Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Just say no it ain't so

Bugger Super Tuesday, and even the supercasino decision...the story that's got me going today is the demise of Grange Hill after 30 glorious years.

I suppose deciding when to end a successful series is always a difficult call to make. Brookside clearly went on a few years' too long - the final episode was one of the most surreal experiences in the history of TV soap, but by then the producers were clearly taking the piss. And Eastenders, in my view, should have finished about five years ago when it still maintained a modicum of artistic credibility, before they started resorting to Dallas-style stunts like bringing people back from the dead.

If I'm honest, Grange Hill has probably passed its sell-by date too. The saddest and yet posibly most perceptive comment I have seen on its demise came from a commenter on the BBC website who said:

"Things have changed too much in both education and society. If Grange Hill were to reflect the lives of teenagers today it would need to be shown after the watershed and not during children's prime viewing slots."

Be that as it may, as a "first generation" viewer from the late 70s, nothing for me can sully the memories of Tucker, Cathy, Gripper, Duane, Suzanne and of course Messrs Bronson and Baxter, the kind of old-school teachers who simply wouldn't exist in today's education system.

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4 comments:

septicisle said...

Not true at all. The Young Ones did a spoof of Grange Hill that had a teacher called Mr Liberal complaining about how the kids were encouraging all others across the country to answer back and be generally unruly. Ben Elton as one of the kids shoots back, "Naw Sir, we're the only children in Britain that don't say fu....". And that was the early 1980s.

Anonymous said...

Tsk!

I suppose I must now give up all hope of them bringing back Tucker's Luck too.

Drew said...

By the way, Duane, Gripper, Bronson and Suzanne weren't IN Grange Hill in the late 70s. They were 1980s characters.

Paul Linford said...

Blimey that's a bit pedantic Andy. I only said I started watching Grange Hill in the 70s, not that I stopped watching it in the early 80s.

I like your TV nostalgia sites, btw.