Years and Years - some light relief

God that mad politician at the end - anyone else getting Dr haddock vibes?

Will give one spoiler

In the first episode of 1990 there is a disability fit for work assessment.

@BeansandRice i was talking about 1990 but yes i remember watching a prog about Margaret Attwood and she said she didnt put anything in her book that hadnt happened.

Ach! So sorry @S1naidSucks The book was published in 1985 - over 30 years ago

I’m a slow reader. 😁

it will give you chills because there are bits that have come to pass

When Ms Atwood first published The Handmaid's Tale people started to talk about "science fiction" and "future fiction" - Attwood said that there was nothing in the book that hadn't happened somewhere.

And she wrote the book over 30 years ago ....

Ach! So sorry @S1naidSucks The book was published in 1985 - over 30 years ago, so I assumed anyone interested in it would have read it by now ....

I read it when it was first published, and rest assured, I'm most likely to be wrong about the ending. My point is, that the television adaptation doesn't do the frame narrative that Margaret Attwood uses. And that the violence against women in the television adaptation is far more graphic than the novel.

But it's not how a novel finishes - it's how it gets there.

Thanks BeansandRice, I haven’t read the book yet, but since you’ve ruined it for me, I needn’t bother now!

I think Years and Years was about how if we dont pay attention and act we end up with idiots like Trump or Boris Johnson or worse a Putin or a Erdoğan. Turning away from what is too difficult and / or not acting means it becomes easier for potentil dictators to get voted in.

So Gran / Muriel's speech has nothing to do with trans anything. It is about us being greedy consumers who dont stop to think how a t-shirt can only be a £1 and / or what happens when you start othering others, such as refugees. I haven't checked is this is the whole speech but found a link here. (But the cynic in me thinks however many people might have found it powerful they wont change as we now exist to be consumers.) twitter.com/BBCOne/status/1141075861791096832

Also like the fact that trans genderism just didn't really feature as though it were a past glich and the focus was on trans humanism. Will it disconnect us from being human or enhance it.

Thought it was good that it was primarily the women who not only had the moral compass in the midst of everyone just being pushed into a pressured lifestyle, and had the courage to try and change it.

I suspect that as things are today most people would just shrug and say what can you do.

Warning ......it will give you chills because there are bits that have come to pass.

Oooh thank you HelenaDove! Not something I'd come across before.

I remember The Mad Death though.

@GlomOfNit Fancy a bit of now historical dystopia?

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/streamed_tv/3567778-BBC-1977-78-dystopian-drama-1990-1984-SIX-Written-by-Wilfred-Greatorexx

Oh, and after the first epi of the first series of The Handmaid's Tale, I decided I had better things to do with my time than watch the dehumanisation of women, and violence against women, even in a fiction which purports to be critical of such things. I think sometimes there's a fine line between criticism and complicity and Handmaid's Tale (the television adaptation) crossed it for me.

No problems with the book - but the book makes it clear that women get away from Gilead, and write from a place of safety and freedom (Canada). The novel is founded on hope, and told backwards.

I never used to be this squeamish, but maybe a lifetime of seeing women represented as slightly less than fully human is taking its toll.

I have to gird my loins to watch Years and Years (I'm a couple of epis behind), because the dystopian thing is sooooo close to the reality now. Which is the point.

And yes, they deal beautifully with a boy who likes to wear dresses, and the earlier episode with the daughter who wants to be transhuman showed just how risky permanent body modifications could be.

But I can't help feeling the populist politics is awfully like the earlier BBC series with Helen McCrory Mother Father Son (thinly disguised roman a clef about Rupert Murdoch, I thought), in which Sarah Lancaster played another straight-talking politician who basically took the vote away from everyone.

These series are scary, they're so close to what we're living through. I wonder if this is what it was like to live in Europe in the 1930s?

I'm obsessively watching reruns of Poirot and Miss Marple at the moment.

I loved Gran. She said a lot of things I often say.

I really enjoyed the series. I loved the fact that they addressed transhumanism, because I see this as the number one threat to humanity and it has concerned me for some time. They did tend to shine a fairly positive light on it overall and especially in the last episode, which I don't agree with, but I am glad it was addressed. It's a topic we should all be very concerned about.

The transsexual debate has never interested me at all. I don't think it's important in the grand scheme of things. I think it has deliberately been placed in the public arena as a decoy. Glad this series only paid it lip service.

Light relief?? You must be made of sterner stuff than me! I've watched four episodes and have found it way too close to the bone and heartbreaking.

When they say "remember in the 90s/2000s we used to complain the news was boring? We didn't realise how lucky we were." Horribly true.

If I had to guess at the relevance of the happily non conforming boy, I'd say its to show how that kind of worry about clothes/presentation isn't really a big deal compared to all the stuff happening while we look the other way/ naval gaze.

I only watched the last two episodes, but I’m going to watch from the start. I really enjoyed it. I was a bit puzzled because the gran called him he, but then realised that it actually made sense, that ideas of what it takes to be a man or woman will change in the future. Everyone accepting non conformity makes more sense that people in the future being told they’re in the wrong body. I thought it was a very subtle way of putting it across. He may have wore the clothes, but still looked like a young boy, which was good.

I’ve not been watching this, but yesterday evening a gay man I know wrote a cryptic status on Facebook saying something like ‘the matriarch made an important statement and I agree whole heartedly.’ He’s not usually so vague, quite the opposite in fact, so I did wonder whether it might be related to the subject of which we are not permitted to speak openly. Do you think this could be the subject of his unusually cryptic post?

Subtle GC point made in the last episode. Ribbons in hair, wearing a dress, referred to as 'he', not a problem which as it should be.

I guess if language has to change it makes more sense for names to become genderless than words like 'women' become meaningless.

True...maybe I'm just cynical but it was no coincidence they chose a beautiful person for the role.

Is he only 15? I kept seeing the counter going up on Years and Years and felt like we'd gone further. Gran was doing very well!

He’s 15 at the end though? So not likely to look like a hairy bearded TRA...

Yes, I noticed that Hulo.

In the final episode Lincoln as an adult is presented by the BBC very good looking/petite/reserved/sweet/gentle/

Not sure if he did self ID as female, but this is not like the majority of hairy, bearded TRAs we see on Twitter.
Instead, presented differently so you know, women have nothing to fear about accepting males in our spaces.

Yes I noticed that too Hulo. The nurse said in the 90s it was facelifts, in the 2000s it was sex changes, then it was transhumans. The implication being they were all fads and she was angry about the damage they caused.