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.

Faltering first steps towards economy

It has been a week of faltering first steps in my household, as one-year-old Charlie discovered that he could let go of the furniture and boldly go across the middle of the room towards the smiling adult with the outstretched arms.

Naturally there have been mishaps along the way, and I have belatedly come to appreciate the origin of that useful phrase “trying to run before you can walk”. Words that spring to mind every time Education Secretary Michael Gove pops up in the media, stuck in the bottom of his hole yet still ferociously digging.

Not that I am without sympathy for those in the Government charged with finding savings in their departmental budgets. It finally dawned on me a couple of weeks ago that I have been living vastly beyond my means for years, and that the only solutions were to increase my income by about 60pc or cut expenditure by a third.

That will be the spending cuts, then, won’t it?

I duly drew up a list of things I could do without, but none has yet got past the family vetting committee. Cancelling my eye-wateringly expensive private health insurance looked like a no-brainer to me, particularly as the small print carefully excludes pretty much any problem I seem likely to develop, but Mrs Hann remains to be convinced. I might go down with blackwater fever right after cancelling my direct debit, and it would be like forgetting to buy a lottery ticket on the day when your usual numbers finally hit the jackpot.

The only foreign holiday I have taken in the last decade was my honeymoon, and I would gladly never take another, but my wife feels the urge to go somewhere reliably sunny in September and even I cannot claim that she is necessarily going to get through a bottle of Soltan in Scarborough towards the end of the summer season.

But tough choices, as they say, are going to have to be made. Memberships of clubs I rarely visit; donations to good causes (and political ones); expensive indulgences like nights at the opera are all in line for the axe. But just looking at my list of potential economies reminds me what a hugely privileged, middle class life I lead.

I may no longer be able to progress, like a mediaeval monarch, between two comfortable homes, but we are some way off worrying about not having a roof over our heads. More of the food shopping may have to come from Iceland and less from Marks & Spencer, but we will not starve (and frankly it would do me no harm if I did, at least for a while).

Dieting is a dreadful prospect, but becomes curiously enjoyable once you have started, as you become obsessively focused on shedding the pounds and feel the benefit of not carrying all that surplus weight around with you. With luck, economising will prove equally addictive. I am just hopelessly out of practice, having been lucky enough to remain reasonably prosperous since the early 1980s.

Never rich, though; never saving for the future; in fact, never really giving a thought about tomorrow. Could there have been a worse preparation for late-life parenthood?

I did notice, in my years as a trustee trying to raise funds for musical charities, that the genuinely wealthy were often pathologically mean. This, I have finally realised, is their secret.

So this week I finally embark on my first unsteady steps to slash spending, just like a proper toff. I hope that anyone trying to touch me for a few quid in the coming months will note that my sudden close-fistedness is not the result of suddenly acquiring a fortune: quite the opposite. With lottery tickets also on my list of cuts, contracting blackwater fever seems a much more likely prospect.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Scarborough versus the Med: no contest

Whatever you think about the ConDem coalition, you must admit that the weather has perked up a treat since they took office. The only snag being that the letters pages will soon be full of global warming true believers bleating “I told you so.”

As the weekend sun beat down, the two sides in the British Airways dispute came close to beating each other up, the Icelandic volcano probably just paused for breath and many of us reflected that our jobs are hanging by a gossamer thread that George Osborne and David Laws are about to slash. So why on earth risk booking a foreign summer holiday when there are seaside guesthouses the length and breadth of Britain desperate for our custom?

You will discover the answer to this in August when you are sitting inside a grim, graffiti-covered Victorian shelter with sodden chip wrappers blowing around your ankles, watching the rain stream down the cracked and filthy windows while several OAPs shout at each other about how they have known worse, albeit only that time the Alton Towers log flume malfunctioned so spectacularly during their annual coach trip.

“Real Blackwaterfoot weather” we called it in my family, after a less than successful childhood holiday on the Isle of Arran. Every drenched afternoon the cheery (by Scottish standards) lady hotelier would raise our spirits by promising that, on the morrow, we would experience “real Blackwaterfoot weather.” And so we did. Several inches of it, often coming at us horizontally.

Still, at least there will be plenty of time to read the newspapers. They will be full of true believers’ valuable insights into the freak downpours, often including the words “I told you so.”

Yet I would not have it any other way. I hate going abroad, me. Not because of xenophobic prejudice. I simply hate going anywhere.

If I absolutely have to take baby Charlie on his first summer holiday, as I am told I must, I fancy St Abbs in Berwickshire. It did for me when I was his age, and look how I turned out. Yes, all right, not the strongest of arguments, I know.

Mrs Hann counterbid with Majorca, Minorca and Corfu (cunningly weaving in two former British colonies, I noted, in the hope of sparking my interest as a historian). So naturally I trumped her with the ultimate holiday destination anywhere on the planet: Scarborough, the Queen of the Yorkshire Riviera. I think I’ve just about forgiven the council for tarmacing over my favourite crazy golf course to create a car park. There are others. Along with a castle, beaches, gardens, cliff tramways, theatres, pubs, a Sea Life Centre, a miniature railway and the grave of Anne Brontë (who was to the Haworth sisterhood what Zeppo was to the Marx Brothers). They took her to Scarborough for her health. What an advertisement.

Seriously, I know you will think I am taking the mickey, but I love the place. What could be better than watching a load of grown men steering miniature warships around the lake in Peasholm Park to recreate one of the great naval battles of the Second World War? It seemed bizarrely old-fashioned when my dad first took me in the early 1960s. How wonderful that it is still going on to enthral (or baffle) my son half a century later.

My wife argues that Charlie needs to get used to aeroplanes, and would prefer a beach with reliable sunshine. I say the days of mass air travel are over. Dani (as I call our new ConDem conjoined PM) has already scrapped the third runway at Heathrow. We are all going to have to get used to holidays at home and the memorable disappointments of real Blackwaterfoot weather. You will laugh about it eventually. Do remember that I told you so.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.