This sort of stuff was all too wide spread when I were a lad.
I can't describe the disappointment of rushing home from school to find the Looney Tunes slot on BBC 2 be replaced by a "cultural exchange" cartoon from Eastern Europe.
No offence to anyone from Eastern Europe but having Bugs Bunny replaced by geometric shapes fighting via the medium of Free Jazz is ...well it's culture shock on a level that no 7 year old should be put through.
> I can't describe the disappointment of rushing home from school to find the Looney Tunes slot on BBC 2 be replaced by a "cultural exchange" cartoon from Eastern Europe.
Interesting. The Simpsons had a bit about cartoons being replaced by weird Eastern European cartoons [1]. I didn't know that actually happened in real life.
I'm from EE and i don't feel offended but geniunely interested in "geometric shapes fighting via the medium of Free Jazz", as i can't recall any from my childhood. Buty have to admit that some of eastern block cartoons' were less attractive in terms of animation technique and storylines wjen compared to Looney Tunes or Hanna Barbera stuff. And some were indeed truly psychedelic like the one about a mole being instructed by parrot to sniff poppy flower and fly :D
Seconded! If there were a feeling I could summon about the turn of the 70s and 80s as a child, it was the uncomfortable cringe of being forced to watch things like these Moog dancers and other bizarre "arts" content. Perhaps it was my upbringing, but if you asked me to describe the late 1970s in Toronto, it would be that adults of that era just seemed creepy and irresponsible.
1970s TV was a bunch of turtleneck and beret wearing, moustached, communist acid heads working for public broadcasters trying to subvert American dominance. The "film strips" I watched as a child in classrooms from Canada's National Film Board were dementedly surreal. The electronic band Boards of Canada were apparently directly inspired by them.
I have been tempted to pitch a netflix series set in a public broadcaster making decisions about film funding and distributing those things to elementary schools, and how absolutely insane these people must have been. Chainsmoking theorists and Quebecois nationalists with government expense accounts trying to create a post-national global society through conceptual art during the hangover from the Montreal Expo. Americans in the 1970s had rock music. Canada had something else. You have no idea how weird this place was. A kind of greater soviet Wisconsin run by small town French pseudointellectuals.
Yeah, if your goal is to find adventurous content in the avant garde sense there's no question the internet has enabled far, far, more than what existed on tv in the 70s.
Also it's just incomparable how quality vs price has changed in camera equipment and related. You can put together a setup that rivals broadcast quality for about the price of an economy car. We live in a golden age of independent productions being much more affordable.
So celebrate the Moog dancers if you like, but I think this subtext that we've lost something or become less adventurous totally preposterous.
With all due respect to the Moog Dancers--It's interesting that some people still think of culture as expressed by things that large numbers of people were forced to watch, on account of there being nothing else good on.
I think the point is that creative experimentation has really been pushed to the far edges. You would never see something so daringly unusual on broadcast television these days. What’s left of broadcast television, anyway.
Broad media consumption all just formulaic and uninspired.
The 60s and 70s were just full of weird, exploratory, boundary-bending shit, which is what makes them a time of such progress.
> subtext that we've lost something or become less adventurous totally preposterous
This was shown where everyone might stumble across it. That's completely unlike today's insular interest bubbles. The unspoken bubbles are a loss for the larger group. The bubbles make us less adventurous.
I think articles like this, and many of the affirmation responses, suffer from a few fallacies:
It ignores that the majority of people wouldn’t actually watch this or want to watch it. Most people would watch more conventional content, much as they do today.
This leads to a lot of people seeing something historically interesting and conflating it as a norm of adventurousness. In reality, many of them ignore the avante garde stuff on TV today.
So what it leads to is people thinking TV today is safe. But that’s because they’re safe people, and because they can’t consider the wide range of content that existed then, they think that any notable example is representative.
In reality, there’s lots of experimental content today.
Look at many children’s shows like Amazing World of Gumball or Adventure Time that is straight up bonkers for adventurous content.
On the adult end of the spectrum, there’s shows like Atlanta and Pen15. And that’s just the mainstream content. There’s so much adventurous stuff out there right now that I’m honestly flummoxed how anyone can hold this view seriously.
IMHO people are too eager to glorify the past because it‘s an easy hit of dopamine . I’d posit that those same people are likely just too safe in their choices and wish they weren’t, but either don’t know how to discover it, or worse, don’t want to.
I’m not sure what that proves. Dancing (and watching dancing) was much more popular at that time (in between the ‘swinging sixties’ and the start of disco). The U.K. music chart show Top of the Pops - with a massive audience - regularly used dancers (Pans People [1]) if the band couldn’t appear. And ballroom dancing competitions were televised - Come Dancing [2]
Is it really surprising that TV is turning to garbage? There's no great conspiracy to dumb it down, it's just a question of demographics. TV used to be the primary source of home entertainment for every age group, now it's just people too technologically illiterate to work out how to sign up for streaming services.
In my group of close 25 - 32 ish year old friends, encompassing maybe 10 households I don't know a single one who actually has their TV hooked up to regular TV, all of them consume content through a combination of streaming services and piracy.
Expand your search past regular broadcast television and you'll find there's a thousand times more weird, avant garde stuff out there today if that's what you're into.
In the 1970s, The Black and White Minstrel Show was still on TV. I don’t think this one clip proves anything.
I think it is true that there used to be more of an attitude to broadcasting ‘things the public ought to see’ more than the things they actually wanted which meant more things like classical music, history, dance, etc. Although I’m not sure if this clip was due to that attitude. If you look at TV today, things like nature documentaries can still be very popular and high quality.
Some of the ‘high-brow’ content was relegated to special channels and so just seen less. Nowadays, it seems like Netflix, YouTube, etc is actually a good place for more niche things to be able to reach a wider audience.
I grew up in Australia. At this time (many years ago) TV was basically a mix of ABC (ie the Australian version of PBS) and British TV (mostly BBC but also some ITV and Channel 4). I cannot adequately describe just how good TV was from this era, particularly children's TV.
Prime example: Dr Who. This was the era of Tom Baker as the Doctor. Honestly, it was amazing. But there were other shows that were just plain goofy like The Goodies and Monkey. On the sci-fi front you had Blake's Seven, which was way ahead of its time in moral complexity. To this day, Avon is an amazing character.
We saw very little American TV. Sesame Street was a notable exception. At the time this even dealth with complex issues (eg the actor who played Mr Cooper died IRL and his death was on the show).
As I got older you got into shows like Grange Hill, which actually dealt with issues like a kid dying of a heroin overdose.
In my teens I got into more adult shows like Yes Minister (which, to this day, is amazing). We had in-depth news program that was of exceedingly high quality (ie Four Corners and the 7:30 Report) that included such gems as [1] (referring to the Kirki [2]).
But what happened in the 1980s to the BBC in particular was that children's TV got really dumbed down. Dr Who was viewed as "too scary". So all this innovation basically disappeared under the guise of the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
It wasn't really until the 2000s that TV recovered from this and even now I believe even now that children's TV is simply awful. None of it seems to be intellectually engaging at all and certainly not "adventurous".
We must be about the same age. I adored Tom Baker Doctor Who, Goodies, Monkey, Blake's 7. Also loved: Kenny Everett Video Show, The Curiosity Show.
A friend who lived in Newcastle went to the corner store to buy rubber bands while watching The Curiosity Show. The bewildered shopkeeper asked why so many kids were coming to buy rubber bands at that moment. What a heart-warming story, I never knew if anyone else watched it.
Recently rewatched Blake's 7, the SO loved it. I mentioned that to a friend in Bulgaria, she said "What?? Blake's 7?? We used to play Blake's 7 in the street when I was a kid. Guess who I was? Gan haha"
"We saw very little American TV." Weird, I watched an awful lot of terrible US series that I'm too ashamed to list. With ads! Moonlighting was about the only really good one.
"Dr Who. This was the era of Tom Baker as the Doctor. Honestly, it was amazing. But there were other shows that were just plain goofy like The Goodies and Monkey. On the sci-fi front you had Blake's Seven, which was way ahead of its time in moral complexity. To this day, Avon is an amazing character."
Avon is indeed amazing. And it's no accident Terry Nation, the creator of Blake's Seven, was the author of what made Dr. Who a smash hit with his script for the second serial titled "The Daleks."
Just squeezing into the "1970s" in 1970 was ITC/ITV's UFO which was also great SF, I watched it a few years after in weekly syndication in the US. Didn't get a chance to watch the previously mentioned BBC shows until the 1980s.
It may have been adventurous, but this was definitely not mainstream. It was fringe and probably shown on public broadcasting in very limited markets, and at a late hour (i.e., low viewership).
This doesn't look adventurous to me. It's more like an extension of "Page 3" culture that spilled over to TV. It's not that much different to the "Hot Gossip" dancers on Kenny Everett's TV show or "Top of the Pops" at the end of the decade.
Old UK TV shows look weird to todays audience (not adventurous) because they are a reflection of a time we have long moved on from. The pandering racism of "Love Thy Neighbour" and "The Black and White Minstrel Show", the scantily clad "totty" in Benny Hill.
I suppose on an incredibly naive way it might seem adventurous but I'm very glad we've moved on.
You get that both parties - the white guy and the black guy - were bigoted racist idiots, neither were right, and their wives who actually got on fine were exasperated with them, right? I mean, you've actually seen the series, I'm sure?
Because if you'd seen Love Thy Neighbour, you'd know that both guys were racist bigoted idiots.
You'd also know that even in the 1970s when it was aired, everyone thought it was shite.
Hmm, I'm not sure I call this more 'adventurous' than TV today - definitely cool. Did 70s TV (in the UK) offer greater variety of programming? Performances of dance (including contemporary dance) have a long history on UK TV.
It’s hard to imagine where you might see something like this today
Ironically, you are more likely to see something like this on YouTube than on TV (I mean not just viewing old TV clips).
Aside: The BBC Archive channel on YouTube is a great dip into some of the BBC archives.
Mainstream broadcast TV, for myself in the UK, has been dead for about a decade. There is literally nothing of value that I want to see. I have netflix/prime/nowtv/ad nausaum to compete for my attention and I can choose something for the mood I am in.
Sometimes I do miss the days of being forced to watch "what ever is on" but I think that is more of a failing in curating the programming for these services. I wish there was a website I could check-off my interests, list my location and the streaming services I subscribe to, and it would just give me my next show to watch.
I also wish something like that existed for video games, collating my steam library + subscription services (EA, PS+, Gamepass, etc.) and just tell me what game to play next, before they age off etc.
Honestly, in this digital age where everything is automated and the era of search I find the curation and recommendation of all of these subscription services to be really very poor.
> Mainstream broadcast TV, for myself in the UK, has been dead for about a decade
OK, I'm not in the UK. However, I always like to defy conventional wisdom that everyone knows, and that is certainly some of it.
Broadcast TV is digital now, in the US at least. An antenna will cost you $50-75 or so, it's tiny, and if you have line-of-sight with the tower, you get a perfect picture. It will be in 4K soon, supposedly.
What's on? Well, sports, if you like that. I watched the US v. Netherlands match yesterday on broadcast. All the big college football games were on yesterday. If you don't watch sports, then yeah, there's not much.
Still: local news, much better than you find on the web. And PBS stations. And ancient TV shows, e.g. Frasier, Taxi. It doesn't replace streaming, but it IS free.
Google, Amazon, and Apple all have AI recommendation apps that show you how what you might want to watch, but you have to buy their respective streaming boxes to access it. Not sure about Roku, but if they didn’t have a similar service I would find it strange
If you find these recommendation services poor, did you give them feedback on the initial and subsequent recommendations in order to train them?
I learned recently that Danny Elfman’s band Oingo Boingo started life as a surrealist theater troupe, started by his brother Richard. That incarnation appeared on The Gong Show. It was just pure chaos, and they won anyway.
That was my first thought, but my second was nothing new on YouTube has that kind of budget.
I mean there’s the three broadcast cameras dancing plus operators plus more broadcast cameras shooting operating on a full soundstage with crews of gaffers and grips and catering and scale wages.
I am not saying that YouTube and TikTok aren’t possibly as creative. Only that nobody is putting that level of resources behind a TikTok because nobody will put that much money at risk.
This explains an aspect of sci-fi I never really got (aside from how simple it is to depict): "Entertainment" across species often means bringing in scantily-clad dancers. Apparently the writers were just partially mimicking some of what was already on TV.
(I like it more when they don't do that, since they had more room to play with reactions - like Phlox at movie night in Star Trek: Enterprise. He found it a lot more interesting to watch the audience.)
Agreed! 1970 "Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp". Watch an episode on YT[1]. Totally bonkers. This should could not be made today. (Chimps forced to snow ski with a Peregrine Falcon tied to it's shoulder? So dangerous)
There was a LOT of this sort of stuff on 70s UK telly. On kids TV too. "Adventurous" is one word for it. I'd rather have had an episode of Battle of the Planets, myself.
[+] [-] Lio|3 years ago|reply
I can't describe the disappointment of rushing home from school to find the Looney Tunes slot on BBC 2 be replaced by a "cultural exchange" cartoon from Eastern Europe.
No offence to anyone from Eastern Europe but having Bugs Bunny replaced by geometric shapes fighting via the medium of Free Jazz is ...well it's culture shock on a level that no 7 year old should be put through.
[+] [-] tzs|3 years ago|reply
Interesting. The Simpsons had a bit about cartoons being replaced by weird Eastern European cartoons [1]. I didn't know that actually happened in real life.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2_dhUv_CrI
[+] [-] ArekDymalski|3 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9wcvV9d2cs&t=594s
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] motohagiography|3 years ago|reply
1970s TV was a bunch of turtleneck and beret wearing, moustached, communist acid heads working for public broadcasters trying to subvert American dominance. The "film strips" I watched as a child in classrooms from Canada's National Film Board were dementedly surreal. The electronic band Boards of Canada were apparently directly inspired by them.
I have been tempted to pitch a netflix series set in a public broadcaster making decisions about film funding and distributing those things to elementary schools, and how absolutely insane these people must have been. Chainsmoking theorists and Quebecois nationalists with government expense accounts trying to create a post-national global society through conceptual art during the hangover from the Montreal Expo. Americans in the 1970s had rock music. Canada had something else. You have no idea how weird this place was. A kind of greater soviet Wisconsin run by small town French pseudointellectuals.
That whole era was just gross.
[+] [-] jasonwatkinspdx|3 years ago|reply
Also it's just incomparable how quality vs price has changed in camera equipment and related. You can put together a setup that rivals broadcast quality for about the price of an economy car. We live in a golden age of independent productions being much more affordable.
So celebrate the Moog dancers if you like, but I think this subtext that we've lost something or become less adventurous totally preposterous.
[+] [-] themodelplumber|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] x3haloed|3 years ago|reply
Broad media consumption all just formulaic and uninspired.
The 60s and 70s were just full of weird, exploratory, boundary-bending shit, which is what makes them a time of such progress.
[+] [-] drewcoo|3 years ago|reply
This was shown where everyone might stumble across it. That's completely unlike today's insular interest bubbles. The unspoken bubbles are a loss for the larger group. The bubbles make us less adventurous.
[+] [-] 2OEH8eoCRo0|3 years ago|reply
I'm torn on this. I suppose it's a beautiful thing to enable more creators but we are also awash in garbage content with BS at scale.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dagmx|3 years ago|reply
It ignores that the majority of people wouldn’t actually watch this or want to watch it. Most people would watch more conventional content, much as they do today.
This leads to a lot of people seeing something historically interesting and conflating it as a norm of adventurousness. In reality, many of them ignore the avante garde stuff on TV today.
So what it leads to is people thinking TV today is safe. But that’s because they’re safe people, and because they can’t consider the wide range of content that existed then, they think that any notable example is representative.
In reality, there’s lots of experimental content today.
Look at many children’s shows like Amazing World of Gumball or Adventure Time that is straight up bonkers for adventurous content.
On the adult end of the spectrum, there’s shows like Atlanta and Pen15. And that’s just the mainstream content. There’s so much adventurous stuff out there right now that I’m honestly flummoxed how anyone can hold this view seriously.
IMHO people are too eager to glorify the past because it‘s an easy hit of dopamine . I’d posit that those same people are likely just too safe in their choices and wish they weren’t, but either don’t know how to discover it, or worse, don’t want to.
[+] [-] helsinkiandrew|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://youtu.be/kRXPhc3RFGI
[2] https://youtu.be/JRPHk4ptE18
[+] [-] p1necone|3 years ago|reply
In my group of close 25 - 32 ish year old friends, encompassing maybe 10 households I don't know a single one who actually has their TV hooked up to regular TV, all of them consume content through a combination of streaming services and piracy.
Expand your search past regular broadcast television and you'll find there's a thousand times more weird, avant garde stuff out there today if that's what you're into.
[+] [-] postalrat|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dan-robertson|3 years ago|reply
I think it is true that there used to be more of an attitude to broadcasting ‘things the public ought to see’ more than the things they actually wanted which meant more things like classical music, history, dance, etc. Although I’m not sure if this clip was due to that attitude. If you look at TV today, things like nature documentaries can still be very popular and high quality.
Some of the ‘high-brow’ content was relegated to special channels and so just seen less. Nowadays, it seems like Netflix, YouTube, etc is actually a good place for more niche things to be able to reach a wider audience.
[+] [-] cletus|3 years ago|reply
Prime example: Dr Who. This was the era of Tom Baker as the Doctor. Honestly, it was amazing. But there were other shows that were just plain goofy like The Goodies and Monkey. On the sci-fi front you had Blake's Seven, which was way ahead of its time in moral complexity. To this day, Avon is an amazing character.
We saw very little American TV. Sesame Street was a notable exception. At the time this even dealth with complex issues (eg the actor who played Mr Cooper died IRL and his death was on the show).
As I got older you got into shows like Grange Hill, which actually dealt with issues like a kid dying of a heroin overdose.
In my teens I got into more adult shows like Yes Minister (which, to this day, is amazing). We had in-depth news program that was of exceedingly high quality (ie Four Corners and the 7:30 Report) that included such gems as [1] (referring to the Kirki [2]).
But what happened in the 1980s to the BBC in particular was that children's TV got really dumbed down. Dr Who was viewed as "too scary". So all this innovation basically disappeared under the guise of the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
It wasn't really until the 2000s that TV recovered from this and even now I believe even now that children's TV is simply awful. None of it seems to be intellectually engaging at all and certainly not "adventurous".
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirki_(tanker)
[+] [-] yesenadam|3 years ago|reply
A friend who lived in Newcastle went to the corner store to buy rubber bands while watching The Curiosity Show. The bewildered shopkeeper asked why so many kids were coming to buy rubber bands at that moment. What a heart-warming story, I never knew if anyone else watched it.
Recently rewatched Blake's 7, the SO loved it. I mentioned that to a friend in Bulgaria, she said "What?? Blake's 7?? We used to play Blake's 7 in the street when I was a kid. Guess who I was? Gan haha"
"We saw very little American TV." Weird, I watched an awful lot of terrible US series that I'm too ashamed to list. With ads! Moonlighting was about the only really good one.
[+] [-] Throwawayaerlei|3 years ago|reply
Avon is indeed amazing. And it's no accident Terry Nation, the creator of Blake's Seven, was the author of what made Dr. Who a smash hit with his script for the second serial titled "The Daleks."
Just squeezing into the "1970s" in 1970 was ITC/ITV's UFO which was also great SF, I watched it a few years after in weekly syndication in the US. Didn't get a chance to watch the previously mentioned BBC shows until the 1980s.
[+] [-] TedDoesntTalk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robotresearcher|3 years ago|reply
This was back when there were two BBC (public) channels and one commercial channel. And they all shut down at bedtime.
[+] [-] smackeyacky|3 years ago|reply
Old UK TV shows look weird to todays audience (not adventurous) because they are a reflection of a time we have long moved on from. The pandering racism of "Love Thy Neighbour" and "The Black and White Minstrel Show", the scantily clad "totty" in Benny Hill.
I suppose on an incredibly naive way it might seem adventurous but I'm very glad we've moved on.
[+] [-] flumpcakes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gordonjcp|3 years ago|reply
You get that both parties - the white guy and the black guy - were bigoted racist idiots, neither were right, and their wives who actually got on fine were exasperated with them, right? I mean, you've actually seen the series, I'm sure?
Because if you'd seen Love Thy Neighbour, you'd know that both guys were racist bigoted idiots.
You'd also know that even in the 1970s when it was aired, everyone thought it was shite.
[+] [-] open-source-ux|3 years ago|reply
It’s hard to imagine where you might see something like this today
Ironically, you are more likely to see something like this on YouTube than on TV (I mean not just viewing old TV clips).
Aside: The BBC Archive channel on YouTube is a great dip into some of the BBC archives.
https://www.youtube.com/@BBCArchive/videos
[+] [-] flumpcakes|3 years ago|reply
Sometimes I do miss the days of being forced to watch "what ever is on" but I think that is more of a failing in curating the programming for these services. I wish there was a website I could check-off my interests, list my location and the streaming services I subscribe to, and it would just give me my next show to watch.
I also wish something like that existed for video games, collating my steam library + subscription services (EA, PS+, Gamepass, etc.) and just tell me what game to play next, before they age off etc.
Honestly, in this digital age where everything is automated and the era of search I find the curation and recommendation of all of these subscription services to be really very poor.
[+] [-] AlbertCory|3 years ago|reply
OK, I'm not in the UK. However, I always like to defy conventional wisdom that everyone knows, and that is certainly some of it.
Broadcast TV is digital now, in the US at least. An antenna will cost you $50-75 or so, it's tiny, and if you have line-of-sight with the tower, you get a perfect picture. It will be in 4K soon, supposedly.
What's on? Well, sports, if you like that. I watched the US v. Netherlands match yesterday on broadcast. All the big college football games were on yesterday. If you don't watch sports, then yeah, there's not much.
Still: local news, much better than you find on the web. And PBS stations. And ancient TV shows, e.g. Frasier, Taxi. It doesn't replace streaming, but it IS free.
[+] [-] chaostheory|3 years ago|reply
If you find these recommendation services poor, did you give them feedback on the initial and subsequent recommendations in order to train them?
[+] [-] hairofadog|3 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/lkontjT7uvg
https://youtu.be/xe95sn0cN3k
[+] [-] TehCorwiz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qohen|3 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsmwVWELBBc
[+] [-] rhplus|3 years ago|reply
YouTube or TikTok, because broadcast TV is all but dead.
[+] [-] brudgers|3 years ago|reply
I mean there’s the three broadcast cameras dancing plus operators plus more broadcast cameras shooting operating on a full soundstage with crews of gaffers and grips and catering and scale wages.
I am not saying that YouTube and TikTok aren’t possibly as creative. Only that nobody is putting that level of resources behind a TikTok because nobody will put that much money at risk.
[+] [-] speedgoose|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Izkata|3 years ago|reply
(I like it more when they don't do that, since they had more room to play with reactions - like Phlox at movie night in Star Trek: Enterprise. He found it a lot more interesting to watch the audience.)
[+] [-] conradfr|3 years ago|reply
https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/RC-014037/tracks/
https://www.youtube.com/@TRACKSARTEFr/videos
[+] [-] ozten|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3ctZI9_oyo
[+] [-] taylorius|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quelsolaar|3 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0HSD_i2DvA
[+] [-] bbanyc|3 years ago|reply