Sleepless in Suburbia

Frankly, I'm knackered today. So knackered I can't remember what the Hell I was planning to post about today. One of the reasons I'm feeling so tired is lack of sleep. For some reason, I found myself sitting up to the early hours watching two episodes of Terry and June back-to-back on ITV3. No, I don't know why I did it either. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that at the moment the only time you can watch 'proper' television programmes is outside of primetime hours. Perhaps I was feeling nostalgic for the simpler age that this creaky sitcom represented. Whatever the reason, it was more than a little disconcerting to find myself back in the middle class world of the 1980s that Terry and June inhabited. The fact is that even in 1982 (when the particular episodes I watched were made) the series was something of an anachronism. Whilst alternative comedy was rapidly taking over TV, with the likes of Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, Ben Elton and Alexie Sayle on the rise, spewing out 'four letter filth', (as the Daily Mail undoubtedly described it), BBC 1 was still giving us bumbling Carry On refugee Terry Scott's bumbling comic adventures in suburbia.

But maybe that was the secret of its success - it appealed to middle class, middle aged audiences seeking reassurance in the midst of the apparent sea of filth and Marxism unleashed by alternative comedy. Indeed, Terry and June does seem designed to reinforce the values of that demographic, conjuring up a cosy suburban world of middle managers with neighbours named Tarquin, attending Church fetes (to hilarious effect, of course) and patronising the lower classes, (represented by the likes of uppity dustmen or irritable shop assistants). It's a strange and - to twenty first century eyes - alien world, where people lived in houses full of chintzy furniture, carriage lamps and drinks cabinets full of sherry, and where they still attend church every Sunday. I'm not sure such a place ever really existed - it certainly wasn't a world I ever visited back in the 1980s, (but then my father was one of those uppity lower orders) - but I think that a lot of people back then wanted to believe that it did. The humour on display also seems curiously dated - a combination of mild lavatory humour, social embarrassment and slapstick. Most bizarre is that the target audience was clearly meant to identify with the Terry Scott character, who now comes over as a bumbling, insensitive, reactionary oaf. But then, I suppose that's still typically middle class...