It Was Alright In The 70's : The Past Is A Foreign Country.

Channel 4 seem to have given us a whole new genre of television with their two part documentary ( and I use the term in its loosest form ) It Was Alright In The 70's. The Self Righteous, Holier Than Thou genre of television. A group of celebs ( and I use the term in its loosest form ) and  clever dick types were sat down in front of 70's TV shows to be shocked by how un PC they were.  They shook their heads and acted horrified in front of The Benny Hill Show, Joker's Wild and sundry  regional Beauty Contests. One of the shocked viewers was that geezer who was worried about how many pears went into his pear cider, on that advert, a few years back, so it is good to know he is just as outraged at 70's television as the lack of pears in his pear cider.
Yeah OK a lot of 70's telly does shock us now, but do we need the self righteous television types to highlight it? In forty years time you would probably get the same gasps of horror at Sex Box and Big Brother as the all those tacky, tawdry regional beauty contests got in this show. And will Educating Joey Essex really stand the test of time and not be ridiculed in some distant future? At one point they showed a bad taste clip from the long forgotten sitcom The Wackers, then pointed out the show was so unpopular the last episode was never aired. So perhaps viewers in the 70's weren't so gung ho for that sort of stuff. OK, it was bad back then , but television has always been more terrible than outstanding.  A lot of 70's television holds up very well these days and a lot of it was groundbreaking and fresh and it wasn't awash with endless cheap reality shows and lazy holier than thou documentaries like this.  So instead of being self satisfied and smug isn't it time to say television has always reflected its time and was always pretty much crap.
Over