Nostalgia isn't what it used to be

The older you get, the faster time passes. So it is comforting to have occasional interludes in which the pace slows, the predictable always happens, and one can bask in happy memories of simpler days.

For many years now, Sunday night TV has provided just this in the whimsy of Last of the Summer Wine from Holmfirth, the gentle police drama of Heartbeat filmed in and around Goathland, or its hospital spin-off The Royal set in Scarborough.

To be honest, I have not watched any of them regularly in years. Summer Wine lost much of its appeal when Bill Owen (Compo) died, and Heartbeat was never the same after Bill Maynard had to be invalided out of the role of Claude Jeremiah Greengrass. Even so, it was comforting to know that they were still there in the schedules, providing work for British character actors and film crews, income for owners of wheeled bathtubs and classic cars, and a massive boost to the Yorkshire tourist industry.

Now, all of a sudden, they are gone. I have never knowingly missed a final chance to see anything since my father let me stay up especially late one night when I was seven, to catch The Last Night of the Crazy Gang from the London Palladium. So naturally I was glued to the screen on Sunday to watch the very last episode of Heartbeat, which exited not so much with a bang as a groan and a lot of sobs, as cast and audience alike were left wondering whether Oscar Blaketon would survive being impaled on a very large pitchfork. Given the Hitchcock-like appearance of the Grim Reaper in an earlier scene, I did not feel inclined to bet on it.

When Heartbeat started back in 1992, there seemed to be a fairly direct connection between the chronology of the series and real time. But then someone no doubt spotted that they would soon have to move on from the steam trains, Bakelite telephones and pounds, shillings and pence that contributed so much of its appeal. And so it ended up stuck for years in the late 1960s, repeating itself like a cracked vinyl record as the regular actors aged but their characters supposedly did not.

Current television convention clearly required a final, wrap-up episode in which it would have been revealed that Aidensfield had actually been wiped out by a surprise Soviet nuclear strike on RAF Fylingdales in 1965, and that everyone had been hanging around in purgatory ever since. Well, it worked for Ashes to Ashes and Lost.

Instead we got a cliff-hanger that could only be resolved in the next series that is never going to be made. Disappointing, or what?

I turned for light relief to BBC4, and what was billed as “Michael Smith’s Deep North: the novelist returns to his native city of Newcastle upon Tyne.” Given that I have never heard of any such person, I had high hopes that this might turn out to be a hilarious spoof. But, in fact, the only fiction proved to be the claim that the man was a Geordie. It eventually emerged that he had been an occasional childhood visitor, escaping from his upbringing in Hartlepool. As you would. The BBC clearly needs to do more work on its geographic understanding of this so-called “deep North” beyond White City.

This, sadly, is the sort of cheap-to-make “fondly looking back” programme of which we can expect to see much more as the old, expensive, period comedies and dramas vanish from the airwaves.

Still, with 295 episodes of Last of the Summer Wine and 372 of Heartbeat available for endless recycling, why bother making new stuff when we can all wallow in fond memories of the way we used to enjoy our Sunday night fix of nostalgia back in the good old 1990s?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

If only I could vote for the ash cloud

My battle with pneumonia last week had a decidedly Franco-Italian flavour: lying down, conceding defeat and waiting for outside intervention. Mercifully it arrived in the form of powerful antibiotics, normally reserved for elephants with rampant septicaemia. These have so far taken me to the Battle of the Bulge phase of the campaign, with the cough of doom currently staging an improbable but determined fight back.

Still, at least it gave me time to think, for a change, and to reach one important conclusion. If the cough wins, the perfect epitaph for my gravestone will be “If only”. This should prove less controversial with the authorities than my previous choice, “Not sleeping, only dead”.

If only I could have predicted that the Elfin Safety worriers would prohibit all air travel for the best part of a week (with more to come) and that Nick Clegg would become the most popular British political leader since Winston Churchill, and if only I’d had the wit to place an accumulator bet on it, I could now be looking forward to a very comfortable retirement.

Marred a little, if the polls do not move, by having another five years of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister even if Labour comes third in the number of votes cast. Though at least such monstrous unfairness might finally provoke the supine taxpayers of Britain into meaningful revolt against their political system.

The trouble with the Clegg surge is that it is a meaningless revolt; an anti-politics gesture provoked by that televised non-debate which reduced the election to another episode of “Britain Lacks Talent”. It serves David Cameron right for pressing for these events in the belief that they would show up Gordon Brown for a fool, without pondering long and hard on the other possibilities.

My first problem with Mr Clegg is that I cannot hear his name without thinking of Last of the Summer Wine, and that nice old boy whose national treasure status has been consolidated by providing the voice of Wallace and Gromit. It would greatly increase my engagement with the electoral process if the next Prime Ministerial debate could be filmed in Holmfirth, with Clegg, Foggy Cameron and Compo Brown careering down a hillside on a souped-up DFS sofa, then being chased by a brush-wielding Harriet Harman in the role of Nora Batty.

Next, he unfortunately shares his name with those large horse flies that inflict such painful bites and are the best argument, apart from the climate, for avoiding the exposure of flesh while walking the Northumbrian moors.

Apparently no-one minds that he went to precisely the same “posh” school as that unbearable toff George Osborne, though admittedly he had the wit not to join the Cambridge equivalent of the Bullingdon Club, or at least not to get photographed in its uniform. But then going to the Eton of Scotland never did Tony Blair any electoral harm, did it? Different rules apply to Tories.

Finally, at the heart of Mr Clegg’s political philosophy lies enthusiasm for the project of European integration. I am sure the vast majority of the British people are not of the same view; so perhaps, as the focus turns to policies rather than personalities, this clegg may yet be swatted. One can but hope, remembering that Churchill reached his peak of personal popularity just weeks before he was ejected from office in favour of the anti-charismatic Clement Attlee.

Ask yourself this. If Mr Clegg really is the new Churchill, why has he not already commandeered a flotilla of small ships to sail to Dunkirk and bring our stranded compatriots home from the Continent?

Personally, I feel an increasingly soft spot for the invisible ash cloud that has stopped all those pesky carbon-emitting flights and may yet cool the whole northern hemisphere. How green is that? If only it were standing for election …

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.