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| Nostalgia… as it was. Radio Times celebrates itself (1977, right) and BBC television (1976, left). |
The shifting sands of pop culture nostalgia...
It’s a
much-overused and fairly ancient witticism: ‘nostalgia – it isn’t
what it was.’ But it happens to be true. When I was growing up,
nostalgia meant the thirties, forties and, just appearing on the
radar of most pop cultural commentators, the fifties. Nowadays it
means... well, you tell me.
In 1976, the BBC
broadcast a series of programmes celebrating forty years of its
television service. That’s the equivalent of looking back from now
to the 1970s. The post-war television service, representing the bulk
if not the entirity of the Corporation’s archive was, at that time,
a mere thirty years old, and there were plenty of people around who
remembered the likes of The Grove Family, or the famously
grumpy appearances of Gilbert Harding on What’s My Line.
John Freeman’s ground-breaking Face to Face interviews were
still vividly remembered and recognised for their importance. These
days, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who even knew what Face
to Face was, and as for Gilbert Harding…
Nostalgia has moved
on. The reason so few people remember the early years of television
is fairly fundamental – those people aren’t around any more. The
sands of nostalgia are shifting. Ten years back, there was still a
relatively high level of interest in the iconic television series of
the 1960s – the likes of The Avengers, The Saint, The
Prisoner et al. Yet even then, it would probably have been true
to say that interest in such items was on the wane. The
high watermark for 1960s television nostalgia came around 1990.
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| Nostalgia, 1993 style: the fad for all things 60s reached its high watermark around this time. Talk about a role call of style icons... |
The late ’80s and
early ’90s saw a huge resurgence of interest in the style, culture
and attitudes of the 1960s. Sometimes this took the form of a
modern-day reimagining, such as the Acid House movement of circa
1989. Elsewhere, car stylists began to reference the classics of an
earlier era, creating modern icons like Mazda’s MX5 (a clear lift
from the mid-60s Lotus Elan) and the retro-futurist Jaguars of the
same period that recalled and refined the classic lines of the
E-Type. In its most basic form, the 80s/90s nostalgia for the 1960s
saw the reappearance of dozens of archive television series, many of
them winning new generations of fans. In large part, this was down to
the personal preference of the then controller of BBC2, but other
channels followed suit, and before long, nostalgically-styled and
themed satellite channels began to emerge, dedicated to such old
programming, in the form of UK Gold and Bravo (the latter
subsequently revamped into a kind of lad-mag hell).
The demise of Bravo
in its ‘ABC Weekend Television’ retro-styling tells us a lot
about the staying power of nostalgia. Like contemporary fashion,
nostalgia doesn’t stay the same for long, and the saturation diet
of 1960s programming seemed to run out of steam fairly quickly. By
the end of the ’90s, the fad for old television had calmed down,
with the only regular broadcasts reduced to a few familiar recycled
repeats on the likes of ITV4 and UK Gold. Comparison of UK Gold’s
output in, say 1995 with its schedule of a decade later also shows a
shift away from niche interest, older programming like Doomwatch
or early Dr. Who episodes, and a tendency to focus on repeats
of essentially familiar comedy material drawn from the preceding
decade.
As someone who
works in the nostalgia industry, this shifting ground gives cause for
alarm. At Network, we’re currently preparing a 50th
Anniversary edition of The Prisoner, its release accompanied
by a special event at Portmeirion. I think it’s fair to say that
this will probably be the last major retrospective granted to the
series. I first worked on designs for The Prisoner back in
2009, and taking into account the various Blu-Ray and repackaged
editions, there have been something like four different design
iterations to date. Finding a new stylistic spin on a cultural
artefact as stylised as The Prisoner isn’t easy, and it’s
almost a relief to know that it’s unlikely that I will ever be
called on to do it again. There are still, believe it or not,
surviving members of the cast and crew who made those episodes, but
they won’t be with us for much longer. Neither, for that matter,
will the fans. And without fans, the memory of any cultural artefact
will begin to dwindle, or find a new expression ‘underground’, ie
away from the mainstream media.
There are dedicated
groups of people out there who celebrate the fashion, music and
culture of the 1940s, 50s and 60s – the latter category containing
a small but fanatical group of young mods who have adopted an
identical style and mental attitude to those of their grandparents’
generation. But you have to dig deep to find them. The mainstream
media views such activities as outsider, eccentric, niche, which
indeed they are. You will always be able to sell mod or swing
compilation CDs (or, more likely vinyl albums), but in ever fewer
quantities. Nostalgia is a great observer of the law of diminishing
returns.
The resurrection of
the vinyl album as a format is an exception that proves the rule.
Astute marketing, together with the patronage of key music industry
figures has created a new sub-genre for recorded music in its most
primitive physical form, flying in the face of Spotify and the
ubiquitous mp3. It won’t rescue the music industry – which in its
post-war form is doomed to extinction – but it goes some way
towards deferring the inevitable day when music returns to its
original, pre-commercial status as free entertainment provided by
itinerant, unpaid performers. In some quarters (which I inhabit) it’s
already there.
If you ask me what’s
nostalgic now, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. It’s probably
something like Pokémon or
Teletubbies, both of them now over twenty years old. But... and it’s
a big but... something fundamental has changed in the arena of
popular culture, altering our perception of what is and isn’t
nostalgic. Formerly, children’s television programmes tended to
come and go within the space of one generation (barring a few
notables like Bill and Ben or Andy Pandy). The rapid
disappearance of items like Hector’s House or Mary, Mungo
and Midge from programme schedules was a guarantee of potent
nostalgia value ten to twenty years down the line. These days, brand
has become all-important, and a creation like Teletubbies will be
carefully product-managed to endure over successive generations of
young viewers. When I first saw Postman Pat, around 1982, I
thought it a charming successor to the likes of Camberwick Green,
and assumed that, like those ’60s icons, it would enjoy its moment
in the spotlight before fading slowly into history. But Pat and his
black and white cat continue to soldier on. They’ll still be at it
even when Greendale has disappeared beneath fracking installations…
It’s hard to say
when this phenomenon first took a hold. The BBC continued to broadcast
the black and white 1950s originals of Bill and Ben well into
the era of colour television, and the characters were later the subject
of a successful revival; but only after an interregnum of maybe
thirty years. I’d point to something like The Mister Men as
being one of the first really long-lasting children’s character
brands, and the late ’70s as the era when marketing began to drive
the staying power of such cultural icons. People will still feel
nostalgia for the pop culture classics of their childhood, but it’s
harder to get that same warm glow from something that never really
went away, or is marketed so relentlessly to successive generations.
Genuine nostalgia
is, for me, a rediscovery of something you’d forgotten about almost
entirely, which played a significant part in your life however many
years ago. Old television has been pretty well squeezed dry of its
nostalgia value, and we’re not far off the stage when every single
item of film or television that survives in an archive will somewhere
be available to buy, download or otherwise interact with. So where
else is there to look?
There has been a
growing interest, in recent years, in what might be referred to as
ephemeral items of broadcasting: programme trails, news bulletins,
commercials and other such fleeting moments in the schedule referred to by
those in the know as ‘programme junctions’ or simply
‘continuity’. Search TV continuity on YouTube and you’ll find a
wealth of such material. Its copyright status is generally unclear
(although technically it resides with the original broadcaster), and
as a result such items tend to go unchallenged. They have no
commercial value, unlike the pop songs and TV/ film items which are
routinely taken down.
This, I would
argue, is the last bastion of nostalgia for those for whom the ‘drug’
of an old episode of The Saint no longer works. The material
is too vague, the copyright issues too muddied for such items ever to
have any commercial value and thus they have found an ideal home
online. Dare I say so, but Network got there first... the company’s
debut release of 1997 presented a selection of venerable Public
Information Films which most definitely satisfied the criteria for
nostalgia I referred to above.
So will anyone
still care about the likes of Thunderbirds, The Saint,
or The Avengers in thirty years from now? One or two of the
greats, maybe, will endure: Thunderbirds has been revamped so
many times it’s conceivable that, by mid-century, it will still
hold some nostalgia value for today’s generation. Assuming anyone
still attaches any value to the idea of nostalgia. Will nostalgia
still be around? It is not, after all, a twentieth century invention,
although it was in the twentieth century that it found its most
potent forms of expression via the media of mechanical reproduction.
These days, I see an increasing mania for novelty – out with the
old, update to the new. Who can possibly feel nostalgia about an old
computer or iPhone? And yet, such items are already perceived as
future collectables. Got an Apple Lisa in its original box? I’d
hold onto it if I were you…
To subvert that old
saying, nostalgia isn’t what it was, wasn’t what it is, and who
knows what it will be. Except, perhaps, Doris Day.
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