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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

to think that the BBC are morally wrong to do this?

114 replies

OhYouLuckyDuck · 13/02/2016 11:24

On Back in Time for the weekend the family take out the piano and replace it with a television. They are then shown smashing the piano. I am incensed at the waste and the message that this sends out to people that it's OK to throw away perfectly good stuff that can be used still.

OP posts:
usual · 13/02/2016 11:52

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

Maryz · 13/02/2016 11:54

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

Cornettoninja · 13/02/2016 11:54

It's one of those individual things.

I hate seeing books destroyed or made into shit word art because I love them and associate them with all the pleasure they've provided me. Even a readers digest encyclopaedia of light bulbs chucked in a skip would bother me slightly Grin

I completely appreciate how a musician would feel seeing an instrument destroyed frivolously. It doesn't provoke the same reaction in me but even though I can appreciate how hard it would be to shift if no one wanted it I can empathise with how you've seen it.

HumphreyCobblers · 13/02/2016 11:54

Everyone in our house is a musician and I think, whilst a shame to smash up something that worked, it is not that big a deal. If that is what happened then it is an accurate representation of the past.

Saying it is akin to smashing a child is just ridiculous.

Also, have you tried to get rid of a piano nowadays? You literally cannot give them away.

SoupDragon · 13/02/2016 11:59

to me that's akin to smashing up a small child

What a ridiculous, over the top statement.

RedToothBrush · 13/02/2016 12:03

I got the feeling from the program not that it was ok to do this, but the highlighting of just how much of a waste it is and how senseless smashing it up was. It also reflected a liberation from the past too though. It was a change from a life of thrift to one of excess where you could afford to waste things.

I don't know how you can be critical of this program and not so many others which show how we waste stuff today without question. If anything it highlighted when our attitudes to possessions changed and how we suddenly were able to throw out something which had such a high value and importance to the family, without a second thought.

The reaction of the mother compared to the daughter was quite marked and it wasn't something you could have got by just telling them they would smash the piano. It showed how it must have affected people at the time too. This sociological experiment into that emotion is something I think is as valuable as the piano itself and worth losing one for that purpose. It certainly had more value to me that just being a 'cheap bit of entertainment for the telly'. It did actually have a point to it.

What2 · 13/02/2016 12:07

There are often pianos for offer on our local free cycle (equivalent) site. I don't think there is a huge demand for pianos.

wtffgs · 13/02/2016 12:10

I thought it was pretty crass tbh Sad

MTWTFSS · 13/02/2016 12:14

YANBU... what a terrible waste :(

MrsJayy · 13/02/2016 12:15

They also boxed up fireplaces and put in 2 bar fake coal electric fires nobody does that now you are very upset over a piano that may or may not have been real or working

BunnyTyler · 13/02/2016 12:23

On a tangent, but piano destruction related - in the RAF, when a fighter pilot is killed a piano is set alight and burned.
It's a long held tradition, everyone in the mess gets drunk on the fallen pilot's bar tab and then they burn a piano.

thebiscuitindustry · 13/02/2016 12:40

YANBU.

I wonder whether they will smash up the TV when they've finished filming??

daisychain01 · 13/02/2016 12:42

This reminds me of the thread a few months ago about "inanimate objects that I feel sorry for".

Logically it's a few chunks of wood and metal.

I didn't see the programme but I would have been really upset. I don't handle destruction well. Not sure why, it just bloody gets to me every time, no rhyme or reason. Once upon a time the piano would have sounded beautiful but now it was being beaten into the ground and sent to the knackers yard Sad

I'm a paid up member of the paralysis by analysis club...

YANBU to have been upset by it, luckyduck not exactly in the spirit of a public service broadcaster was it.

WorraLiberty · 13/02/2016 12:47

It was functional. It really upset me too but I'm a musician and to me that's akin to smashing up a small child

I've read some massive over exaggerations in my time but that one takes the Oscar Blush

daisychain01 · 13/02/2016 12:58

I love the Who as a band but I will admit that them smashing up guitars, hotel rooms etc back in their day felt awful. Let's face it, any form of vandalism says a lot about the person and their mentality. Ditto re Hendrix. Shame they felt the need to enhance their act.. it was probably the drugs.

Original poster
OhYouLuckyDuck · 13/02/2016 13:01

daisy quite. I just think it was pointless, they didn't need to do it. It wasn't good viewing and it didn't have much value as a sociological experiment.

OP posts:
Wolpertinger · 13/02/2016 13:03

It was a pretty awful piano.

Interestingly I wondered how common it really was for people to smash up their old pianos in the 60s and on this thread we've already had a couple of examples of families who actually did do this in the sixties so clearly more common than I thought.

And lots of examples of how now you can't give away an old piano and that even if you do, the likelihood is they will be smashed up.

It was also interesting watching the reactions of the kids being liberated into the age of the record player and the mum who had been enjoying playing the piano - you wouldn't have got that if you hadn't broken the piano.

ZiggyFartdust · 13/02/2016 13:03

The message it sends out to people? I am so sick of people banging on about the messages on tv, telling people this that and the other, as we're all just mindless automatons waiting for the all-knowing telly box to tell us how to behave!
Fucks sake, its a lightweight entertainment show, and it was an old and probably wrecked piano. It's just a thing, it doesn't matter. And whoever compared to a child; wtf? How knobby is that.

(and I am a musician)

Grilledaubergines · 13/02/2016 13:06

It's so difficult to get rid of an old piano - they're worth no more than firewood.

HopeClearwater · 13/02/2016 13:09

You try getting rid of a piano and you might change your mind... Friends of mine had to make a bonfire of theirs.

Wolpertinger · 13/02/2016 13:13

I thought the message it sent out to people was half of Britain simultaneously tried to dispose of their pianos.

What were they supposed to do with them?

Almost overnight everyone had decided they were old, boring and pointless and wanted records as a new age, the age of the teenager had arrived.

Meanwhile, poor old mum, the only person who had liked the piano, was stuck hoovering, washing, making dinner, even more rules about hair and makeup than she had before, not getting to enjoy any of the liberation that the kids and dad were enjoying at all.

The mum expressed how she hated the sixties (as did the mum in the previous programme) as it was passing her generation by and I thought the programme covered this very well. The piano episode highlighted this well.

DamedifYouDo · 13/02/2016 13:19

The show is a reflection of the times. In the 1970s so many people were getting rid of old pianos that my local carnival used to have a piano bashing competition every year.

The BBC are no condoning waste they are recounting what happened.

britbat23 · 13/02/2016 13:19

Pianos often have no resale value and end up being scrapped. www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19706812

OurBlanche · 13/02/2016 13:27

I just think it was pointless, they didn't need to do it. It wasn't good viewing and it didn't have much value as a sociological experiment.

That is your opinion. Talking to some teens about it, they were really interested in just how different things were. We spent a couple of hours talking about the way we think and feel about some things - they loved the idea of Dial A Disc - and got some idea of why some of us don't carry our mobile phones round with us all the time.

They understood that the freedom, choice and newly discovered value of the teen years was intoxicating. That smashing it was a celebration of the ability to move from being forced to sit and listen to your mum/granny plonking out Vera Lynn song having to learn the words and sing along to being able to bring home whatever music you had found at the record shop and being able to dance to it, carry it round with them - the Dansette was the precursor to your current mobile phone!

That and - have you tried to get rid of an old upright piano in the last 10 - 20 years? Even our charity furniture recycling place refuses them. I would imagine the producers got that one for free, taken from a grateful previous owner who was glad to see the back of it.

Bogeyface · 13/02/2016 13:46

I agree that getting rid of a piano is next to impossible, so smashing it up isnt actually as gratuitous as it seems. We did, after a very long advertising campaign, get shot of ours but it took some doing. Smashing it up was on the cards if we hadnt got rid.

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