OP: it's Bilko I particularly miss.

[hobbes]

Anti-Retromania

Once more, OTF cost me money. I can't have Peanut growing up without this or this.

[Ray de Galles]

Anti-Retromania

As referenced above, there are plenty of Tom & Jerry and Looney Tunes cartoons up in the "Kids" channels on Sky.

My three have seen plenty of them and the delight of watching them watch Road Runner and Foghorn Leghorn for the first time will always live with me.

I recently gave them the joy of seeing the Marx Brothers' 'Lydia The Tattooed Lady' for the first time too, albeit via the gateway drug of Kermit the Frog's version, though that was through Youtube.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Anti-Retromania

Over here the billion channel universe means this is much less of a problem.

Much as I loathe Ted Turner, I have to admit TCM is nirvana for film buffs, its programming is hard to fault. It's not the only vintage movie channel either. There are also cartoon channels where you can watch T&J all day long almost. And one of the smaller local stations switched to an "all 60s" schedule recently, meaning I can watch Lost in Space and Batman with my Saturday tea.

[Taylor]

Anti-Retromania

Felicity, I guess so wrote: We've had to remove German Expressionism from a 1st year film intro as the students simply refused to watch it/give it any consideration

Surely the only thing you "had" to do was tell the little bastards to shut up and watch it? If I taught literature, and the students thought Shakespeare was "booooooooring", that would be their tough luck as far as I was concerned. If I taught chemistry and they refused to look at the Periodic Table... etc etc.

All this has been on my mind, too - I was thinking recently how much comedy, from Monty Python to The Simpsons to jokes you make with your friends in the pub, depends on a reservoir of shared cultural knowledge, and would cease to function without that encyclopedic awareness of, y'know, old stuff. Not that I'm saying this is the main issue here, but it illustrates the problem: when people are cut off from their own cultural heritage, their world shrinks suddenly and quite depressingly. Even ten-to-fifteen years on from all those Simpsons visual gags about wartime cartoons, or old footage of America in the 30s, or Alfred Hitchcock movies, or news presenting styles of the 50s, 60s and 70s, would reasonably bright 21-year-olds still get the same jokes? Maybe they would - I appreciate that I'm completely ignorant of what goes on in most young people's minds, really, and for all I know they spend hours on YouTube looking at this shit - but that's not the impression I get.

My six-year-old son watches CBBC and Boomerang and so on, and he enjoys Looney Tunes and indeed the new Scooby Doo cartoons that have been made in the exact same animation style as the old ones (an example of actual retromania which is needless, really, but quite satisfying for an old sod like me). That's a tiny, tiny percentage of what goes out on the kids' channels, though. What really comes across is not just how little old stuff there is on there (although I suppose his new favourite, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, is as old now as some of the black and white films I watched as a kid), but how limited the range of kids' programming has become, now that it all has to be so very modern. CBeebies was really good, way better than pre-schoolers' telly was in my day - but now he's graduated to the big kids' channels, it's basically just a barrage of gags about "poo", "pants", "farts", "snot" etc, jammed into the limited space between adverts for rip-off toys and ivory-rotting cereals. I know I sound like a very, very old man here... but it's not the content I object to, it's the homogeneity of it. Give the people what they want, over and over and over again.

I'm not sure that you could find a single live action drama serial on any of the modern, round-the-clock kids' TV channels. Comedy-drama yes, cartoon-thriller obviously, but not one regular drama show (I might be wrong, but only just). I'm not suggesting things should be like they were In My Day - when I found a lot of what was on kids' telly pretty boring, it has to be said - and I'm aware that even then there were adults up in arms about the fact that we were watching telly at all, rather than climbing trees and reading "Swallows And Amazons" (which we did as well, to be fair). But at least we got a bit of variety, for God's sake, as we sat staring blankly at the box. Scary stories, stories set in the olden days, foreign stories, stuff about ancient Egypt, stuff about real life, etc etc. Even if most of it was only tolerated, until that thing came on where people got dunked in tubs of gunge or whatever the fuck it was.

I'm just worried that we're breeding new generations of kids who may be no less intelligent or creative, but simply haven't been exposed to the same range of stuff that their parents were. That can't be good. Pretty soon, silent comedy or old-fashioned television drama will become like medieval poetry; something you only come into contact with if you're looking. I do try not to be really Dadlike, and moan about what kind of culture is filling that same space in people's brains these days, but bloody hell... regardless of whether things really are going backwards, I can't see much progress - I'm far from sure that British popular culture is growing richer and more varied as time goes on - and that's bad enough in itself.

[Jah Womble]

Anti-Retromania

...but it's not the content I object to, it's the homogeneity of it.

Yep, my sentiments exactly. Ditto music. It's not about being a curmudgeon before one's time - it's about thinking that kids deserve better. 'Variety' is indeed the key word.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Anti-Retromania

I'm just worried that we're breeding new generations of kids who may be no less intelligent or creative, but simply haven't been exposed to the same range of stuff that their parents were.

Isn't this is basically the same point that was being made by T.S. Eliot, Leavis and others in the middle of the last century though? Then it was burgeoning technology, and the consequent fragmentation of cultural references leading to — horrors! — Modernism, that was seen to be the issue. In the 1920s poet David Jones called it "the Break," a fall into an alien land in which the cultural signs artists used, and their public understood, had neither value nor significance.

I'm not saying you, or Jones, are/were wrong. Just that it's not a new problem, yet we've continued to muddle along somehow, even if our signage is increasingly short term.

[garcia]

Anti-Retromania

For all the "It's always on on Christmas Day", I have still never seen "It's a wonderful life", "The Sound Of Music" or "Casablanca".

i watched most of two out of these three over the christmas just gone.

i'm not so sure about this - in fact i envy the young ones now the range of stuff that is available to them. it's not necessarily on mainstream channels but it exists in a way it didn't when i was a kid. i had about 10 videos that i just watched over and over again. history of liverpool FC. ron and valerie taylor film great white sharks. amadeus. the old cartoon of moby dick. BMX bandits. the world cup's greatest goals. the last unicorn. i watched each of these probably 50 times because i had nothing else to watch. imagine i'd had youtube, or even crap like netflix, what i could have watched? i might not actually have done, but i could have. and all of it at a time when there was a chance of me remembering it.

the problem kids today might have is a bit like what happens to me with spotify, when everything is available you suddenly don't know what you want. but then again as a kid i would sit there for hours reading any old crap that was in the house. i would spend the afternoon reading encyclopaedia articles in a grotesquely slowed-down version of the way i still spend some evenings surfing through wikipedia. i think i still would have done this had i been a kid today but the reading material available to me would have been incomparably wider and richer.

then again, maybe i just would have wanted to spend all my time playing the incomparably better computer games, since i spent enough hours in the 1980s playing the awful ones i had access to.

[Vulgarian Visigoth]

Anti-Retromania

Now I have the mental image of a bored 10-year-old garcia repeating Salieri's lines with an absent-minded expression as he lies on the carpet with his face resting on his hand.

[Taylor]

Anti-Retromania

Amor de Cosmos wrote: Isn't this is basically the same point that was being made by T.S. Eliot, Leavis and others in the middle of the last century though? Then it was burgeoning technology, and the consequent fragmentation of cultural references leading to — horrors! — Modernism, that was seen to be the issue. In the 1920s poet David Jones called it "the Break," a fall into an alien land in which the cultural signs artists used, and their public understood, had neither value nor significance.

Yes, I was thinking about this as I was typing (minus the names and references because I'm an uneducated oik, but precisely this point).

It's not quite the same thing though, I think. I mean, the "public" mentioned above, who understood cultural signs - that wasn't really the public, was it? It would have been the educated classes, and everyone else would have to be content with the music hall. I'm thinking, really, of the post-war world in which I grew up, and those specific conditions which enabled pretty much everyone to take in as much (popular) culture as they liked, while ensuring they absorbed at least a bare minimum whether they liked it or not. I know that kind of paternalism is out of fashion these days, but it was hardly a trial to live through, and in every sense better than a culture which appears to be slowly sealing itself up... at least to these old eyes.

[Ray de Galles]

Anti-Retromania

Taylor wrote:

I'm not sure that you could find a single live action drama serial on any of the modern, round-the-clock kids' TV channels. Comedy-drama yes, cartoon-thriller obviously, but not one regular drama show (I might be wrong, but only just).

My daughters love a Tracy Beaker spin-off on CBBC about children in a care home called 'The Dumping Ground' which, from what I've seen of it, fits the bill.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Anti-Retromania

Uneducated oik!

Not hardly.

I suppose I used high-art/scholarly references partly to show that it wasn't so different for them, as for us.

Hasn't it almost always been the case, for example, that the intentional art object/event, has been mediated by someone eg: Publisher, Film Producer, Record Company, TV Network? It's true that those structures don't function as well these days as they once did. Am I wrong but is that what you miss, more curatorial inolvement? In the world of the internet it surely can't be lack of available expressive variety can it?

I mean, the "public" mentioned above, who understood cultural signs - that wasn't really the public, was it? It would have been the educated classes, and everyone else would have to be content with the music hall.

I think such cultural references have always existed and they're not limited to overt creative works — "high" or "low" — that are labelled as such. For example, I think most of us would agree pretty much anyone can listen to a Beatles song, or an Eliot poem, today and get some meaning from it — though the significance won't be exactly the same for everybody. However for a few months in 1963 the way the Beatles went "ooooooo!" and the height of the heels on their boots, had every bit as much cultural relevance to their audience as their music. But that meaning is indiscernible today and wasn't articulated even then. Culture is made up of these transient gestures as much as intentional expressions, but they're quickly lost. I reckon the reader of The Wasteland in the 20s would have been surrounded by her own versions of Beatle boots, we just don't know what they were.

My Mum was taught Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" while at a state school in Burnley in the 30s. She learned it almost by heart, and used to recite it to my sister and I when we were kids. I think she was pretty familiar with "Streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent." So it made sense to her.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Anti-Retromania

Surely the only thing you "had" to do was tell the little bastards to shut up and watch it? If I taught literature, and the students thought Shakespeare was "booooooooring", that would be their tough luck as far as I was concerned. If I taught chemistry and they refused to look at the Periodic Table... etc etc.

This. FFS, the students are supposed to be "studying", the clue's in the word. Do they even begin to understand the concept of extending one's horizons? And, less rhetorically, if they don't get that, then what the fuck are they doing taking up places on the course?