Programmes/Films That Haven't Aged Well..

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I have been off work a couple of days with a stomach bug, so a lot of time has been spent flicking through Netflix and Amazon for films/programmes etc. I'll preface with being an avid fan of easy-watching background rubbish.. however a few things have been ruined for me this week...

Starting strong I thought we'd have a bit of Christmas trash and put on 'The Holiday'; used to love this. However I switched off after the first half hour because all I really homed in on was Cameron Diaz punching her ex (because she's a woman & he's a man that's OK), followed by advocating drink driving by swigging red wine out of the bottle in the Deli... and quite generally just found it quite dated and cheesy and ultimately not entertaining.

I've had a similar experience with old episodes of SATC recently too - used to love this however in hindsight what a bunch of god-awful self obsessed women in completely unrealistic and narrow minded roles.

I dare not put on Friends or Bridget Jones in case I tarnish the memory forever!!

Obviously this is light-hearted, but more seriously is this an age thing (nearly 40) or is it created by a more cultural/societal shift where women punching men, using 'gay' references as comedic slurs and advocating for drink driving is literally not accepted, let alone funny?

Is it just a continuation of change, for example watching Carry On from the 60's & 70's is potentially an even more extreme example, yet to me at least less unwatchable?

Is there anything that you used to love that you now can't watch for this kind of reason?

The problem with Bridget Jones’ Diary was that the people who made the film didn’t understand the book.

Dirty Dancing was quite an uncomfortable watch. Baby’s father was the only sensible person around.

Twilight is getting a bit uncomfortable. Edward looks young but is actually really old. He is grooming a 17 year old with the approval of his vampire family - except Rosalee, who we are meant to dislike but who actually had a point. Bella’s father is right to mistrust Edward.

The word I'm constantly hearing these days is "problematic". Everything (particularly from days gone by) seems to be branded "problematic".

It's such a lazy, catch-all word to me.

I don't understand this current fascination with doing it now. Like just now is the only time that things have moved on from what came before.

Things change. This is life. I have no problem with watching tv/film with an understanding of how things were when it was made.

How are peeps going to view todays films / programmes in the future i.e 30/40 years? There will be those who think it's much of nothing, funny or offensive.

National Lampoons is still bloody hilarious.

And no one is 'looking to be offended'. We still watch and enjoy this stuff whilst recognising it's from another time.

If you want to talk about offensive, you also might want to look up where the term 'snowflake' originated. A broad hint: it was in Nazi Germany.

I've hated Bridget Jones since Day 1.

@Alalalalalongalalalalalonglonglilong

Totally off topic but thanks for the ear worm (Not)! 🤣🤣🤣🤣 Fab user name😁

For me it was the porn scenes and the horrible singer with all his cursing. And Martine McCutcheon's cursing. It was too much.

The only scene I liked was the bedroom scene with Joni Mitchell singing, where Thompson's character tries to hold it together, fixing her perfect bed in contrast with the cat-that-got-the-cream mistress and messy bed where she'd just had sex with Thompson's husband. That was a cracking part of the film.

As a fully paid up member of the (largely imaginary) 'PC Brigade' I absolutely love Carry On films, Benny Hill, Les Dawson, It ain't half hot mum, and lots of other stuff along similar lines. My absolute favourite films (of all genres) are mostly ones made in the 60s and 70s. I find it very odd when I read of how 'attitudes have changed' since the year 2000 for goodness sale, so certain things 'couldn't be made nowadays' - of course they could, and still are.

I watched the entire two series of The Young Ones over the past couple of days (80s, obviously) and it is still brilliant - the characters are complete losers, not role models. The only thing I noticed in the whole thing that probably wouldn't be shown now was graffiti at the bus stop that clearly read (and I'll asterisk it as I don't think racist words are permissible here - quite rightly) 'w*gs out!' Now, that does not mean that the show and its writers condoned such thoughts - far from it: it was co-written by Ben Elton, for goodness sake - but it was just a realistic part of the scummy area the characters lived in, and the times at which it was set.

There are loads of facebook threads, on the 'nostalgia' pages and suchlike, bewailing the perception that 'you aren't allowed to say this that and the other nowadays' and how bad that is. It is pretty much a made-up notion. We no longer see stuff like Love Thy Neighbour because it actually wasn't terribly funny to begin with, and tastes change. Rising Damp is still shown on the retro channels frequently, and the attitudes in that are just as racist, sexist, and everything else-ist, but it's a far superior comedy than lots of the dross that nostlgia buffs claim to miss so tearfully, and the dodgy opinions were being ridiculed even in the dark days of the 1970s.

Someone above mentioned Rita Sue and Bob too - this is another one that perplexes me. 'It wouldn't be made nowadays' they claim - I think it would. It's an utterly grim depiction of a soulless, hopeless set of lives, and always was. Comedy often has tragedy underlying it. Of course Bob is a sleazeball - do you really think we were meant to agree with his behaviour?

As someone to whom the 80s and 90s seem genuinely like yesterday, I find it bemusing, and actually quite depressing, to read stuff about how films made in the early 2000s 'couldn't be made nowadays' because 'attitudes were different back then' - on the whole, they weren't. Some people evidently just didn't get the nuance - that you can portray crappy people with crappy attitudes without embracing those attitudes. Also, people are complex things, and a character being flawed does not mean you can have absolutely no sympathy for them.

I was surprised when I rewatched the original Charlie's Angels film (Cameron Diaz et al) how full of stereotypes it is, woman are sex objects and men only capable of thinking with their dicks. It was weird because I remember really liking it when it came out 20+ years ago. Wether I'm more mature or we've come to see that reducing people to one characteristic isn't good I'm not sure, but it didn't sit comfortably with me.

The tragedy of Rita, Sue and Bob Too is that it was a none-too inaccurate reflection of its playwright's own life. She died at the all-too young age of 29, having succumbed to the effects of alcoholism.

Life in the north in the 1980s was grim for some. This truly is the way some people lived. There is no way in which characters like Bob, or Sue's racist, alcoholic father, or Rita's large, hellraising clan of brothers, or wife-beater Aslam, could be seen as admirable characters. And she doesn't make a beeline for the Asian characters, either. In many ways, white, middle-class Bob is by far the worst of a bad lot of men, and he doesn't have grinding poverty as an excuse.

In places it was side-achingly funny, but it was also depressing, and meant to be. It was a social satire, but a tragicomedy at the same time. I believe that nowadays there is far more of an inclination to rugsweep the uncomfortable stuff. Film-making suffers as a consequence (theatre is still more willing to go nearer the knuckle, and is the richer for it). As an art form, it's supposed to make you think and question the status quo.

I agree that stuff like Alf Garnett and the dated, canned-laughter style comedies like Benny Hill et al haven't worn well because they were never funny in the first place. The Fast Show has aged pretty well, I think, and series like Fawlty Towers and Bottom are classics. The Young Ones is really of its time and all the better for it. It was raucous, ridiculous, and full of an energy that seems to be lacking these days.

I am going to go much further back. A very very highly rated 1958 Hitchcock movie called Vertigo starring Kim Novak and James Stewart (all round good guy like Tom Hanks).

The James Stewart character is the hero, but he has some very manipulative, misogynistic and obsessive behaviour practically bullying the heroine to dye her hair and wear the clothes he insists on. Although his role is meant to garner sympathy, by todays standards he just comes over pervy.

Its important to know this film has regularly been in the top of the critics all time best 25 films ever for years.

It also shows how far we have come, and is a reminder of how bad things were.

Laurence Oliviers Rebecca doesn’t do well either.

My take on a lot of this “dated” media, is that until relatively recently, a lot of TV/movies were written by middle aged men, made by middle aged men, having to be OKed by middle aged men who rarely questioned if the rest of society would think or feel like them.

sometimes this worked, but sometimes we only enjoyed it at the time as we weren’t being offered anything else. I am now used to seeing woman in TV and film who sound like real woman, who are presented as a full human, not just a prop for men in the same show/film - so older media just seems shit in comparison.

Fifty Shades of Grey came out in 2015. Far worse than some of the films being talked about on this thread.

I had a look at it for the first time this year.

Watched about fifteen minutes at most before turning it off. I just didn't find it remotely funny.

@SaltedSnax and by contrast, I hated Benny Hill at the time!

@sandletown Rita Sue and Bob too (in spite of some great acting) was dire from the first moment it was shown. One of the few films I felt like asking for my money back.

Ali G didn't age well!

I think that one will be almost unheard of in 20 years time.

@Lucytheloose yes. We watched the stage play of The History Boys before it was a film and it was crawlingly uncomfortable then. I can't imagine how it ever worked. It had funny moments.

It seemed like although it was cosmetically set in the fairly recent past, it actually had an older feel. Husband and I went to similar schools and to Oxford in the period when it's supposed to be set, so maybe we were a tough crowd for it? (Our college was massively LGBT-friendly and had excellent pastoral and mental health support as we had reason to find out. Posner would have been OK there!)

@AtomicBlondeRose yes, I think American Beauty was always meant to be uncomfortable. I didn't find it entertaining viewing, particularly, but I didn't feel we were supposed to be cheering any of the characters on.

(I do recall agreeing with friends, afterwards, that we felt the inevitable police investigation afterwards might have made a more interesting film - with bits of what actually happened as flashbacks.)

Twilight always made my skin crawl. I read the books to find out what everyone was talking about but they are direly written and Edward was always creepy and controlling, even without the weird "17, but also 100" thing. And I thought Bella's insistence on being vamped before she got too old and crusty (because we're all at our peak of beauty in our teens? I don't think so) was a very poor message as well, although the "he watches her when she sleeps" part gets more discussion.

As Maya Angelou famously said ‘when we know better, we do better’. The last 20 years has represented an explosion of the ‘information age’. Thanks to our greater knowledge & understanding, we now know better and generally do better, in terms of attitudes & representation - altho there’s still plenty of room for improvement on the whole sexism front. OPs attitudes have not changed because she’s become super sensitive; she just knows better now.

I'm not altogether sure.

In some senses, you're right. In others, that might be interpreted as rugsweeping and hiding from unpaletable facts of life.

Art has always been provocative to a degree. Which is why a lot of the global film output outside the US (barring the godawful 'Working Title', obvs) is a more interesting medium than the continual rehashing, 'remakes', sophisticated special effects and same old saleable faces being pumped out by Hollywood.

Who wants to only watch things with characters who are morally scrupulous? Sounds incredibly boring.

Exactly that.