{"id":422,"date":"2009-11-06T15:58:41","date_gmt":"2009-11-06T14:58:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/?p=422"},"modified":"2009-11-06T15:58:41","modified_gmt":"2009-11-06T14:58:41","slug":"is-media-nostalgia-a-thing-of-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/?p=422","title":{"rendered":"Is Media Nostalgia a Thing of the Past?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"HereLast night I found myself stuck in a YouTube<\/a> chain of watching late 70s, early 80s children’s TV opening credits.\u00c2\u00a0 It all started with looking up Floella Benjamin<\/a> on Wikipedia<\/a> (after hardly believing that was really her in the Sarah Jane Adventures<\/a> yesterday – she looked far too young but it was, nonetheless, her!).\u00c2\u00a0 That led me to seek clips from Play Away<\/a> on YouTube and it didn’t stop there…<\/p>\n

Seriously dating myself (no – not in that<\/em> way!) I watched the opening credits to the likes of (I’m sure there were more) Play Away (with Jeremy Irons!), Rentaghost<\/a>, The Flumps<\/a>, Bod<\/a>, Worzel Gummidge<\/a>, Jamie And The Magic Torch<\/a>, The Adventure Game<\/a> (including the last 5 minutes, where the contestants have to cross the vortex), Rainbow<\/a>, Grange Hill<\/a> (the original opening with the exploding sausage! Also Gripper’s exit scenes from the series), Wizbit<\/a>, Jigsaw<\/a>, Look and Read<\/a>: Dark Towers<\/a> (no credits, just a good few minutes of the programme) and three crappy American series from the early to mid 80s – Automan<\/a>, Manimal<\/a> and Street Hawk<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Is there a point to all this rambling?\u00c2\u00a0 If there is it is this: will children in the future fail to have the vague nostalgic memories of children’s TV past that we do, because the programmes will always be instantly accessible in perpetuity?\u00c2\u00a0 For the most part I was only looking at the opening credits last night which is enough to evoke memories but not enough to destroy them!\u00c2\u00a0 In the not too distant future we will almost certainly be able to bring up programmes at will.\u00c2\u00a0 Children won’t have the same experience that we had – namely that a TV programme was generally shown once and rarely (if ever) repeated.<\/p>\n

Perhaps inaccessibility to a past event isn’t required to generate nostalgia but I do wonder if being able to quickly and easily revisit an old childhood memory might be a bit traumatic when they find it isn’t quite as good as their memory suggests.\u00c2\u00a0 No, that’s the situation our generation is in, looking back 30+ years without anything to bridge that gulf.\u00c2\u00a0 Future generations won’t need to have such a gap – as they progress through childhood they can watch programmes to death and revisit them later in childhood, only to find they don’t like them any more.\u00c2\u00a0 Perhaps for that reason alone TV (and ‘media’ in general) nostalgia will be a thing of the past and maybe that’s no bad thing!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night I found myself stuck in a YouTube chain of watching late 70s, early 80s children’s TV opening credits.\u00c2\u00a0 It all started with looking up Floella Benjamin on Wikipedia (after hardly believing that was really her in the Sarah Jane Adventures yesterday – she looked far too young but it was, nonetheless, her!).\u00c2\u00a0 That […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}