Programmes that have aged poorly and programmes that have aged well?

One small point that I find interesting is that a disproportionately high amount of these 'reality'/exploitative/shaming people programmes are/were on Channel 4.

Channel 4 was originally promoted with its raison d'etre to be a more highbrow, ethical, intelligent, thinking-person's channel - maybe a kind of earlier forerunner to BBC4; yet it was also the vanguard of so many of these trashy shows as well. Eurotrash even made it blatantly obvious in its very name!

Channel 4, under Michael Grade, also brought us the 'Red Light Zone' season. The modern porn-riddled internet age makes it look retrospectively tame; but at the time, it was deliberately intended to culturally subvert with a deeply unpleasant agenda to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

‘Dr’ Gillian passing out on I’m A Celeb was iconic reality TV.
She’s currently touting her daughter around the beauty pageant circuit. Says daughter has also given interviews about being ‘close’ to Brooklyn Beckham.
Can anyone remember Secret Eaters?
I think people described very basically what they eat in a week and then secret cameras would follow them? They’d then see all the food laid out on a long table and be faced with the evidence.
It was usually 50 white thick slice loaves, 86 sausage rolls, 77 jam tarts, 134 cans of Vimto….
I would lie in bed watching it being very judgemental whilst scoffing a full pack of custard creams.
The OG 10 years younger was awful and the makeovers were rank. They always had some sort of huge plastic belt shoved on whatever outfit they’d been forced into.

What's coming over to me about this brilliant thread is - we don't always notice the way society is changing when we're in the midst of it.

It takes a wander down Memory Lane into the recent past to see how attitudes have changed even in 10, and certainly 20 or 30 years. Some things may be worse (the horrendous plague of celebrity programmes, from my pov, for example) but TV companies could not now get away with the cruel exploitation of vulnerable people, or just ordinary members of the public, as they did in the past. It was a bit of a freak show at one time.

Re Kym Marsh - she's currently getting rave reviews for the play version of Single White Female. Go Kym 😀

Re printing off doctorates and ordination, I agree. Gillian and daughter were recently on a reality show, can't remember which one. First time she'd been seen in a while.

I think all that era of progs were a bit suss. There was How Clean is Your House, Supersize vs Superskinny, that plastic surgery one, the Trinny and Suzannah etc

In a way, Animal Hospital (BBC) / Pet Rescue (C4) were exploitative too. Not just because of Rolf Harris but because of the number of people who had bought an expensive pedigree dog known for having health issues and then came on the show as they couldn’t afford vets’ bills. A British bulldog or pug would come on and we’d be shouting at the telly (and judging) when the owners were surprised that this weird looking dog needed treatment.

That also brings to mind that nasty Nigel Lythgoe and how horribly he bullied and hounded Kym Marsh for supposedly being disgustingly fat (when she wasn't at all) - threatening to end her career if she didn't drastically lose weight. She was also shamed for being a single mum - maybe the two were connected as having been pregnant and giving birth will obviously have left any woman horrendously fat and ugly and completely unlikeable by fans who are supposedly being asked to admire her musical talents anyway...

Danny was bigger built too - nothing out of the ordinary - but I don't recall him being hounded for not being stick-thin in the same way.

Look at them both now: Kym is a household name; whilst Nigel.........

The thought of Gillain McKeith printing her 'doctorate' off the internet reminded me of that episode in The Simpsons where Homer tapped a few keys on a website and was instantly ordained... then he pressed a button for his new dog collar to be sent immediately to his printer - magically ready perforated to be able to press out and put straight on

Madness that people actually chose to watch that! Like a monkeys-at-the-zoo version of "Shut it, you ain't mah mum!"... "Yes, I am; so get aht of mah pub!"

Ah, yes - also Benefits Street and Wife Swap and many others. The whole idea of these programmes is supposedly that people are watching because they want to see the resolutions, when people stop warring and find respectful common ground; and people who do outrageous things learn how to behave much better.

In truth, of course, viewers only watched for the drama; and if anything, I bet the viewing figures for the later episodes - when the subjects had taken on board the error of their ways and transformed - were far down compared to the earlier ones with all the drama.

The TV makers would always keep upping the ante for more shock, though. The first couple of series of Big Brother were genuinely great - where the point of it was that they were ordinary, everyday folk in a very extraordinary situation. Inevitably, it didn't take the producers long to completely defeat the object of the experiment and dump the ordinary people in favour of the grab-your-popcorn, short-tempered 'characters' - often not especially bright or well-adjusted - who were all about the drama.

Then, when that got boring, they too were chucked out in later series as the producers actively looked for seriously broken people, for whom the very, very last thing they needed was to be paraded on national TV for the general public to judge them and vote them out (or keep them in if they were a thrilling enough 'freak show').

I'm sure I also read that they later showed the UK Big Brother in South Africa and had the public there paying to vote for whom to keep in or be evicted - way after it had all already finished and the results decided and winner crowned long ago.

The person I am thinking of said “But everyone’s shit stinks” and Gillian McKeith shouted “Not like yours!!!”. Awful.

@CoffeeCantata how clean is your house most definitely exploitave .
There were other programmes involving benefits.i re one where a vulnerable woman was paying the new boyfriends garage bill .she had known him days.
The production team should have stepped in.

Amazing that you have to be a doctor to be able to realise that fact!

And that programme where 2 cleaning experts went into people's seriously squalid homes and cleaned them. It was absolutely stomach-churning, and although the person got a clean home out of it, again, if was borderline dodgy and exploitative because clearly some of the people had mental health issues of some sort. Even back then, when we weren't so aware of things like hoarding etc, I used to feel queasy about the effect the show would have on the individuals whose disgusting homes had been given such exposure on TV. I don't think they'd do it now...some of those people could not have been aware of what TV exposure would mean.

But it was gross! The women would urge the person to sniff all kinds of things - including faeces - and react.

And referred to every woman's boobs as bangers. "Lets get those bangers out" used to be his catchphrase and made me shudder as much then as it does now.

Also around that time The X Factor was mahoosive and has aged really badly. Particularly the clips of Simon Cowell openly, gleefully trashing women over their looks and weight. It's such uncomfortable viewing.

And lol at Gillian McKeith. Who initially tried to claim she was DR Gillian and even had a book published using that title. Then had to admit after some newspapers did some digging IIRC that the only diploma she had was one she printed off herself from the internet. She was as much a doctor as Dr Fox or Pepper!

Yes! She would bellow “Your shit stinks!” at some poor soul who agreed to go on the show.

Annoying git Gillian Mckeith

Wasn’t there a show where a fake doctor analysed people’s poo? You are what you eat.

I'd forgotten about Sherlock, the Jeremy Brett version. Once we had a course which was actually held in the Sherlock set at Granada, in the sitting room of 21B, at the end of the of Baker Street set there was the back of the Coronation Street set.

Yes! They did the fashion equivalent of painting everything magnolia.

Re hotter than my daughter
Bloody awful.

And snog, marry, avoid!!

People with extreme or quirky looks and fashion senses subjected to public scrutiny before being "transformed" in the makeover pod and returned to their families 😂

Different tangent but early noughties ITV i think:

Ladette to Lady
Peckham finishing school for girls

Voyeueristic broken britain type programmes that would not fly now

ETA - i did watch and enjoy them though 🙈 Catriona are you on here?! 😂

A lot of the comedies that I think have aged really well have already been mentioned:
Yes Minister, Yes Prime Minister
Outnumbered
Fawlty Towers
Mitchell and Webb
Black Adder
The Royle Family
The Office
I'm Alan Partridge
Father Ted
The Thick of It
Porridge
Spaced

I don't think anyone's mentioned Extras or Marion and Geoff but I think they're still funny and very watchable.

I got sidetracked by the reddit thread that was quoted earlier and googled the Mitchell and Webb Sherlock Holmes sketch which was mentioned. I don't remember it but think it's brilliant.

I'm not sure about Frasier. It's very witty but he's also pretty sleazy and there was some slut shaming of Ros which I never liked.

Allo, Allo has been mentioned but I thought that was bloody awful and very unfunny at the time. I did like Secret Army, the series that it was a pastiche of.

A drama that I think holds up really well is Tenko. I loved watching it with my mum when it first came out and then, a couple of decades later, I rewatched it with my own dd and she loved it too.

I'm currently watching Clocking Off. It's 25 years old and the phones and computers are dated but nothing else is. I didn't see it first time round and am absolutely loving it.
It has a similar feel to The Street (ensemble cast, ongoing storylines but focusing on different characters each episode) which was made a few years later and which I enjoyed at the time.
Once I've finished bingeing Clocking Off, I'm going to see if The Street is available anywhere and hope that's also held up well.

Alan Bennett's Talking Heads monologues are wonderful. The original ones from the 80s were so well done that I didn't bother with the 2020 remake. That seemed utterly pointless.

Tracy Ullman in a kick up the 80s said what we were all thinking.

'Harry and Pauls' piss take of On the Buses.

One Foot In The Grave has aged well. There's a underlying quiet sadness to Victor and Margaret, but it never gets in the way of the comedy.

Related, and arguably the thing that distinguishes British comedy from US sitcom is that underlying sorrow

https://www.reddit.com/r/BritishTV/comments/1scouo7/what_is_a_sad_or_heartbreaking_moment_in_a_sitcom/