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It was alright in the 1970's


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Old 06-09-2015, 12:57
solare
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God it's awful..just loads of leftie, unfunny 'comedians' sneering for a few quid.
I agree. I enjoy seeing the old clips, but the talking heads interrupting every clip with their crass, predictable "outrage" is very annoying and unnecessary.
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Old 06-09-2015, 16:27
Galaxy266
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I liked the bit with that chap trying to jump the river in that old Bedford van

No seat belt of any description
Nobody already in the water to rescue him if the worst happened, which it did.
No roll cage in van

It would appear he received multiple injuries to his arms when the van landed in the water

He was very lucky he wasn't killed

Were that "experiment" carried out today I think it would be done rather differently.
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Old 06-09-2015, 16:30
RINGWAYMAN
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What an utter pile of shite this was. I was 'forced' to watch this last night.
Smug 30-somethings taking the piss at seventies television, working on the basis that television is much better today than 40+ years ago....! Well, it certainly ain't.

Who really have thought in 1975 that forty years later that there would be a programme on people in their living rooms watching television!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Monkey tennis? Youth-hostelling with Chris Eubank?
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Old 06-09-2015, 17:18
Alrightmate
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I thought most of the clips wouldn't be that bad if they were shown today.
In fact the first half hour was very entertaining telly, I was laughing out loud at some of the clips.

The only clips which seemed bad now are the Carry On clip of Babs Windsor pretending to be 13 years old with Sid James as Santa making lewd remarks and making an erection joke, and the clip of Helen Mirren being interviewed by Parkinson.

Nazis being the subject of comedy isn't really bad. What about Allo Allo?
Sexism still exists today in some shape or form, as we see on the internet, and how older female TV presenters are fired when they get too old in the view of the show, plus we still have the same old tired format of the older male news anchorman paired with young attractive secondary female presenter. Sexism on television hasn't really changed that much from then. It also cuts both ways nowadays with men being the subject of the ridicule.

And is Stanley Baxter's stereotypes any different from Little Britain? And the part where he blacked up, was that really that different from Harry Enfield blacking up as Nelson Mandela with the accent?

I'm also intrigued by that TV science fiction drama series where the roles of men and women in society are reversed. I would genuinely like to watch that out of curiosity.

You also have to take into account context. When you take little clips from here and there and have some talking heads telling you how bad those clips are, you are immediately affecting the context.

I think the most grounded point of view was from those three blokes who just watched the clips as if they were watching youtube, and although a few clips were dodgy much of it was seen as a laugh, just like we rip the piss out of some telly nowadays.
What was more noticeable was the way in which things were presented rather than how 'bad' they were.

I'm not sure if the programme succeeding in what it wanted to achieve, because if anything it made TV from the 1970s appear to be much more entertaining and funny than much of what we see on TV today.

Good to see Bob Mills. I used to love his own show 'In Bed With MeDinner' which looked at television in a similar way to this show. I still miss it.
Plenty of clips and full shows of this series have been uploaded to youtube.
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Old 06-09-2015, 17:37
davads
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Haven't read the whole thread so this may have been addressed already (I'm currently watching the show, and in true 2015 fashion have to comment here whilst doing so ), but the clip with the bloke demonstrating the wires on a plug - what exactly was the joke there? It all seemed to be about the fact he seemed a bit shambolic (and slightly drunk?) but surely the principal lunacy was the fact that he was presenting the colours on a black and white programme...? Or was that supposed to be inherently obvious - nobody mentioned it as such?
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Old 06-09-2015, 18:27
Fizzbin
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I'm also intrigued by that TV science fiction drama series where the roles of men and women in society are reversed. I would genuinely like to watch that out of curiosity.
Just looked for Star Maidens DVD on Amazon & it's £45 - £65!

I bought it for a fiver about 10 years ago.

It was a UK/Germany co production, the special effects very much in the Space 1999 style. Gareth Thomas pre Blakes 7 was in it.

A better gender reversal story from 1980 was the Two Ronnies recurring strand 'The Worm that Turned' with Diana Dors as the Commander of Police https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcMd1F1acSo

edit: found some Star Maidens episodes on Vimeo, but someone (and his wife) has added annoying running commentary.

edit2: the bar code for Star Maidens DVD is 4006408861096, seems CEX have some copies for £25
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Old 06-09-2015, 19:19
Inkblot
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I was a teenager in the 70s and watched this show with two contemporaries. The weird thing was, we hadn't heard of a lot of the programmes. We could only conclude that being at school/university at the time, we didn't watch much TV back then.

Quite surprised to see all the hate here for the "outrage" at some dodgy jokes and bizarre programming decisions. In particular the sex education video was genuinely shocking, not because of the explicit content but because of the horribly sexist voiceover. It was like Mr Cholmondley-Warner with added masturbation, only not as educational.
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Old 06-09-2015, 19:27
Virgil Tracy
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Star Maidens was only shown in some ITV regions .
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Old 06-09-2015, 19:36
The Wulfrunian
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Just painful stuff 'oh look at how awful the 70's were and how great and smug we are now'. No thanks, I like to look back with fondness and not with vitriol.

I'd rather watch the BBC 'I love' series with Jamie Theakston telling me how great 1974 was despite being 4 years old at the time rather than incredibly smug twenty something telling me how awful and inappropriate it all was.
Many look back misty eyed at the institutionalised racism and sexism of the 70s
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Old 06-09-2015, 20:02
cathrin
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Wasn't Helen Mirren awesome? She handled that creepy line of questioning with such delightful class and poise! I admire her even more now than I did already. I loved how she showed that it was perfectly possible for a young actress to be beautiful, intelligent, witty, sharp, sexy, and 100% in control of the situation, even when presented with a prehistoric attempt to reduce her to some sort of object. Watching her wipe the floor with 70s sexism back then, wouldn't you just have put money on her still being a star (and an inspiration) 40 years later?!

Happy memories of Millsy and InbedWith Medinner. Haven't seen him on the box for years. He used to make me cry with laughter when he took the mickey out of those old TV clips. I can still remember his take on Beam & Da Silva, which was a kind of bargain basement version of Watchdog. Hilarious!
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Old 06-09-2015, 21:34
sianlovescats
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I know !
they had no idea , they heard an Irishman joke and like little pavlovian Guardian readers immediately started salivating in offence .
they had no appreciation for the satire involved because of course back in the 70s everything was crude and offensive .
BIB Unlike Daily Mail readers who lack the basic skill of understanding the difference between lies and Daily Mail truths.
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Old 06-09-2015, 23:21
odie30
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Looks like he was in bed with with his dinner...

..and stayed there.
I had forgotten how much I loved that show wot a muggy bonehead
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Old 07-09-2015, 06:34
WhoAteMeDinner
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There are only two reasons somebody's head swells up like Bob's has in recent years.
And my money is on the vice side of things. That's showbiz baby.
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Old 07-09-2015, 07:42
charliesays
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The older posters on here always get awfully defensive whenever a programme deigns to criticise the 70's (see previous thread on the earlier series).

Fact is those born in the 80s and after have collective jaws that hit the floor when we see the casual racism, sexism and homophobia that made it's way onto prime time TV. Maybe it was normal back then before bloody political correctness went mad but it doesn't make it right. Not by a long shot.

And yes we laugh at the kitsch and other worldliness of the period, a decade that taste and style forgot. And we love the music and some of the television.

But sentimentality aside it was a god awful decade for this country as the post-war baby boomers brought their fecklessness and dire management skills to the fore and did their best to bring this country to its knees (tanking economy, 3 day weeks, IMF bailout, the car industry turning comically bad.....)

Have your happy personal memories but my generation and later only live in a country that is still amongst the best in the world to inhabit in spite of, not because of, the 1970s.
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Old 07-09-2015, 07:55
dave_windows
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Now if they d only release that sex education vid in full!
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Old 07-09-2015, 10:18
davads
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I enjoyed this for the clips, but I agree that the hand-wringing "shocked" talking heads were a bit much at times (maybe that makes me politically incorrect!)...

Some of the items were a bit of a fuss about nothing though - the Magnus Pyke van stunt was funny, sure, but no different to what they were doing on Top Gear only a couple of months ago.

And the Crackerjack clip - they were dressing up in silly Nazi uniforms, they were hardly making quips about the Holocaust. It's not like there wasn't plenty of Hitler-related satire in the 1940s, during the war.

Things are just "of their time", that's all it is. You could equally have a programme like this in 30 years' time where people sit open-mouthed at the Simon Cowell shows where they parade arguably mentally unstable people in front of a camera and laugh at them trying to sing
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Old 07-09-2015, 10:21
mike65
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Some of the items were a bit of a fuss about nothing though - the Magnus Pyke van stunt was funny, sure, but no different to what they were doing on Top Gear only a couple of months ago.
To be fair on Top Gear they have to comply with elfandsafety stantards, the Stig would be in a harness and the van would be fitted with a steel cage etc.

Things are just "of their time", that's all it is. You could equally have a programme like this in 30 years' time where people sit open-mouthed at the Simon Cowell shows where they parade arguably mentally unstable people in front of a camera and laugh at them trying to sing
True enough, its outrageous enough already mind you in that regard.
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Old 07-09-2015, 12:44
Virgil Tracy
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The older posters on here always get awfully defensive whenever a programme deigns to criticise the 70's (see previous thread on the earlier series).

Fact is those born in the 80s and after have collective jaws that hit the floor when we see the casual racism, sexism and homophobia that made it's way onto prime time TV. Maybe it was normal back then before bloody political correctness went mad but it doesn't make it right. Not by a long shot.

And yes we laugh at the kitsch and other worldliness of the period, a decade that taste and style forgot. And we love the music and some of the television.

But sentimentality aside it was a god awful decade for this country as the post-war baby boomers brought their fecklessness and dire management skills to the fore and did their best to bring this country to its knees (tanking economy, 3 day weeks, IMF bailout, the car industry turning comically bad.....)

Have your happy personal memories but my generation and later only live in a country that is still amongst the best in the world to inhabit in spite of, not because of, the 1970s.
a baby boomer in the 70s would've been under 30 , they weren't running the country back then
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Old 07-09-2015, 12:50
mike_b
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This 70's TV 'personaility' seems to still be the epitome of that decade's rampant racism:

Patti Lee Salter, also known as Lee Patrick.

https://twitter.com/LeeP59

Ex-hostess on ITV's game-show The Golden Shot, working, no less, with much-loved black ex-footballer come comedian Charlie Williams. She also appeared in a few other programmes including Some Mother's Do 'Ave Em. She was also allegedly a former squeeze of Keith Moon of The Who.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2034951/

The intervening years seem to have had an adverse affect on Ms. Salter/Patrick as she now seems to have positioned herself as a Twitter media-commentator slightly to the right of Katie Hopkins.

Here's a few of her nuggets of wisdom:

"My greatest hobby is insulting islam, the ****ing shit eating A holes..."

Captionining a group of pictures of unspecified migrants of African origin: "...they look pure evil, how anyone would want these creatures in our country is beyond me"

And: "..highly sexed revolting looking creatures surely a recipe for total disaster, a pig woudnt (sic) want to be ****ed by one of them"

Accompanying pictures of refugess stranded at Budapest train station. "These same cretins will be rampaging through our streets dressed in black weilding machetes soon."

Accompanying a picture of the Syrian migrant convoy in Hungary on their way to the Austrian border: "Please drop a bomb on the assholes before they do even more damage to our country #NoMoreMigrants" "Somebody get out the sarin gas spray.."

Generalisation about African migrants: "They are programmed to attack women, black or white.."

And most endearing of all:

In response to a poster asking how she's prefer to tackle a group of Syrian refugees:

"A 'Final Solution' hopefully..."

What a wonderfully inspirational person she really is. Perhaps not in the same league as Jimmy Savile, but another dangerously unpaletable product of seventies television perhaps?
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Old 07-09-2015, 13:06
lady_xanax
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I enjoyed the programme- only a few of tjeclips were raised eyebrows. I think the general consensus was that it wasn't meant offensively but that they were a product of their time. Not every programme made in that era was a classic just as today we have lots of bad TV.
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Old 07-09-2015, 13:14
JT2060
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This 70's TV 'personaility' seems to still be the epitome of that decade's rampant racism:

Patti Lee Salter, also known as Lee Patrick.

https://twitter.com/LeeP59

Ex-hostess on ITV's game-show The Golden Shot, working, no less, with much-loved black ex-footballer come comedian Charlie Williams. She also appeared in a few other programmes including Some Mother's Do 'Ave Em. She was also allegedly a former squeeze of Keith Moon of The Who.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2034951/

The intervening years seem to have had an adverse affect on Ms. Salter/Patrick as she now seems to have positioned herself as a Twitter media-commentator slightly to the right of Katie Hopkins.

Here's a few of her nuggets of wisdom:

"My greatest hobby is insulting islam, the ****ing shit eating A holes..."

Captionining a group of pictures of unspecified migrants of African origin: "...they look pure evil, how anyone would want these creatures in our country is beyond me"

And: "..highly sexed revolting looking creatures surely a recipe for total disaster, a pig woudnt (sic) want to be ****ed by one of them"

Accompanying pictures of refugess stranded at Budapest train station. "These same cretins will be rampaging through our streets dressed in black weilding machetes soon."

Accompanying a picture of the Syrian migrant convoy in Hungary on their way to the Austrian border: "Please drop a bomb on the assholes before they do even more damage to our country #NoMoreMigrants" "Somebody get out the sarin gas spray.."

Generalisation about African migrants: "They are programmed to attack women, black or white.."

And most endearing of all:

In response to a poster asking how she's prefer to tackle a group of Syrian refugees:

"A 'Final Solution' hopefully..."

What a wonderfully inspirational person she really is. Perhaps not in the same league as Jimmy Savile, but another dangerously unpaletable product of seventies television perhaps?
So one person represents a whole decade of thought?

1970 Equal Pay Act
1974 Heath and Safety at Work Act
1975 Sex Discrimination Act
1976 Race Relations Act
1976 Domestic Violence Act
1977 Formation of the Anti Nazi League
1978 Employment Protection Act

My, we were despicable people in the 70's.

Contrary to your views, the 70's was the generation that woke up to the nature of discrimination in all forms, and did something about it.
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Old 07-09-2015, 13:19
Justabloke
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I watched this out of curiosity having grown up in the 70's.. I'll tell you what's offensive, the people on this show applying current mores to shows from 40 odd years ago. If shows were still like that or considered acceptable fair game but they're aren't and they're not so a pretty pointless waste of someone's TV show making budget is all that's been achieved.

At the time they were shown, society was a very different place, its evolved, nothing to see here move on. I won't be tuning in for the rest of the series.
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Old 07-09-2015, 13:23
mike_b
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So one person represents a whole decade of thought?
Contrary to your views, the 70's was the generation that woke up to the nature of discrimination in all forms, and did something about it.
I'm not disagreeing with you but as the child of immigrants growing up in the Home Counties in the 70's there was certainly a fair bit of it about. It's just a shame that people like Ms. Salter, and her 800+ Twitter cronies seem to wish to propagate it in 2015.
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Old 07-09-2015, 13:25
niceguy1966
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Has there even been a clips program that was improved by the talking heads? I can't think of one. I always just assume they couldnt find enough clips to fill the hour and the talking heads are padding.

It would be much better just to have a voice-over.
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Old 07-09-2015, 13:29
JT2060
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Has there even been a clips program that was improved by the talking heads? I can't think of one. I always just assume they couldnt find enough clips to fill the hour and the talking heads are padding.

It would be much better just to have a voice-over.
I haven't seen the program, but I do hope Paul Morley didn't turn up spouting his usual pretentious twaddle - he usually manages to be a talking head on every program.
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