Friday 5 May 2017

Am I a dinosaur?

I don't mean am I a big scaly thing with huge teeth and tiny arms (the answer to that is yes) but in my ideas.

I am a child of the Seventies.  I grew up without the aid of Health and Safety and yet, I am still here.  

I spent my formative years digging in the dirt, damming streams, running round builder's yards and scrap yards.  I left the house every morning clean, I returned every evening I wasn't at school looking like I had been shoved up a chimney.  I had to come in the back door and strip down to my underwear in the kitchen before I was marched up to the bath.

We built dens in the park with the long grass, we didn't demand that dog poo be picked up, we knew to avoid it.  If you wanted to be evil, you would pick up a lump of poo in a load of grass (generally a whole handful of grass to a tiny speck of poo) and chase someone with it. 

We didn't have to deal with syringes back then as drugs were not a major issue anywhere apart from the seediest areas, any druggies straying out of these areas would have been run out of town by an angry mob of mums and dads and none of them would have dared gone to the Police about their 'Human Rights'.

And even if used syringes HAD been a problem, our parents would have told us to leave them alone, so we would have done.

And even though we didn't have watches or iphones, we always knew when it was time to be in.

Television too was different.  I grew up with On The Buses, The Rag Trade, Love Thy Neighbour, Benny Hill and Jim Davison.  It didn't offend me then, and it doesn't offend me now.

Yes, I used to wonder how Stan and Jack always managed to get women (Reg Varney looked like my Grandad and Bob Grant, eww, even as young as I was),  It was all so harmless and generally it was the underdog who came out on top.  There was no bad language and how many women did Benny Hill catch?  They always managed to evade him, okay in hindsight there may have been a reason for that but then, it was funny.

So when Ashes To Ashes came along in 2008, I somehow missed Life On Mars, I had to watch. Real men coppers like Gene Hunt and Ray Carling, reminiscent of Jack Regan and George Carter, were too much of a draw.



Real Men.  With a capital M.

Brut wearing, whiskey drinking, V8 driving.  This was the man I needed.

Unfortunately these days it is more likely to be the women swigging single malt and revving the V8 whilst the men are sipping soft drinks and driving Priuses.

But some of us dinosaurs want these real men, so if you know a Gene Hunt looking for a hard drinking, hard gambling lady love, send him my way.

Please.




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