User reviews

The 1970s are in some ways a forgotten decade. If you mention the 1960s then everyone has an image of what it means (even if they weren't there). The Beatles; free love; political protests; the Kennedys; Profumo... But the 70s? In The Rotters Club we are reminded (those of us who were around at the time) what it was like to be young in the era of IRA bombs; strikes; punk rock; Watergate; the Austin Allegro...

The TV adaptation of Jonathon Coe's novel is brilliantly descriptive of the times. Not just visually (although the settings are very authentic) but in terms of attitudes. The stifling moralities of family life. The racism that rumbled only just below the surface. The opportunity that a good education gave young people (so much greater than those of their parents). The hypocrisy of failed marriages struggling on for no particular reason - and the exciting chances that a more sexually liberated society (helped by the Pill) gave for escape.

This is an utterly British story and would probably seem very odd to anyone other than us Brits. As the John Cleese character in "A Fish called Wanda" says "Have you any idea how awful it is to be English". The Rotters Club will show you why!

An amazing work of art - one of the best TV series of my lifetime. Watching it felt like someone had video recorded my hormonal, self-conscious, awkward adolescence and displayed it to the world. Clement and Le Frenais wrote Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, and this is a very natural successor - the angst and the emotion of male friendship, the fraught attempts to get to know that weird species known as girls, it's all wonderfully depicted. The headlines of the day are folded in to great effect - the Birmingham Bombings storyline in particular is a heartbreaking piece of writing. There is humour in abundance too - for some reason a group of boys earnestly trying to create prog rock will always be funny, whether it's four unknowns in a provincial school common room, or the members of Gentle Giant sweating over a blank page. Prog is yet another wonderful touch - no Tamla (as the cool people claim), no Bay City Rollers, I was the same, Prog and Glam all the way. Very difficult to find, but I managed to grab a Dutch DVD on Amazon. Extras, subtitles etc would have been nice but just being able to see this again is manna from Heaven.

Jonathon Coe's novel 'The Rotters' Club' occupies some ambitious terrain, attempting as it does to capture the spirit of an age (in this case, 1970s Britain) through a collection of personal stories. It's a similar (though smaller scale) idea to that which motivated 'Our Friends in the North', one of the outstanding television dramas of the 1990s; but in this adaptation, 'The Rotters' Club' doesn't quite manage to keep such exulted company. The biggest problem with this sort of thing is the risk that you end up with weak individual stories stretched around the obvious, clichéd landmarks of a time, when what you want is a strong, character-driven narrative shaped by its setting, but not a slave to it. This is important not just because we all like a good story, but because there's always more to an era than what subsequently becomes recognised as its defining landmarks. Too often old films are criticised as being dated, when what is really meant is that the portrait of their own times is not the way we now routinely judge them; truth rejected because it doesn't fit the history. A really good drama about a recent era would explore how our current prejudices fail to reflect what it was really like to live then, rather than selling itself by directly featuring what we think we know before we start to watch. 'The Rotter's Club' is not awful, but the personal drama is never quite strong enough, and the political reference points are rather too obviously signposted. A small example can be seen in the series' depiction of racism, which it correctly shows as being more prevalent (or at least, less disguised) then than now. But the portrait of "good" anti-racists and "bad" racists on display seems rather simplistic. At my school probably 90% of children used racist epithets with some frequency, but this was more a reflection of the general culture, and their own immaturity, than a sign of their individual characters or beliefs. Which is not to excuse their utterances, simply to observe that they were pre-political in nature, a universal (and hateful) banality rather than a Nazi manifesto. Likewise, people's awareness of other social trends (the growth of punk, clashes between the unions and management) was, I would suggest, less conscious than presented here: but the writers don't quite have the skill to let the bigger picture form quietly in the background.

Sadly, in spite of it's obviousness, 'The Rotters' Club' still doesn't seem to have much to say about the 1970s, except to gawp at their supposed strangeness. There are some funny lines, but at heart, this is a rather bland tale of kids growing up in the recent past. And I can't help feeling that you might get a truer picture of that if you abandoned the need to gaze through hindsight's glasses, and simply watched some old episodes of 'Grange Hill' instead.

So it's based on a successful book. So what? Shallow, hollow and one-dimensional. If you knew this generation of three day working weeks and unions and shop stewards and immigration and racism and IRA bombs etc etc etc, all well and good - all this series does is cast a glib, politically correct eye at those times, rendering the issues essentially as sound-bites that never really develop further than the histo-montage credits. This could have been done so much better - could have been grittier and more potent concerning the issues of the day. Instead, it was like a twee, picture postcard, empty homage to what was essentially an amazing decade.