talking about kids tv in the pub/on the internet etc etc

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So, ever since i went to college, almost ten years ago now, I've been having this conversation "oh remember pigeon street!" etc etc with depressing regularity, to the point where if someone brings it up now I try to change the subject to *why* we (and i'm not including the Pinefox in that "we") are so infatuated with it all. Obviously if one is on the internet, the offenders can be quickly sent to tvcream, but that's not so easy to do in the pub...

Any suggestions about why this has become a main topic of conversation then kids?

― carsmilesteve, Monday, 18 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

A common bond of warming emotional experiences in this complex adult scene of difficult relationships and fractured pop music taste.

Plus you can usually only half remember them, so the contributions of other's seem valuable. Like eight-bit computer games, however, they are better left alone as affectionate imperfection than found again in all their cold, hard mediocrity.

It seems to me that the genre ripe for planting the seed for some kind of collective false memory syndrome. We only have to claim to enough sentimental twenty-somrthings that our favourite programme was The Magical Wangers or something and people will start to petition the BBC to release it on video.

― Magnus, Monday, 18 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Well, I'm game. I have long assumed that the notorious 'dirty Captain Pugwash' rumours (Master Bates etc.) were started by malicious and cynical post-students ("BUT THEY'RE IN THE BOOKS") and been keen to try something similar. Good thread idea actually - urban myths you have started.

― Tom, Monday, 18 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I'm faaairly sure the scurrilous Captain Pugwash rumours (characters called Seaman Staines, Roger the Cabin Boy etc.) were started by Victor Lewis-Smith on a programme called Bygones in the early nineties. I hadn't heard the rumours before then but after, they were everywhere. I remember the show, he also said that 'Pugwash' was Austrailian lesbian slang for cunnilingus.

After the rumours spread and spread the author of the CP stories came forward in the press, on radio and TV to say the rumours *had* all been made up and none of the characters ever had dodgy names.

If you want to start naughty rumours or urban myths then, go on late- night Channel 4.

― DavidM, Monday, 18 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Why do we talk about it? What's good and what's not and why is important — and not just to making pubs vaguely tolerable. It's a big help if you actually fix on something you all experienced. Mary, Mungo and Midge demolishes Merzbow, in this particular territory.

Pugwash = Victor Lewis Smith = beyond toss. Anyone in a pub who claims fondness for either is lying and shd be glassed.

― mark s, Monday, 18 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Mad magazine had a fake ad for an "Unlicensed All-Purpose Nostalgia T- shirt" that read: "I grew up watching the same cartoons, reading the same books and eating the same foods you did. Let's connect on that seminal level".

Perhaps one of the side effects of the steady diet of rainbow- coloured pop media that many children of the 70s and 80s were raised on is premature nostalgia. Maybe the experiences of childhood during those decades are significantly removed from the actualities of adult life. Maybe it's an effect of the societal trend of "sharing" and "bonding" on people who have little shared cultural experiences aside from some sugar-coated cereals and Super Mario Brothers.

― Mitch Lastnamewithheld, Monday, 18 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I should note that I include myself in that list, and I still eat sugary cereals regularly . And I have an uneasy feeling that someone will misread "bonding" as "bondage" and in a moment we'll have a Nintendo FanFic site with a link to "Super Sodomy Brothers". Please, no.

― Mitch Lastnamewithheld, Monday, 18 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Shared memory and nostalgia needn't be the same thing (assuming nostalgia = automatically suspect, anyway). A lot of what's actually interesting to reach, about some of these earliest cultural experiences, is that they were intense (frightening, obviously, but other, more fugitive qualities apply). I'm actually more suspicious of the need to put it at arms length , as a sort of faddy product of false community values and commodified blah blah blah. Compared to what? It's the landscape onto which we project our understanding now of our first learned judgments and encounter with judgment: I think it would sillier not to be accessing it, or to be setting it aside as mere ("childish") irrelevance.

Nor is the memory's adjustment of quality upwards *just* a warm-and-fuzzy epiphenomenon of lazy infantilised boomer self-adoration: it's after all an index of WHAT WE WANTED, which impacts on WHAT WE WANT.

On of the things that SHOCKED me abt Thunderbirds reruns, was that — on the whole — within maybe three minutes of an episode starting, I knew exactly what happened in the whole of the rest of the story. I don't know if this is because I sat glued to repeats as a kid, or what: but the quality of my recall actually somewhat unnerved me. (Where was it stored? I hadn't given the prog ANY thought for three decades...)

― mark s, Monday, 18 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Re perfectly remembered Thunderbirds plots...I don't know what mechanism is at work but children have incredible memories. They can remember details of very insignificant conversations from a month ago.

A possible explanation would be that as you get older, your life becomes ever more complicated, so you need to filter out the less important information (or rather the 'insignificant' stuff is marked for non-permanent storage).

― David, Monday, 18 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

So to answer the question somewhat: as a generation (two, really), brought up under far more intense cultural bombardment than any previous, we reach for somewhat softcore blather about elements of this NOT SO MUCH in muzzy hope of shared experience AS to (collectively) *protect* and *distance* ourselves from the complex intensity and sedimented affect wrought in our bare infant psyches. We suppress the highly personalised and odd responses, and bat our way towards the safe, conventional, agreed- on ways we Should Have Responded (guided, as so often, by the perceptive wisdoms of Stuart Maconie).

At least, in pubs we do, because pubs = rubbish. Here at ILE we are bolder and more honest.

― mark s, Monday, 18 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

"We are the critical UBERMENSCH!"

― DG, Monday, 18 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I'm a bit iffy about the aspect of all this that (wholly inadvertently) marginalises and almost writes out of history those aspects of the recent past which *don't* fit into the "shared experience" thing. Certainly it depresses me to see someone like Maconie who actually has considerable knowledge of a lot of stuff from the 70s and 80s that falls outside these period stereotypes playing up to the turning of all this into a Big TV Industry. A lot of it reminds me of the 50s nostalgia boom of the Happy Days / Grease era.

But equally I can see why it's comforting, and why it has become so all-embracing, and certainly a lot of the stuff that gets revived this way has fascinating period resonances *outside* the base-level Saturday-night BBC2 / C4 mindset: Mary Mungo and Midge as a kind of pre-school introduction to Wilson's Brave New Britain, Trumptonshire as the precise opposite of above concept, The Battle of Billy's Pond (CFF, 1976) as halfway house between jaunty post-war kids' adventures and present environmental concerns, King of the Castle (HTV West, 1977, I don't expect anyone will know it) as invocation of the spiritual and moral bankruptcy and reaching-point-of-no-return-ism of both lumpen working-class *and* institutional middle-class Britain in the Callaghan era through creating fantasy parallels to the real characters of both backgrounds, etc., etc. In the Radiophonic Workshop's glory years, a lot of these shows gave young kids exposure to music at least as far out as anything being created for the self- pleasure of the avant-garde, as well.

But, as we all know, anyone who has ever used the phrase "What *were* they on?" should be shot.

― Robin Carmody, Monday, 18 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

its not different to the past but similar? wordsworth colette et al call upon childhood sensations to make poetry because of their nakedness. previous generations just didn't have tv as an aesthetic experience, that's all. apparently Tolstoy had a copy of P G Wodehouse's stories for little boys by his bed when he died. most experiences are aesthetic to children, because they are constantly forming new metaphors, a process which becomes stale in adulthood? this doesn't mean childhood has to have been an 'idyll.' banal analysts will make banal analyses of childhood tv, but this isn't necessary.

― Maryann, Tuesday, 19 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

That is *so* true, Maryann. I wish Maconie et al would learn :).

― Robin Carmody, Tuesday, 19 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

eleven years pass...

both my boys (9 and 16) have loved this show.

reminds me of all the chaos that old'uns had towards tiswas.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/dec/04/ofcom-investigate-bbc-child-eating

rather than investigating, this should be promoted to saturday nights.

― mark e, Tuesday, 4 December 2012 19:31 (twelve years ago)

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