Television
Short swing
Martyn Harris
Those affluent days. Those happy lov- ing days of the Sixties.'
Thus spake Desmond Wilcox, husband of Esther and erstwhile editor of Man Alive. He was talking on BBC 2's evening of Sixties nostalgia (Monday), and had evi- dently been selected to represent all the defects of that decade. The easy sentimen- tality; the uninspected liberal nostrums of tolerance and compassion; the short mem- ory for first wives; the too-young leisure clothes.
My sister felt that she had missed the Sixties because she was too old, while I felt I had missed them because I was too young. Since there is only two years between us we must have been dull young people, or it was a short decade.
Most of my contemporaries (I am 40) claimed to be having lots of sex at the time, but we have owned up since that most of us were virgins before we went to university. Drugs? A few joints. Clothes? Mostly denim. Music? We pretended to like drum solos and lead guitar breaks but affected to despise what turned out to be the lasting stuff from Motown and the Beatles.
I suppose there were some people, hang- ing around the Arts Lab, the King's Road, the Cavern and the Scotch of St James's who really experienced the Sixties, while the rest of us kicked our heels in Hull and Swansea and Southampton, but I doubt if it was ever more than a few thousand.
Reactionaries hate it better than its sur- vivors remember it Cif you remember it you weren't really there') and that is one good reason to stick up for the Sixties. It was the closest the British class system ever came to overthrow (stockbrokers had to cut their hair like photographers) and for a while everything could be held up to can- did, amused inspection.
Man Alive, the heir to Picture Post and son of New Society, looked at cults and clans, homosexuals, phobics and fetishists with equal élan, but my favourite from this resurrection was Dave the double-decker bus fiend. He spent his whole time collect- ing buses, reading about buses, riding on buses and driving buses. Loyally his wife came along, but complained it was impossi- ble to communicate with somebody while they were driving a double-decker bus. 'But you've got the bell codes,' said Dave indig- nantly.
But meanwhile, as they say on The Nature Detectives, Chris Packham continues his bid for the Michael Wood award for wearing tight jeans in pointless location shots: a chemical plant; wading in a lily pond; and creeping through the runner beans in an allotment garden.
The Nature Detectives is a mixture of Jeremy Beadle and James Herriot: video voyeurism and furry animals. Last week it was: 'The school caretaker who has record- ed a bluetit's worst nightmare, the pension- er with a penchant for crustaceans and the Scottish housewife who is host to some very rare mammals'. Packham, the presenter, has a Millwall supporter's haircut, with hogged black bristle around the edges and floppy peroxide bits on top, and a shame- lessness with his linking material such has not been seen since the days of Monty Python.
`Well, it's a long way from the industrial landscape of Willington to a wee cottage in the Scottish Highlands,' he declared, and so it was, but we were going there anyway, to see people who fed pine martens with peanut-butter sandwiches on their living- room carpet.
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