The Decline of the British Bank Holiday

It's Good Friday again, so it is time for my regular gripe about how the media constantly seems to downgrade this sort of thing.  Look, I'm not remotely religious, but the fact is that Easter is a religious holiday, so you'd think that the media would do something to acknowledge this.  I mean, today you'd have little idea from the TV schedules that this was anything other than a regular Friday.  Other than BBC2 providing an early morning double bill of King of Kings and The Robe, there has been nothing remotely Easter-related on any of the main channels.  Worse still, there seems to be next to no recognition that today and Monday are Bank Holidays.  Now, at risk of turning into one of those old bores who go on all the time about how things were better when I was young, the fact is that when I was a kid growing up in the seventies, the Easter weekend was a big thing.  Not just because of the prospect of chocolate, but because it was a four day weekend, when most people were off work and in the mood to d, well, something.  Even if that something was simply crashing out on the sofa for four days and watching TV, which had schedules full of special programming and movies.  

But, just as Christmas has gradually been eroded to a rump of barely seven days, rather than its true twelve day glory, so Easter (and Bank Holidays in general) have been progressively downgraded.  Nowadays they are barely distinguishable from any other day - certainly in terms of retail.  When I was a kid, I used to find it intensely frustrating that everything in the UK closed down on Sundays and Bank Holidays, (at one time cinemas wouldn't even show new release films on Sundays and Sunday TV schedules were full of religious programmes).  I welcomed Sunday opening and the gradual trend of bigger shops opening on Bank Holidays (often in order to launch sales).  But now, when one day is barely distinguishable from the other in commercial and media terms, I find myself missing the 'specialness' of those traditional Sundays and Bank Holidays.  The latter, in particular, gave us a shared cultural experience, in that virtually everyone was off work and looking for entertainment: heading outdoors if the weather was good, or to other events - exhibitions, concerts, sporting fixtures and the like that would be held on Bank Holiday weekends.  I know, I know, I'm turning into a boring old fart rattling on about the 'Good Old Days' that existed in some mythical past 'Golden Age'.  I'm afraid that a yearning for an idealised version of one's past - even though you know that, in reality, there was just as much shit going down in the world then as there is now - is the curse of growing older.