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Back To The Future

While flicking through the television channels the other night I happened upon one of those ‘remember the 1990’s’ nostalgia shows which always seem to be presented by Paul Ross (less successful brother of Jonathan), and invariably feature lame cultural commentary from one of the Spice Girls. This got me thinking as to what point in human evolution nostalgia first occurred. Perhaps Adam rolled over to Eve one evening in their later years and said ‘listen love, do you remember that afternoon in the garden with the talking serpent and the forbidden apple?’ At which point they no doubt laughed and talked for hours about how young and feckless they were back then, and bounced ideas around as to whatever happened to the serpent, whether God was still mad at them, and how things haven’t necessarily changed for the better.

Waking up the morning after a party and recalling the events with fellow attendees (sufferers if it was a good party), or sitting at the table as a family and discussing the succulence of a just-consumed roast dinner is not nostalgia. A relative amount of time must be involved; it is about looking back fondly on an event or era after you have moved on and experienced other things, and then fleetingly wishing you could re-visit it. Nostalgia is entirely natural, and often involuntary, as it can be invoked by something as simple as hearing an old tune on the radio, or chancing on a long forgotten keepsake while tidying out the cupboards.

Contemporary television has a lot to answer for when it comes to nostalgia, for it has cheapened the whole concept beyond belief, churning out endless clip shows dedicated to the recent past as an easy way of filling schedules. The most ludicrous example of this is I Love 1999, which was first broadcast in November 2001 to an audience who presumably had not yet had chance to forget about that year. Television shows such as the  ‘I Love 19..’ series (one episode for each year from 1960 to 1999), are merely a form of force-fed nostalgia, whereby they provide a cultural mash-up of whatever was happening in the specified time period, without really saying anything of consequence about it. There are entire channels dedicating to showing old television programmes (mainly fiction) to satisfy the appetite of anyone who feels nostalgic for such things, but at least they allow the viewer to experience the original event intact, rather than chopping the key scenes into a string of canned laughter.

Social networking sites such as Friends Reunited, and more recently Facebook, allow people to make connections with old friendships from the past that somehow faded away. They provide an opportunity to investigate personal nostalgia, and to see if it lives up to expectation e.g. a recent divorcee suddenly remembers an old flame from high school, thinks how wonderful it would be to see her again and decides find out what she is up to now. Assuming that the old flame can be contacted through the website, the divorcee can ascertain whether it’s possible to meet up, and more importantly whether she is still as he remembers, or whether she is now a he, working as a brick-layer called Leon in New Jersey.

The problem with such websites is that they can feel like a stasis, particularly when you encounter people who are too busy looking back to embrace the present, and ultimately the future. These people are nostalgic for the past as a whole, not necessarily any specific era, which basically functions as a distraction from the present for them. They mine such websites like social termites, latching on to anyone they ever crossed paths with in the hope of sparking up some form of contact, usually just to discuss what they once had in common, and to make non-specific references to meeting up again in the future. This is not a failing of the websites themselves, but rather a reflection of the insincere forms of contact proliferated by the internet.

Nostalgia is often used to manipulate people, particularly within advertising, which chews up and spits our past back at us in the hope that it makes for a tasty dish. In a recent interview relating to the re-launch of the Wispa chocolate bar, advertising executive Trevor Beattie referred to ‘dipping the campaign in liquid nostalgia’ during the creative process. A crass and but revealing statement. Nostalgia was originally coined as a medical term for extreme homesickness, and was a particularly common condition among soldiers sent away to battle. The modern interpretation is a less sincere and arguably more superficial idea, whereby we look back at previous eras from the comfort of our own home, using modern technology to assist the process. There is nothing wrong with looking back at our past, but we mustn’t forget to look where we are going next. It is fair to say nostalgia is not what it was.

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