It Was Alright in the 70s

Well Channel 4 did not start broadcasting until 1982 so there will be no exhibits from that channel's output on this show. However let us give a Hall of Shame mention to Channel 4 programmes such as Minipops and After Dark where guests in order to be controversial were plied with drink and smoked like chimneys.

It was alright in the 70s is a smug and sneering look at some of the programmes on the BBC & ITV in less enlightened times. In sitcoms where men were louts and women were dolly birds.

Still Channel 4 took the opportunity in showing clips out of context such as the one in Butterflies which was a rare sitcom as it had a female writer and dealt with the frustrations of a middle aged married woman.

The second episode examined race and sexuality where we had flamboyant gay men in sitcoms and white people blacking up in the Black & White Minstrel shows. The non ironic commentary is from Matt Lucas well known for being the last gay in the village and blacking/browning up in comedy shows for over the last 10 years.

This is just a clips show to demonstrate how horrid television was 40 years ago and we had comments from not so famous comedians and television personalities. I agree some of the television output was bad but why show The Goodies clips on racism which itself was a satirical and political critique of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. That's right a kids show daring to be controversial, something you will be less likely to see these days.

Ironically it was left to black entertainers such as Derek Griffiths and Kenny Lynch who were there at the time to stand up for the television shows they did. Lynch lets not forget was always politically active and got his MBE many years before his showbiz pal Bruce Forsyth and was a pacesetter for black comedians from the 1960s onwards.

'It Was Alright in the 70's' was another smug,sneering look at a controversial decade with conveniently picked clips and partial commentators trying to tell us how more enlightened we all are now.

For every bit of dated sexism,racism and homophobia you would still get far more moments of classic drama,entertainment,documentary and comedy,predictably glossed over as good dramas,intelligent documentaries and outstanding comedy is very difficult to pick out from hundreds of channels in this day and age as we are saturated with wall-to-wall reality TV,incredulous celebrities,hackneyed dramas and soaps,sensationalist documentaries and mean-spirited,foul-mouthed comedians.

We should have had a programme on such modern cultural and TV retrograde steps accompanied by sneering critics as that would've been justified,and Dapper Laughs is a whole lot more sexist and offensive than Benny Hill was,plus he didn't imply jokes about rape,he 100% included it in one of his 'jokes' recently.Now that was a lot worse than what happened in the 70's,plus Big Brother,I'm a Celeb and TOWIE too.

All in all,a huge disappointment,save the archive clips from the period,one or two of which had not been broadcast before,even in the overtly non-PC 70's when the material was too strong even then (from the forgotten sitcom,'THE WACKERS' that is,featuring a young Alison Steadman and crumple-faced Joe Gladwin),and the performers of today that made such critical comments from shows and attitudes of the past should look at themselves once in a while to see if they are any superior (which in most cases,they certainly ain't).

RATING:3 and a half out of 10.

A programme looking back at bizarre, embarrassing, shocking and, to some, offensive clips from the 70s could have been a hoot, if tackled the right way. Yes, the pc brigade will watch these clips and act offended (their main occupation in life), but this should have been about laughing at how different programmes were, how backward they were in some cases, without having a bunch of ultra-pc unfunny comedians making comments after every clip.

How ironic that Matt Lucas, who made his name out of a show that was ultra non-pc for its time (ultra camp gays everywhere, old women peeing randomly, or being sick when tasting food handed to them by a black guy) is the narrator. Shame on you Matt, Little Britain was great, but now you have just spoiled the memory by going all pc and pointing the finger at other people.

The most annoying thing about the show, other than the school teacher like, arrogant comments from some of the people looking back, is the fact that many of the clips are shown out of context. Indeed, you could take plenty of shows now, cut them up and make them look even worse. Is living in a stiflingly pc world a better world now? In some ways, yes, if it means people are treated better by others. But this show's main aim seems to be to point fingers squarely at white people, mainly men,(because of course, nobody else is ever sex, racist or homophobic, are they?) and blame them for stuff they didn't do, never mind all the good thing's they have been responsible for over the years.

In my humble opinion, It Was Alright in the 70s is one of the most intriguing clip shows made in recent years and I feel the other reviewers have somewhat missed the message. For me the starting point of the show was to consider how we don't often see outrageously offensive casual racism, sexism and homophobia on television these days, in our popular mainstream entertainment.

Yes there are exceptions - Little Britain & The League of Gentlemen among them - but you don't find popular presenters using the n-word these days, nor do you hear mainstream singers perform ballads in which they express the hope that their unborn child doesn't turn out to be gay. But sometimes this would happen on TV in the 70s, as the clips demonstrated. They had absorbing clips of other things we don't see too often now, things that used to happen A LOT - like middle-aged male TV personalities lusting after nubile young women at beauty pageants, or generally being patronising to them.

When you hear a 70s female sitcom character say that she wants to be raped, or you hear a 70s male GP sitcom character say that he likes young school girls and can't wait to go and examine them, it sounds jarring to us. We like to think that we've moved on a bit. Not everyone has, of course, but most people probably have.

No one denies that in the 1970s, we made some of our best TV in the UK - comedy shows like Fawlty Towers, or dramas like and Colditz and I Claudius. Programmes which became the envy of the world. But It Was Alright in the 70s never said that the 70s were terrible, or that 70s TV was terrible. For the other reviewers to say that this is "just a clips show to demonstrate how horrid television was 40 years ago" does not make sense. I think it was trying to point out the way in which popular, everyday TV like sitcoms, chat-shows and music shows reflected the way most people thought at the time. Unfortunately a lot of people at the time were casually sexist, racist and homophobic. These days we put a little more thought into trying to be less sexist, racist and homophobic, on TV anyway, which can only be a good thing. We've got a long way to go, of course...

I think there was balance in the choice of the on-camera commentators too. Many of them expressed the view that you have to judge 70s TV by the standards of the time. For instance, Toby Young said that since it's perfectly right for us today to tolerate people of different ethnicities, people who have different sexualities and people from different cultures, then we should show the same consideration and toleration of people from different eras and the ways in which they made TV. Which I do.

So this show gets a big thumbs-up from me.