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

On The Buses is dire, but what's rather puzzling is that the main writers (Ronald Wolfe and Ronald Chesney) had previously created The Rag Trade, which had loads of strong female characters!

Quite a lot of early 2000s comedy had aged less well than some earlier stuff, partly because of the anti-PC backlash that seemed to be a product of the Loaded era. Two Pints... is particularly depressing - most of the male characters are sex-obsessed morons, and the girls seem to just accept it (and even welcome it to a degree).

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.

Also for a series made as recently as the 90s and particularly popular with liberal fandom it is interesting to watch series 1 and play “spot the minority”. Its set in public school in Santa Barbara in a non flashy area but good luck spotting even an extra who isn’t white and beautiful in one of the more diverse parts of the US. I think it was series two before there was a black actor in a bit part - a stereotyped Baptist minister vampire. It was a damned sight whiter than any part of California I worked in.

And of course whilst all the pupils are dressed pretty much as you would expect school students Buffy alone is in the skin tight skimpy outfits alongside peers in jumpers, sweatshirts and jeans. The 16 year old /much older man was, as you say, creepy. Even for its time.

B5 was a lot better for its time than most other series in this respect, X files did better than average as well.

Mini Pops.

Infamously with an 8 year old doing Like a Virgin

Another horror from the past which would be absolutely shocking today was that show where young children- primary age - (mainly girls) were made up and given sexy costumes to cavort around in. Oh - what what is called..? "Pop something or other".

It was a paedophile's wildest dream. What in the name of God were they thinking?

She can be an incredibly witty writer but has always massively overshared and had a number of view changes to fit with the zeitgeist. I was not surprised when Shrill the tv series bore so little resemblance to the characters of the book written only a few years earlier.

Adult Braces has however generated many hours of gobsmacked podcasts, some of which are just as funny as the Love Actually review!

Embarrassing Bodies was seriously weird as well. People who were too coy to speak to their trusted GP behind a closed door, but were happy to go on national TV and tell millions of strangers.

The episode that always sticks in my mind is the man who went because he was really worried about the constant unpleasant smell from his nether regions. Dr Christian examined him and his diagnosis was that the man needed to, as he so eloquently and tactfully phrased it, "revisit your wiping technique"! Imagine being a grown adult and having to be told by a doctor in front of the country that you need to wipe your arse properly, otherwise it will stink!!

I was thinking the other day that the UK Office has aged well - in particular, Finchy has gone from being a retrograde boor to a premonition.

Comedy? It was a fly on the wall documentary shurely?

Nowadays it's all been replaced by the flat uniform tasteful grey/ white kitchen and bathroom interiors you see on Homes Under The Hammer.

This is the one I came here to say!

Adam & Joe was taking the piss out of this 25 years ago.

"But know this, Gil isn't about to stop loving the ladies"

@JustbrotherscarlenaNsoulthis Guy’s commentary on CR is gold.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNRX35ks3/

I rewatched super skinny whatever recently- with that awful dr Christian where they locked them in a house and made a fat and thin person switch diets.

eating disorder central marketed as fixing health.

Changing rooms ..wreck each others living rooms with MDF and shite stencilling..way to go Linda Barker
And you just knew she didn't have that pish in her own house

Ooh and that Gok Wan programme where he kept going around groping women's boobs and making catty comments - which they apparently needn't worry about at all as he was gay, so that made it all OK.

Oh God yes - the stapler, glue gun, MDF offcuts and felt played a huge part. It was absolutely excruciating to watch. Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen recently admitted it was very consipiratorial against the punters and said he always gave people 'the rooms they deserved'.

Nice.

I think mostly TV companies are more wary of humiliating members of the public these days.

Exactly Howard gets his arse chewed all the time for being a prick.

Yes, because the "designer" had a brainwave to put books, which are y'know...notoriously heavy on the bottom of the bookshelf containing all the teapots and was hung up by really slim, flimsy wire.

And as the picture shows, all the makeovers were done with mdf. Hope nobody struck a match in any of the made over rooms, although it might have been an improvement.

Was Changing rooms the one where the teapot collection came crashing to the ground? Its usually features on the TV disaster shows 🤣🤣🤣

Ooh - just remembered another genre (not drama) which I'm SO glad has disappeared mostly from our screens: programmes where 'experts' came along, patronised some member of the public into the ground either by dictating and bossing them around as to home decor or their fashion choices, and at the end smugly claimed to have transformed their dreary suburban lives.

Changing Rooms and What Not to Wear, I'm looking at you! Mercifully I think TV companies have learned their lesson about this kind of thing and you wouldn't get Trinny and Susanna types bullying and belittling women in that way nowadays. There was always an arrogance and snobbishness about the way the so-called experts treated their victims, and you got the strong impression that the TV crew had been instructed to make the punters look as stupid as possible.

Good riddance!

Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! Was brilliant, if a tad coarse.

Yep, exactly. This is a problem with novels and with drama too.

Thing is, if you’re writing fiction about, say, racism, you have you to have racist characters doing racist things in order to give the story something to address. If you’re writing a comedy to ridicule sexism, you have to write sexist characters doing sexist stuff in order to ridicule them.

And yet people complain when they see racism and sexism portrayed.

The question to be asked is: do you want drama and comedy to reflect the way the world is, or the way you’d like it to be?

And if the latter, what should happen in those stories?

Leonard was so lovely. My mum would swoon over him whilst I swooned over Russell.

God, I loved Butterflies. It's the reason I want a union jack on the roof of my mini.
Always had a secret crush on Geoffrey Palmer and could never see what she saw in that awful Leonard.