A little question that is vexing me because I can’t quite square up the facts.
I think I do believe that in general attention spans are getting shorter, with everything vying for our attention these days, and 10 second tiktok videos (ask your kids) all the rage.
So why are TV shows so long? And how do all these people with apparently short attention spans find the time to watch them?
I’ve lost count of how many different series of Star Wars there are, and now we also have extended seasons of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones all over the place.
I’m a bit averse to it, truth be told. I think the art of telling a concise story with a beginning and an end is being lost, and the assumption seems to be that more is always better. The current show I’m watching (finally) is Breaking Bad and to be honest it’s so slow it’s quite tortuous. I’m on the second last season so I’ll stick to the end, but then I need to decide whether to also watch the spin off movie and the spin off Better Call Saul series (which is now far longer than even Breaking Bad ever was).
I’m surprised we’ve got this far down the thread without anyone comparing the The Office (UK version) with The Office (USA version).
It is a daunting challenge to undertake such commitment when a show has more than two seasons and you are over 60 (I’m 60-and-a-half). I greatly feared dying before finding out what happens at the end of Game of Thrones, so I gave up on it and found, to my surprise, that pretty much resolved that dilemma. I feel very proud of myself for having somehow got the first five seasons of Saul already done and dusted and as a result feel fairly confident-ish going into what I thankfully know will be the last season. Except I can’t really remember what happened in seasons 1 to 5. But I’m going in anyway, such is my courage.
I’m 60-and-a-half, too!
I don’t know what the UK version of the series “Shameless” is like, but I’ve seen all 134 episodes of the US version of “Shameless”, with William H. Macy as Frank Gallagher.
It’s warmly recommended. Dive in.
Checking in as another member of the 60.5 club. Not starting any long series any more that I have never watched except one probably. The Sopranos
Is that 60.5 or 65? Count me in the latter. I don’t even listen to box sets any more. (Never did, to be fair. All that padding.)
In my case 60 years and 6 months.
You sweet summer child!
Tl;dr.
@Bingo-LIttle
Bm2i
@Jaygee
AIAMU
You and your chimpish sense of humour, G!
IANAL
(and before you put your dirty spin on this, I got it from the comments at emptywheel, and it stands for I Am Not A Lawyer (but …). The Afterword needs its own version – IANAR – I Am Not A Royalist (but …).
IANAM
The drummer’s lament.
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is the perfect counter to that.
Nothing longer than 25 minutes, completely unserious, and only going to be 9 episodes. It’s a little slice of perfection.
Except who over the age of 14 would be tempted to watch it? And its brevity is wasted on under 14-year-olds as they’ll have enough time to watch anything. (Except Eastenders and Coronation Street, which will still be going long after humanity has died out.)
Um *raises hand* me…
Well, you are not watching a two and a half hour-plus movie if you are watching an episode of a TV series, so a tiny attention span is not being stretched. I’m not sure where the contradiction is.
Mo’s point here is, I think, refutable only by halfwits and nincompoops.
Legalish weed in the USA driving the need for stimuli?
Thought Breaking Bad moved at a pretty fast pace when I watched it at the time. If you think that is slow then on no account watch BCS, that is about 10 times slower (but equally brilliant)
And BCS is almost exact same length as BB, just 1 more episode (63 v 62)
Yep. Had a little inward titter at how Arthur would react to Saul if he thinks Breaking Bad is slow..
Oh, yes I still feel it is slow.
I think the story is a decent one (chemistry teacher decides to cook meth on the side and gets in over his head), but it’s a decent story that would have made a decent two hour movie rather than an extended TV series. I do think the point is being laboured a bit over 60+ episodes, and they keep having to invent pot boilers and moments of suspense to keep extending the story.
In series two, one of the episodes started with a 3 or 4 minute spoof Mexican song about Walt and Jesse – couldn’t that have been pruned? The whole subplot about one of the characters shoplifting was, I think, unnecessary. It’s full of bits like this. I think the plane crash was a totally un-needed plot that went nowhere, and I’m not even going to mention that notorious bottle episode with the fly.
I will say it creates the very good illusion of being fast-paced, as things “seem” to be happening all the time, but at the end of each series when I think back on what has actually moved on, it’s very little.
Having said all that, it’s watchable and enjoyable, and the saving grace is I know there is a definitive END coming in about 20 episodes’ time, so I’ll reserve final judgement until then.
And not forgetting they dropped the original reason for Walter White’s move into cooking meth in the first place. No mentions of the c*nc*r after about the second season IIRC (but I probably don’t).
It was there throughout, but later he admitted that he enjoyed it and it was kind of an excuse.
I thought the fly episode was fine. No relevant plot at all, but kind of thrilling in it’s way. I was on tenderhooks.
The greatness of series like Breaking Bad is the character development throughout and the build up to huge things happening. As I said I didn’t consider it slow at all, but if you just want lots of action then stuff like Mission Impossible or something is there for you. Breaking Bad is different.
I was thinking of arguing your last point there, and rhyming off a load of arthouse flicks to prove that just because I find Breaking Bad slow doesn’t mean I don’t like stately, serious movies…. But actually I quite like Mission Impossible so I take your point.
I thought this was about individual shows in series getting longer and longer – the most recent series of Stranger Things being an excellent example of a show that has collapsed under the weight of its own pretentious
Short and sweet is the way forward. There is a new series of ‘Ghosts’ on the Beeb from Friday – 30 minutes per episode and 6 episodes per series. ‘Detectorists’ is another to warm the heart and leave one wanting more and Bob and Paul have gone fishing again to combine gentle humour, beautiful scenery and musical gorgeousness.
What’s particularly pleasing is watching good US comedy shows on channels with no ads – Frasier, for instance, or Brooklyn99. They weigh in at a punchy 20-odd minutes.
… and another non-mention of Angie Tribeca. What is wrong with you people?
Rashida Jones! My buddy Jeff used to be married to her sister. True fact. (Before marrying him, she was engaged to Tupac.)
Crikey. CRIKEY!
I watched Rev recently, all 3 series of about 3 hours each over a week or two, and it benefited hugely from having a beginning, middle and end. Of course it’s not nearly as ambitious a show as, say, the brilliant Breaking Bad, and has a much smaller scope and cast.
As you might have guessed I though Rev very good, even as a lifelong heathen. A pet hate of mine is when sitcoms decide that they have to get serious,. and in Rev the subject is already pretty serious – a dedicated and faithful, though very human, anglican priest trying to keep his inner-city church open in the face of indifference from all around.
Just watched the first episode. The last scene with the bottle is wonderful – like the last piece in a jigsaw, or the domino getting pushed that starts the obliteration of the whole patient domino run that was built up in the previous half an hour.
If the question is whether attention spans are really getting shorter: the fact that an ability to watch TV is being held up as a counter probably speaks for itself.
If the question is why TV series are getting longer: that’s a process that’s been underway for nearly a quarter of a century now, driven by the late 90s TV boom, the increased time people spend on screens, and the market demands of subscription services.
A good point re ability to watch TV. It’s not about paying attention so much as being zombified enough to binge watch something. I suppose that’s the answer to my question.
Surprised we’ve got this far without a plug for Justified, six long series that are holding my attention like a nipple clamp. It’s the first long-form TV I’ve watched since HBO re-invented the form. But hey, Bingo’s “nearly quarter of a century” is selling it short. Star Trek, The Waltons, Gilligan’s Island and other shows may not have defined the long-form narrative we’re familiar with, but they attracted season-long loyalty in the same way, so the distinction may not be important.
I remember when John-Boy found a bible among the German books everybody was burning. A very moving moment.
@Gary
The very next day, he probably got a part-time job at the local store that paid him exactly the price the redneck Nazis wanted to spare said tome from the conflagration?
I don’t remember what happened next, but I know John-Boy’s dad was in Cool Hand Luke and rather unfairly had to spend his very first night in the box.
NOT GOING GACK IN THE GOX!!
….oh I thought this was the impressions thread
“What we have heeyuh isa failyuh to comewnikayt, Mr. Mooche”
Now try saying it without moving your lips,..
The funerals thread is up a bit, Moosey.
The history of TV can be neatly divided pre and post 1999. The Sopranos changed the game.
It can indeed. But The Invaders (lest we forget, A Quinn-Martin Production©) had everything the Sopranos had, except for Italian gangsters. The story stretched over several seasons, the episodes being both stand-alone and part of the longer narrative. Similarly, The Fugitive, starring T.V.’s David Janssen. The Sopranos did nothing truly new, but did it superbly, and for longer. So maybe your neat division blurs a little if you squint at it long enough.
@Bingo-LIttle
You forgot Oz –
HBOs very first foray into LFTV,
Pre-dated the Sopranos by a couple of years and also featured Edie Falco
Oz was amazing. J.K Simmons will always be Vernon Shillinger to me.
Edie Falco sounds a bit like Falconetti in reverse. He was the baddie in Rich Man, Poor Man.
@H-P-Saucecraft
I’m waiting for some kind of Epilog to your post, HP
It’s not really my division, to be fair. It’s a pretty widely accepted truism within the industry and beyond.
If you want to know why TV looks the way it does in 2022, why it enjoys the budgets it does, the production values, the (comparative) moral and narrative depth, the length of story, the A-list talent, the parity with film, etc, etc, then The Sopranos is part of your answer. The Invaders, maybe fractionally less so, unless you’re willing to squint very hard indeed.
The thing about shows like Invaders and Fugitive was that they were essentially the same episode after episode, series after series.
Roy Thinnes or David Jannsen arrived in a new place met some new people who were initially very sceptical but eventually came round to their way of seeing things.
There was little or no real character or plot development between the first and last episodes and you could have easily switched RT or DJ without anyone really noticing
Yebbut, yebbut … this is a matter of degree – even “nuance”. The format was established earlier than Oz, or The Sopranos. The content of the format evolved to accommodate the aspects you so cogently elucidate. The narratives became more complex, incorporating character arcs. But that’s it – the idea of watching many subsequent seasons of a show, and the attention span required, was long accepted by the time HBO took it to the max.
(Checks to make sure I’ve downloaded the 2-disc Hard Nose alternative album HP kindly uploaded for him – Result!)
It’s a bit like saying that the wheels cavemen used to make are comparable to those on a modern-day F1 car – they share the same format but very little else
Other pithier analogies are avaialble
How about this? In the old days, if someone asked me if I’d seen a programme and I had watched a dozen episodes and could name characters outside the main two I would reply that, yes, I’ve seen it. Now, I might say “No, I’ve only got as far as season 4”.
We complete tv now, because we believe it’s written to be completed (often erroneously, as many U.S. shows are just toffee stretching exercises until they are not renewed. Justified, as a for instance, which was so brilliant for so long, IMO went on just a little bit more than ideal – although I hear they are making more, so what do I know?)
That’s a pretty good summation of now v then.
Paradoxically, while it was a lot easier to miss an episode and know what was going on in those days, there was no way of catchingup via repeats or recordings
@jaygee – “It’s a bit like saying that the wheels cavemen used to make are comparable to those on a modern-day F1 car …”
And indeed there you have it, old pilchard! Encapsulated in as pithy a simile as one could wish for! The wheel of the caveman, formed no doubt by main strength and rude tool from a slab of prehistoric oak, perhaps in the guttering firelight of his cosy cave as his wife, clad in skimpy fur, stirs the pot of pterodactyl broth, possessed both the circularity and axle-centric rotational quality we see in the wheel of the “hi-tech” modern racing car! Think only of T.V.’s The Flintstones if further confirmation is needed that you have firmly grasped as it were the gist of this argument!
You won me over with “clad in skimpy fur”, HP
Not to mention The Rockford Files, with a back-story arc covering six series over sixteen years, or The Virginian which ran for nine series over nine years. This pre- and post- 1999 theory is, in fact, pants.
And what about Heidi? That went on for about forty years.
Lol.
Foxy, we may point to countless series that seem to deny it, and M*A*S*H springs readily to mind, but I’m told it’s a pretty widely accepted truism within the industry and beyond.
Only on the Afterword can a simple statement on the seismic impact of the Sopranos on the TV industry be received as an attack on the tremendous television of the 60s/70s 😂
“Only on the Afterword” – No! No, I won’t have that! There’s a place in Eastbourne.
Thank you, Major!
*double take*
Oh tsk, Bingo Little. Tsk, I say! I merely thought I saw a slight flaw in your impeccably poised argument – basically, that you were full of shit – and gently brought to your attention examples of the genre (as have others) that would seem to bear me out. I make no case for the telly of my younger years being “tremendous”, but I am not such a giddy merryandrew that I consider these dark days to be a “Golden Age” for the medium, which it clearly is not, although your enthusiasm is as refreshing as it is baffling.
In fact, as I cool to my theme, telly back when I was a teenager was almost uniformly rubbish, as it is now. The exceptions weren’t enough to make me sit at home with my mum and dad watching it all evening. You’ll have to take my word for this, Bing, but going out and having fun with your mates was what young people did back then. Every night of the week. It was like social without the media. TV was seen as part of the dozy older generation’s idea of entertainment we set ourselves apart from. So no “Golden Age of TV” vote from me, and no nostalgia, either. I haven’t spent an evening in front of the TV for maybe thirty years. And I live in a country where the medium never really caught on except for amusing the staff in restaurants.
In the seventies, most TV was rubbish but there was less TV, therefore less rubbish. Nowadays, there is so much rubbish, it’s difficult to know where to start.
Darling, if the choice here is between being full of shit and engaging with you in what would undoubtedly be a prolonged and deeply tedious ego-drenched “debate” about (of all things) the quality of television, I’m afraid I’m going to have to quite gladly opt for the former.
Life is simply too short, and approximately 30 seconds of Googling would suffice to set the record straight (I particularly recommend “Golden age of television”, since it’s quoted above).
You chat on a bit longer about the 60s, and I’ll be elsewhere, relaxing with my thoughts.
😘
Nobody, but nobody, was understanding your comments as an attack on the (air quotes) tremendous television of the 60’s/70’s. Similarly, nobody here was claiming it to be any kind of (air quotes) Golden Age. This was your devious spin on things – an admirable quality in the publicist or politician!
I wasn’t going to dignify your comment with a response, but there’s something about you, Bing, something gentle and mole-like, I find curiously attractive.
Apropos of not a lot, I’ve said on here before that I found Better Call Saul painfully slow and, to be honest, boring.
All has changed for the final series. Things happen! Brilliant things happen! It’s great!
Better than Breaking Bad? Nah.
Well we don’t have to decide between them. I think aspects of BCS were as good as television gets.
Agree. I felt a bit so-so about BSC until it really gathered steam in season five. And the conclusion was highly satisfying.
But don’t get me started on Ozark. Watched the final episode last week and I’m still feeling pissed off.
I started Ozark just a few weeks ago, on the strong recommendation of a Friend Of A Friend. I’m really struggling to get past S01E06… should I persevere?
Ironically, I promised to start Ozark as a condition of FOAF promising to restart BCS, which I correctly predicted he’d abandoned around the time that Chuck’s EHS was drearily dominating the narrative.
I praised BCS to the high heavens* and urged him to return to it and keep going, so I’ve sort of banjaxed myself ‘cos no doubt when I next see FOAF round at Mutual Friend’s we’ll compare notes.
*(For me, BCS is light years better than anything I’ve ever seen… even better than The Sopranos, which has been my way-ahead-of-the-rest benchmark for many years. I think it’s genuinely astonishing, and very rewarding, in every regard).
You should watch Ozark for the tremendous third season. It gets very into shark-jumping stupidity in the final one.
Ah ok, thanks for that.
Season Three does feel like a very long way off atm though; had to really grind my way through another S01 episode last night. Feels like there’s just not enough… substance… to it yet; feels a bit diffuse, a bit drifty. I’ll keep going though.
TV has become a chore. Who has time to watch all this shit? I don’t care any more. Am I the only person who feels this?
Not that. i know I’m the only person who feels that.
I’m with you.
I don’t watch a great deal of TV. More of a movies guy – the idea of investing 10+ hours in a show just feels a bit exhausting somehow, and there’s usually something else I’d prefer to be doing.
I think it was Thrones that actually broke me. About halfway through the third series I was struggling to remember who was who and realised it was because I didn’t care enough to remember and was only watching it out of duty. (The fact that my memory is completedly bollicksed is completely incidental)
It was Breaking Bad, for me. Watched two episodes and realised I didn’t really want to watch any more, so I didn’t. Sometimes these shows feel like homework, although that said I remember The Wire starting out that way before it became completely magnificent.
The truth is that I just can’t make the time commitment fit my life right now. And that’s not meant to be some sort of lofty statement; there are all sorts of stupid, frivolous things I waste tons of time on, TV shows just aren’t generally one of them right now.
…..”there are all sorts of stupid, frivolous things I waste tons of time on” – I’ve no idea what you mean, said one Afterworder to another.
Quite.
I don’t own a telly, I watch things via computer/projector. Which means I never see anything I don’t choose to watch. But my impression is that telly’s never been better. The Afterword-acclaimed Slow Horses with Gary Oldman being the most recent example of top-notch 5 star entertainment.
Regardless of whether I’m watching it or not, it’s pretty clear that this is a comparative golden age of television by most reasonable standards.
My plan is to catch up on it all when I retire. I figure it’ll all still be there.
@Moose-the-Mooche
Quick update that’ll advance your enjoyment by at least seven decades. M.
The old queen died to be succeeded by her young, thrusting (hurr!) septuagenerian son whose own children are squabbling about issues that are dividing the entire Kingdom.
That has only advanced my enjoyment by 69 years. I’m cancelling Netflix.
I’d cancel Netflix but I don’t pay for it, and I occasionally spend a few minutes scrolling rapidly through stuff I can’t imagine ever watching.
It’s more of the favourite Afterword theme of things aren’t as good as they used to be.
@Diddley-Farquar
And your post started out so promisingly, D
Nooo, have i accidentally created one of ‘those’ threads? I am on grumpy autopilot these days, I tell you.
I’m picturing the less cheerful brother of Otto from Airplane.
I’m picturing Cowslip as Charles Hawtrey in a boy scout uniform. Prove me wrong.
The Sopranos may have been a watershed for the TV industry, but as well as the series mentioned about, there were others going in that direction, of TV being seen as an equal to films or novels, before that.
The first series that I remember which combined long running story arcs, as they’re called now, with episode length plots was Hill Street Blues. It also seemed to be aiming for more realism than other police shows, reflecting the fact that even in New York in the eighties, the police could on one day be dealing with domestic squabbles and gang related crime. I think Homicide took that further, and it was definitely a step towards The Wire (both created by David Simon).
I suppose the first series that really got taken as seriously as cinema was Twin Peaks. A major film director, especially one as non-mainstream as David Lynch, working on TV changed the way a lot of people, or at least critics, saw its potential
I watched all of these as they came out, and liked them, but there wasn’t that much competition if you liked something like this – a bit more heavyweight than the average show. But now there is just so much of it to catch up on, I don’t know where to start.
Maybe the best series came out during the period when the DVD box set was at it’s peak with shows like The Wire, Game Of Thrones and Breaking Bad among others. Now we are in a time where, like movies, there are sequels, prequels and attempts to re-do the original, all of which are inferior. Maybe the golden age is already over. Where are the great new big shows that wow the critics? But you can find the gems still, things like Russian Doll (series 1), You, End Of The Fucking World (this was on normal UK TV I think as well) and The OA, although these have been around a while now. I am saying things were better before aren’t I? Like everything most is shit.
We watch quite a bit of TV and are glad to find a good streamed series. A lot of the time there is very little worth seeing. The Sinner is another good one. We are only too pleased to find something to binge and it’s a shame when they are over.
I was just going to say that. Give other commenters a chance.
I don’t have the time (or a TV, but mostly it’s a lack of time).
But because I like being able to understand references and jokes about a few endless series that everyone watched, I watch other people react to them on YouTube. This gives me a quick summary of the story and I get to see the most iconic scenes but don’t have to watch all of the dull stuff in between… This way, instead of watching hours and hours and hours of GOT, I watched someone react to the series in just a couple of hours in total. Result!
This is where we are heading, I’m sure of it.
I watch TV with my phone constantly on – scrolling through. The only one I devote full attention to is Only Connect.
I’d point out that going back to the 19th century there has been a tradition of novels developing into long running series. Anthony Trollope was doing it in the 1850-60s with the Chronicles of Barsetshire (which I haven’t read), CP Snow in the 1940-70s with Strangers and Brothers (which I have read, and it’s excellent), Paul Scott 1965-75 with the Raj Quartet (also excellent).
Same principle: readers/viewers get interested in characters, want to know what happened further down the line, and if it’s well written will stick with the story over several seasons. Worked brilliantly for The Wire and Breaking Bad, but sometimes the story isn’t worth it. I sat through Severance on Apple TV earlier in the year; found the earlier episodes riveting but by the time it ended the season with a cliffhanger decided the story wasn’t worth sticking with for another two, three, four years.
Felt exactly the same way about Severance myself.
The willing suspension of disbelief being asked for of the viewer was just too much and I bailed after four episodes
Dickens used to write a lot of his books as serials in the 19th Century – a habit later taken up by our very own HP Saucecraft in his Blue Kilometer series
The massive growth in serial dramas on the streaming services seems to have come at the expense of factual documentary series on science, philosophy and history, something at which the BBC used to excel. I was struggling to find something to watch last night (and I have access to Netflix, Prime HBO etc), and eventually came across a BBC series from 1984 called The Sea of Faith, presented by Don Cupitt. Essentially an overview of the historical decline of religion and the rise of a more mechanistic, scientific view of the world. An ambling pace, loooong quotes from Galileo, Descartes and Pascal, mercifully free of intrusive music or gimmicks of any kind, I thought it was ace. Just a knowledgeable bloke talking enthusiastically about the history of ideas. On YouTube if anyone is interested.
There are no more programmes being commissioned for BBC4, of course. Don’t panic, they’ve brought back BBC3 onto the airwaves! Eye-roll emoji.
The Golden Age of TV finished when they cancelled The Bill.
I loved The Bill.
“It’s all kickin’ off down the Jasmine Allen!”
Great stuff.
@jeff
It bloomin’ was!
@Freddy-Steady
Ha ha!
After our pings on this last week, I found myself thinking “How come my early evenings used to involve watching this so regularly that I can remember a detail like that?” And then I realised that it probably had something to do with being a combination of post-work, post-feeding-the-kids, collapsing-into-an-exhausted-1000yd-stare-zoned-out-fugue-state, and it just being a really well-written, well-cast, and well-acted popular drama. I thought it was really well done, and addressed emerging complex social issues without being either cringingly didactic or shoutily EastEndersy.
Also, for the avoidance of doubt, I should make it clear that, though my name is Jeff, I’m not Jeff Stewart, who played PC Reg Hollis.
Mind how y’go, sir.
Syndication kills a lot of the big US shows, in terms of creativity. House was a great idea, maybe three series max, stretched to death.
A mate of mine recommended The Walking Dead. He said, “It really gets going in season three!” Leaving aside my aversion to any sort of zombie-related tv show, I’m not numbing my buttocks for about 656 episodes just to get to the good bit.
Just as much as it leads to a decline, the TV system we have now can lead to brilliance. Those who think of commercial considerations first often haven’t a clue and kill the golden goose but somehow, against the odds, there was a golden goose to begin with. Same as it ever was. We tire of many a series, the same characters, the familiar scenarios. Orange Is The New Black was superb for a few seasons, likewise Peaky Blinders. The Good Wife that was a DVD era show, was excellent all the way through. I couldn’t keep up the interest for the follow up series. It’s worth making the effort for the rewards you can get. I wonder what we would make now of the old series that were so lauded, from the 70s, 80s and 90s. Possibly not so impressive as we thought.
Anybody watched Cracker recently? Prime Suspect? Unlike with music, old telly is best off staying in the past. Drama, anyway.
I watched Brideshead Revisited not long ago with someone who’d never seen it. It’s as stunningly brilliant and worth watching as ever. Every single actor perfectly cast. The most amazing thing for me, watching it again, was Jeremy Irons’ transition from naive self-conscious youth to jaded middle age. A quite astonishing performance.
We’ve had the DVD set for upwards of ten years. Never watched it. Still in its cellophane. We don’t watch DVDs, ever. I’m glad it’s good, though.
I always felt with Jeremy Irons that there was acting going on, which got in the way. A lot of talent in that series though. It was a big deal at the time. We even got the music LP.
Reminds me: some brilliant material from Alan Rickman’s diaries has been published in today’s Graun, including his pithy film reviews. This for 12 Years a Slave:
A great film, I am told. Would I watch it twice? No. What does it say? Should Chiwetel [Ejiofor] get an Oscar? No. He’s in it a lot, looking worried, and breathing heavily. Is that enough? [Michael] Fassbender, however, is very fine. Makes you ferret to understand him. Somehow, I was always watching actors, not a story.
“I always felt with Jeremy Irons that there was acting going on, which got in the way.” This is quite brilliant, Diddles. Who said it?
@Moose-the-Mooche
I watched Cracker all the way through a few weeks back. Aside from the idiotic HK reprise episode i thought it held up pretty well.
I’d thoroughly recommend tv shows from the 70s and 80s, just to observe how much booze is consumed. Even in something as relatively ornate as Jewel in the Crown, they’re constantly nodding at the barmaid’s thumb. I saw an episode of the Sweeney on Thursday; in one scene, Regan downed – in three minutes – the equivalent of six double whiskies, then went back to work/shouting.
We watched Between the Lines recently – it’s from 1992, if you please – the amount of tabs smoked and gallons of whiskey guzzled was extraordinary. Did we live like that then? Well I did, but I was a student, not an adult with a job.
When the Sweeney episode I watched was released, Moose, John Thaw was 34. He looked about 55. Apparently, he started a serious smoking habit aged 12.