The MCMLXXX-Factor

I'm glad to say I'm on the mend and smiling again :) my digestive system appears to be working as it should be now, more or less, although it's probably another reason to perhaps eat a little more healthily than I currently do - despite being an alien, I am also male and therefore should probably listen to my body a little more, yeah?

I've spent all Saturday night watching YouTube clips of various things, mainly clips of TV programmes from my childhood and teenage years. While this nostalgia-fest was going on I had Tweetdeck open in the background, as I always do, and one of my followers was bemoaning the fact that everyone (in the UK, at least) was watching the X-factor, and wondering if she was the only person who couldn't be bothered with it? I assured her that she wasn't - in fact I've never watched it! Nor Pop Idol, nor Britain's Got Talent - in fact, the only "reality" show I've watched over the last few years was Eurovision - Your Country Needs You, and that's only because I was writing a column on it for a website...

This made me think - I don't watch all that much TV any more, the internet having taken it's place, and when I do watch TV it tends to be repeats of older shows I enjoyed the first time around - or shows from my parents' generation which were repeated during my childhood, such as Thunderbirds and The Saint. The same goes for the music I tend to listen to - 21st century tracks, or even stuff from the nineties, tends to be crowded out by sixties classics, glam rock, punk, synthpop, eighties favourites. And there's nothing I like better than surfing websites dedicated to pop culture from those glory years, like the legendary TV Cream. My earliest memories come from around 1976, but I was rather obsessed with the 60s and early 70s as a young adult - my sisters' time - so stuff from then tends to get a fair airing as well. (Second-hand nostalgia??)

Recently though, I've started worrying about whether or not I'm "living in the past" - which would be ironic considering one of my interests is technology!! The cut-off date is usually the end of 1990 - mainly due to the fact that the early 90s were rather unhappy times for me on the whole. In fact, it was probably to cope with this that I found myself wallowing in nostalgia originally - and I don't think I've ever completely caught up. Oh sure, I had a lot of happy memories of fun in the Britpop years and I'd hate to live without my 21st century gadgets... but give me a choice between the TV or music charts of today and the ones of twenty five years ago, and I'd be off in my deLorean at 88 miles per hour before you could blink.

Why is that, I wonder? Can it be that the music, the fashions, the TV shows - life in general, even - were really that much better then, or am I coloured by the fact I grew up in the 70s and 80s and so have that "rose-tinted" affection for that time? Would I feel different about those decades if I experienced them as a grown-up? Or did those hateful years when I was still quite young "stop time" for me, and it's just I've never really caught up?

When times are bad we tend to look back on the "good old days" and we tend to remember only what was good about those days. And let's face it, times are pretty bad now - what with the recession and the worries everyone has about their future. In fact, thirty years ago, when the country was in an even worse state, I remember bands like Showaddywaddy being almost constantly on the TV singing covers of 1950s rock-n-roll, so there's nothing new about nostalgia trips :)

For some reason, I can't seem to work up as much enthusiasm for 2009 as I can for 1989, or 1979, or even 1969 despite not being around then. With the end of the decade fast approaching, I like many people wonder what the 2010s will bring, and am hoping they'll be good times for myself and those I care about. One thing I am hoping is that I won't spend the decade pretending to myself it's still 1990. Hopefully I'll be able to embrace the trends of the twenty-teens to at least some extent, because when you freeze yourself in time like that, to me, that's the definition of being old.

I'll still want to watch stuff like this from time to time though :)