Victims


A really good story - very well acted and the quality of the print was great. I know modern TV's can upgrade a non HD picture but this episode I saw on ITV4 this morning was excellent.

Watching the Sweeney is a portal into the past - I was a very young man of 20 in 1978. The cars do look old in terms of design- except the Ford Grammy which doesn't seem to have aged.

Of course no traction control - ABS - Satnav and to top it all you did not have to wear a seatbelt.

It seems incredible now that people didn't mind being thrown through their windscreen or having someone on the backseat be launched like a torpedo into the back of their head if there was a crash or emergency stop.

Clearly the physics of inertia was not a hot topic in pubs. I remember my friend used to drive his Ford fiesta at 90 (indicated) on the motorway (no speed cameras) so we would have both ended up as pizza in the event of an accident.

It was a totally different World though with no mobile phones - so queues outside red telephone boxes (although often to use them as a loo after the pubs shut) - no internet - home computers and grotty TV's with runny colour. Don't ask about home decorations.

I wonder how society will look back on us in 40 years time?

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Though would you have made the "pizza" analogy back in those Fiesta days? When did pizza become a thing here? I remember hearing about it (I'm a year older than you) on American TV shows and asking my mother what they were (she didn't know but theorised they were some sort of cake from what she saw on TV), then seeing frozen ones in cardboard boxes in supermarket freezers (Fine Fare, Kwik Save, that kind of thing). I was distinctly underwhelmed when I had one - "It's tomato and cheese on bread!" but they have improved immeasurably over the years and now takeaways, unheard of and unimaginable in 1975, litter (in every sense) our high streets.

I do find myself noting the absence of mobile phones in Seventies shows. When someone is in trouble I say "Just use your...oh yeah..." More often than that, I look around the streets and see so many people walking along, head down, scrutinising their screen, maybe with a grin on their face. They are satirised in movies such as Shaun of the Dead as Zombies, but it's an apt analogy. Everyone is walking around in their own bubble, conversation is dying out. When I see a 14 year old walking to school and animatedly chatting on her phone, I always ask myself "What DID we do without them?"

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Well I probably wouldn't have used the pizza analogy back in the fiesta days because - at least mine and certainly my driver friend's sense of danger was nowhere near what it is now.

Good point though - although I do remember having pizzas in the late 70's I can't remember if it was sit down or takeaway. According to Wiki he first Pizza Express opened in 1965 but in the 70's my drinking pals and I tended to stick to grotty Chinese takeaways and sit down Indians.

In the case of Indians I was the only one who managed to down a chicken phall but did suffer the next day (the restaurant manager had warned me).

I guess they'll always be a tendency to look back and make fun of the lack of technology in certain era's so I'm sure both our current technology (what no holodecks) and eating habits (yuk all that processed food) will come in for ridicule.

My hopes are that by the years 2036 most cars will be electric or hydrogen powered with a highly efficient electrical grid providing the means to charge new low range batteries and produce the hydrogen. Perhaps by then we will have shrugged off the tyranny of oil - coal and gas and said a final goodbye to the Middle East.

Nuclear fusion will still be another 20 years away though :(

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