sherwood
Resources: the unheard of tires
Rating: 
Everything about the 80’s was awful. † † at least if you believe the BBC.
A medley of anniversary documentaries and dramas portray those years as a nightmarish dystopia. Apparently the era was all about violence, racism, unemployment, sexual prejudice and reading. And that was just the sitcoms.
Each flashback reveals bad perms and a worse set. Whenever we see Margaret Thatcher, she storms us from a podium, always angled at an angle – the not-too-subtle signal from the BBC that the country’s first female prime minister should always be portrayed as unbalanced.
Surely our national broadcaster cannot be biased against an entire decade just because Labor was permanently out of power?
Scenes of a Nottinghamshire mining town during the 1984 strike, in Sherwood (BBC1), painted a picture of dingy discos and grim pubs
Loosely based on a real-life murder case, this bleak drama revolves around dirty police tactics and brutality (Sherwood stock image)
Maybe my memory is faulty as I remember a lot to love about the eighties. The mail arrived before breakfast, along with the milk and the Daily Mail. Boys on bicycles went to school and did not sell drugs. Without cell phones, we had a little bit of privacy and freedom. Most important of all, chocolate bars were bigger. I miss old Mars.
Scenes of a Nottinghamshire mining town during the 1984 strike, in Sherwood (BBC1), painted a picture of dingy discos and grim pubs. Loosely based on a true murder case, this bleak drama revolves around dirty police tactics and brutality. Mind you, judging by that sticky beer in the workers’ club, there wouldn’t be much difference between a pint of that and a blow with a baton.
Sherwood was a disappointment, with storylines as flat as beer. The cast is excellent, stuffed with more top actors than a Harry Potter movie. But even the talents of Lorraine Ashbourne, Mark Addy, Pip Torrens, Adeel Akhtar, David Morrissey and Robert Glenister can’t cover up the gaping illogicalities in the plot.
Who could believe that an undercover cop, welcomed by the community she’d sent to infiltrate, would suddenly realize that her true calling was that of petty criminal?
And has anyone ever been shot in the chest by a semi-automatic police rifle and stopped to take off his glasses, before dying on his knees gurgling and dying?
Meanwhile, a killer roams Sherwood Forest in a hoodie, harassing his pursuers with notes pinned to oak trees with arrows.
Even after 40 years, the chill of prejudice [the programme] revealing is enough to make the flesh crawl.
If you’re old enough to remember Michael Praed in Robin Of Sherwood, there’s something else that was better about the 1980s.
The music wasn’t, however, judging by the jaded soundtrack of hackneyed electro-pop that accompanied Aids: The Unheard Tapes (BBC2). If I never hear Bronski Beat’s Smalltown Boy in a documentary about the eighties again, it’ll be a week too early. This three-part history of a pandemic is largely told through the voices of gay men interviewed at the time.
Actors in the 80s fashion synchronized with the audio, an innovative technique that, despite being impeccably executed, didn’t quite work. The performers spoke their lines with split-second accuracy, but the effect was like watching those plasticine animations of talking animals on Heat Electric ads (if you remember Robin Of Sherwood, you remember those ads too:’ They should be easy-off and on’).
Excerpts from news reports reminded us how difficult it was to talk about sexually transmitted diseases back then. Jeremy Paxman said the word “condoms” with real distance, as if picking up the word between the tips of two fingers.
A man with AIDS described how a nurse put on a mask and rubber gloves to give him a glass of water. Even after 40 years, the chill of prejudice that comes to light is enough to make the flesh crawl.