Enough with the nostalgia

I'm sick of it. All of this looking backwards. Yes, I love the 1960s, a decade before I was even born. I love its music, its fashion, I even write for a website about it. But in the last month I've been overwhelmed the amount of harking back to the past, mainly on account of Facebook. Old friends are popping up all over the place and whilst I'm pleased to receive a quick email saying they are still alive and doing well, that is probably enough. But no, reunions are happening all over the place, where you sit and talk about who kissed who when you were fifteen. Its fine for about ten minutes but then I'm bored. I want to talk about present, the future, the abstract. The past is a finite resource. Move on.

What has this to do with detective programmes, you may well wonder. Not that much really, except last night we watched an episode of T J Hooker on the Screen Gems channel.

The OH is a big fan of the opening titles of T J Hooker, the music and Heather Locklear, so we only intended to take a quick trip down memory lane but there was nothing else on so I thought we may as well watch the whole episode.

It involved some dispute in the trucking industry, with some gangster sabotaging the cargos of an old man and his daughter. The daughter had a pet orang-utan called Venus, who appeared in several scenes in various outfits before anyone even remarked on its presence, as if every trucker had a simian companion.

T J Hooker is very much a product of the 1980s. It was produced by Aaron Spelling, the police cadets wear shockingly short shorts and a big name star (Shatner), attractive blonde (Locklear) and some action scenes were obviously enough in those days to pass as entertainment. There was no mystery to be solved, no psychological element, just a straightforward cop gets bad guy, all done and dusted in 45 minutes.

The OH loved it, harking as it did back to a simpler time. I hated it which is strange considering I love Charlie’s Angels, Remington Steele and a host of other shows that have similar faults. I think it might be down to William Shatner, who is such a ham.