Reeling in the Years

With baited breath, I looked forward to seeing the return of RTÉ's excellent "Reeling in the Years" retrospective, with the year 2000 being shown last night. It's a show that clearly doesn't appeal merely to history graduates, since the series from the 1960s to the 1990s still claim huge audiences every time they're repeated, even though the first batch of episodes, covering the 1980s, first aired eleven years ago. That's probably the first horific thing I realised; that the first series, which I fondly remember seeing first time around back in 1999, was first shown over a decade ago. Seeing the 1990s series in 2000 felt a little odd, because the last episode was shown less than a year after the featured year itself had finished, but for me the series still felt like watching history, because the early 1990s are a bit hazy. I don't have that excuse now, because I can vividly remember the year 2000 (well, aside from some of the music; I'm not a big fan of modern pop, if it was released after 1995, I'm not really interested). As I watched a lamb defecate on Bono's leather jacket sleeve, it dawned on me that ten full years has already elapsed. It's all well and good to look at the Medieval perios as "history", but there must a certain amount of discomfort when a programme is shown featured a year you easily remember, yet it's called "retrospective" (merely a polite way of saying "if you remember it, you're old". It certainly felt like that to me last night!

The whole process got me thinking about relative history, basically recent events which happened in the last couple of decades. I have a video recording of the 1992 "Late Late Toy Show" featuring Uncle Gay, one of the many obligatory multi-coloured jumpers he donned for the occassion annually, assisted by some woman named Eileen who I never heard of before or since, and the lad who was on the children's quiz "Physiquiz" at the time before disappearing soon after, before reappearring for another RTÉ kids quiz about a decade later. Anyway, aside from an insight into what the kiddies wanted from Santa during the year with record unemployment (er, until this year), one toy was discussed as the most popular toy when it was first featured on the Late Late Toy Show eighteen years previously, in 1974. I could almost sense the dismay in Uncle Gay's voice when he reminisced about the edition from eighteen years previously. I can only imagine how he'd feel if he saw that 1992 episode, a further eighteen years after that toy was featured in 1974. I have a number of video recordings from the early 1990s, most of which were from The Children's Channel (TCC). Now, I didn't have satellite television growing up (in fact, my parents still don't have anything other than RTÉ One, Two and TG4. The mountains of Connemara block the signal from TV3, though they're not missing much), but a friend of my Mom's did, and she recorded some programmes from TCC and the Cartoon Network in 1994 which I still sometimes watch, as part of a general nostalgic trip I travel on. The programmes themselves don't make me think of days gone by, or wish that such programmes filled the children's schedules instead of what is currently shown, but the increasing length of time travelled since their first airings make me think. The majority of the tapes are from spring 1994, sixteen years ago. 1994 is the half-way point between 2010 and 1978. I wasn't born until 1986, so it shouldn't bother me, not as much as someone who was born in 1978, or indeed as much as someone who easily remembers 1978 too, yet the whole thing does unfaze me somewhat.

When I look at the children featured on the tapes, either in the shows themselves or on the adverts aimed at children (many of which probably wouldn't be allowed to air today), I wonder where those kids are, what they're up to, and have they seen the commercial featuring their mother and the naked rear end looking clammy after enduring an inferior brand of nappies. This is probably the main source of my dismay (if that's the right word); the older children featured were about my age in 1994, and would therefore now be adults in their mid-to-late twenties, and they're only getting older. This of course means that I'm getting older too, and though being 24 isn't old (despite the opinions of various undergrads still in their teens I encounter), it's certainly a lot older than 8. The less said about the fact that 24 is the mid-point between being 8 years old and 40 years old, the better for my sanity. I should probably relax, and embrace the passage of time, but the discomfort I have that the early 1990s, which I vividly and fondly remember, are nearly two decades in the past and only drifting further into history, will increase.