TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* Britainology 4: That '70s Episode

Episode Date: April 20, 2021

We're back again to explain the eccentricities and fault lines of this truly normal island. This week, Milo and Nate discuss the 1970s in Britain, why everything went downhill, why the decade radicalised the Boomers, and why the TV from that era is.... not good. Hope you enjoy! If you want more Britainology, you can get it on our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/48881406 We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://bailproject.org/?form=donate *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, Trash Shooter fans just as an FYI. This week's free episode is out on the Patreon already. It'll be out on Wednesday this week on the main feed. However, in the interim, please enjoy this unlocked Britannology. Just bear in mind that if you want more Britannology, you get one episode per month on the $5 tier along with all the other bonus content. For those extreme heads out there, you can actually get a second Britannology per month on the $10 tier along with our Q&A and special intimate access to the Trash Shooter cast. Thanks for listening and hope you enjoy. Hello and welcome to yet another episode of Britannology, episode four, I do believe.

It is in fact number four. Yeah, an odyssey into the minds of the British people and the things which drive them to ever greater success in the war on being normal. This week, as ever, I'm joined by my loyal co-host, Nate Pathay. Hello, it's wonderful to be back. We're having a banner week in Britain. Normal things are happening, but some of them I feel are informed by a deep psychosis for everyone over, let's say the age of 55 in Britain, who thinks they personally fought in World War II, even though to be a World War II veteran at this point, you probably got to be in your 90s. Yeah, I mean, they've inhaled enough leaded petrol fumes in their childhood that they really believe they fought in World War II.

And in a way, that's all that matters. So we're going to talk, and Milo's going to lead this, but we're going to talk about a particularly cursed decade in the history of the United Kingdom, which is the 1970s. Yeah. If you know anything about the history of the 1970s in the world, you have two big problems. You've got the oil crisis in 1973 and 1979. You also have the British currency was devalued in the late 60s, and inflation started to run rampant when the Bretton Woods system was introduced, basically, when countries went off the gold standard. Now, this is not a gold standard podcast. However, Britain- Wait, what? It's a particularly cursed responses to inflation and to the oil crises. And by the,

this was marked by the winter of discontent, a six-week period of industrial action in the late 70s. Everyone is convinced was 10 times worse than it was, and that they all personally lived through, even though they probably did not. Milo, you told me once that your parents both will never vote labor because of the winter of discontent, because it's so ingrained and people are convinced that bodies were- It's part of what radicalized the boomers. Yeah, 100%. People are convinced that bodies were piling up in the streets when there was a grave digger strike in, like, Merseyside that lasted for two weeks, but everyone's convinced that bodies were piling up in the street around the entire country, which is not in fact the case.

So- No, that was just because of the craze. Yeah, exactly. In those days, you could do a Merseyside without a fucking political correctness saying you can't concrete a body into the M40. So, in 1970, you had the initial episodes of Monty Python. By 1979, you had Dave Courtney in his sword fight in a Chinese restaurant. Exactly. It was a very powerful decade in the early 70s. Like, honestly, like, you know, early Hong Kong cinema has nothing on the life of Dave Courtney. Exactly. In the early 70s, you have the three-day work week, which was-

Like a hidden Giza. You have the three-day work week, which is a response to the oil crisis and the need to save electricity in which businesses around the country switch to a three-day work week. This is not a lie. This absolutely happened. You have a very, yeah, very deeply cursed period of what you might call just incredible decay and general malaise that then led in May, 1979, to the election of Margaret Thatcher and the rest's history. Everything got worse, but some people got richer. Everything became extremely good after that point.

And so, to talk about- we're not going to talk about the history of the 1970s much more than what I've just summarized, because I feel like there is one very important point, which is that under a labor government, they started cutting the social safety net and cutting government spending in anticipation of an IMF bailout that they wound up not needing because they had done the figures wrong. This is not made up. So basically, the 1970s in common memory in the United Kingdom sucked. My mom considered moving back to the United Kingdom when she finished college, but she came and visited her relatives and said,

this place fucking sucks. I am definitely not staying here. And we're going to talk about the cultural importance of a couple of things, one being dad's army, the other being Jimmy Saddle. So Milo can take it away. So I'm tentatively calling this that 70s episode because I feel like, yeah, what we're going to do is we're going to try and explain something about Britain through the kind of the cultural mores and more than that, the personalities that emerged from the 1970s. Because I think that a lot of people have a lot of fascination with the peculiarities of British cultural affects and indeed the celebrities that the 70s spawned. And it's worth exploring.

I think for me, the most important thing that you can possibly understand about Britain in the 1970s is that you could buy seven pints of beer in a painting. And once you know that, I feel like everything else makes a lot more sense. I one time out of curiosity, watched a video of British advertisements from the 1970s that was made into a YouTube compilation. And the best way I can describe it was single one was about drunk driving. And it was just drunk driving in Scotland, drunk driving in the North, drunk driving in the English, in the Midlands, you learned all these accents about like I've got to get home from the pub somehow. I'm a bit pissed. Don't crash your fucking car.

Oh, Ozzy Osbourne, taking it away. Sharon, I'm drunk. Sharon, you got to buy the cup before Cortina, Sharon. I need to sober up, Sharon. I've got a rather bad. Yeah, I mean, so I feel like at the end of the you had a prime minister who went slower, slowly more insane and was convinced that MI5 was trying to overthrow him. It turned out he was right. This is Harold Wilson in his second premiership. You had a prime minister, a Tory prime minister who was elected and it was, it strongly, strongly suggested that he had some, let's say, upper class English problems, AKA non-sing. Nazar had been confirmed, but there have been a significant number of rumors about

Ted Heath. They didn't have the VAR technology then, so there could be no VAR decision. You had a prime minister who was famously on at like some kind of, I think, a Commonwealth conference in like somewhere in the West Indies during shit getting really, really bad in the 1970s and he came back basically sunburned his fuck, no British man of a certain age will ever wear sunscreen. British don't do blackface, we do redface. Exactly. That's why every British guy you meet abroad has no sunglasses and no sunscreen. But long story short, you went from the sort of white hot heat of technology proposed by Harold Wilson in the 1960s to by 1979, people were like, oh yeah, Britain's going to get

downgraded to a developing country status if shit continues on. So a lot of things happened. It was weird and bad, but I think what Milo's point is really trenching here. It's the decade that radicalized the boomers and we are now paying the price and will until all of them are gone. Yeah, there's like, there's nothing that can be done with that generation, honestly. So another quick hit before we really get into the meat of the 1970s is you need to understand something from 2011. Ye Olde 2011 when Pretty Patel was like, bring back, bring back hanging, we're all member 2011, Ty O'Cruz was in the charts. 2011. So in 2011, the Metropolitan Police launched this thing they called Operation U-Tree,

which is basically, might as well have been called Operation Catch the 1970s Nonsense. And it's a really, it's a really weird bit of police history in the UK because they basically uncovered a lot of like really shocking, just like child abuse that had been going on amongst really famous people who've been like famous for a long time and are at kind of like, kind of very establishment levels in like the British media class. But they also arrested a fuckload of people who literally did absolutely nothing. It's a really weird like, like half the people they arrested were like, holy shit, these guys were like mega nonces who were like the highest levels of British society.

And then half the other people they arrested, it was like, there was literally no evidence to implicate this person at all. So it's got like a really weird mixed bag kind of history. Like there's been like a lot of controversies about it. But essentially, they kind of, they started pulling at the thread of British nonces and they found out how deep the rabbit hole went. There were two really big ones that come to mind immediately. The one you may not have heard of is a guy named Cyril Smith. He was a Liberal MP for the Liberal Party before they became the SDP LP and then now the Liberal

Democrats. It was then later, if I'm not mistaken, a Liberal Party Lord. Yes, before they invented the Swin Zone. Yeah, exactly. Before skills wallets and massacring squirrels, there was Cyril Smith, who was like 550 pounds. I might be exaggerating, but not that much. He literally weighed like 400 pounds. He was a beast of a man who's huge. He was a thick boy. He'd tell you to shreds. He was an MP from Rochdale, which is... The Joe Rogan nonce vodka.

Jesus Christ. Rochdale is what like kind of nearest to Liverpool, isn't it? Like it's somewhere... It's in the north. Yeah, it's deeply north. Don't ask me a Southern man where places in the north are. Anyway, he was famous for basically going on grand tours of different wayward boys' homes in his constituency and just abusing children. This was all known to everyone. However, much like the next person I will bring up, this was known to everyone and then only became public

once he was already dead. Similarly, the famous TV show host of a show called Jimmy... Jim will fix it. Jimmy Savile looks like off-brand Rod Stewart with a just deeply evil grin. And if you ever see videos of him for some reason, he's often dressed for what looks like a sex safari. Okay. I mean, I think we're being a little bit unfair to Rod Stewart there. Jimmy Savile looks a little bit like the preserved corpse of Jeremy Bentham. Like imagine it like a sort of accursed zombie Benjamin Franklin, and that's kind of in a tracksuit. You know, Phil Spector, the producer like with like the weird page boy haircut that he kept

wearing till he was like 70 years old? That was Jimmy Savile. But he also, well, Milo, you know the story better than I do. Let's just say no one who knew Jimmy Savile or who was involved with Jim or Jim will fix it or any of his other productions was surprised when this came out. Yeah. Cause right, what you've got to understand about Jimmy Savile is that Jimmy Savile almost lived his life. He is like the British Michael Jackson in the sense that he lived his life as if wearing a big sign that said, I am a pedophile. And then there were just people going like, this guy can't be a pedophile. Yeah, he's wearing the sign that says I am a pedophile, but would a pedophile do that? You know, if you had something to hide, the last thing you would do

would be to do exactly what a pedophile would do in every single situation. I feel like one of the reasons why it's dumb bullshit, but one of the reasons why there is so much traction for the constant, constant allegations about grooming gangs and stuff in the United Kingdom is that there is form for this in terms of authorities just choosing to ignore like systemic scale child abuse in the UK. And it's happened a lot in the history of this country. And the most recent case was obviously like when it was revealed that a guy who had basically gotten every kind of fucking honor you could get from the British government, military, academic establishment, whatever the fuck had been abusing children for 40 years.

Yeah, it's all it's all very normal stuff. It you know, it just like, I think the weird thing though about Savile is that when when all the stuff about him came out, people were shocked, but they were only shocked at like the extent of it. Like I didn't know anyone who was like, oh, like what a surprise. Like they're kind of like generally speaking, even amongst the wider general public like Jimmy Savile was considered to be like something up with that guy. Like you couldn't look, I mean, like Google will give you a moment, Google a picture of Jimmy Savile right now and tell me that that's not a man who looks like a nonce because it's impossible. So I'll tell you a little bit. So the thing that made Jimmy Savile really famous

was he had a TV show called Jim will fix it, which you alluded to earlier, which is a television show on which the guests were primarily children. Yep. And he would make their wishes come true. I'm now going to read a section from the show's Wikipedia page and you know, just just just react however you feel the show was hosted by Savile who would fix it for the wishes of several viewers brackets usually children to come true each week. The producer throughout the show's run was Roger Ordish always referred to by Savile as Dr. Magic. The standard format was that the viewers letter which described their wish would be shown on the screen and read out loud initially by Savile, but in later series by the viewer himself as a

voiceover in the studio. Savile would then introduce the fix, which would either have been pre filmed on location or take place live in the studio. At the end, the viewer would join Savile to be congratulated and presented with a large medal with the words Jim fixed it for me engraved on it. Occasionally other people featured in the fix it actors from well known series, for example, I found out that Muhammad Ali had a cameo role on this, which is kind of an amusing tidbit. Anyway, Savile himself played no part in the filming or recording of the fix it unless specifically requested as part of the letter writer's wish. Some children apparently thought that Savile's first name was Jimmel. So some letters shown on the program started with Dear Jimmel.

My favorite detail is this part. Early series saw Savile distributing medals from a magic chair which concealed the medals in a variety of compartments. And he would like often have like the children like sat on his lap and stuff. And he he was quite often like wearing like a full drag suit. He was basically he was he was like an off an off looking dude. It was weird. Yeah, it's one of those things where how to describe it. Imagine, imagine Mr. Rogers. But instead of dressing like conservative grandpa, he dresses like what a guy in the 1970s who's way too old to be dressing this way thinks someone in a disco would wear and is constantly involved with I don't know like a kind of creepy showmanship that you can't hide the creepiness

even in the like stage managed and produced part. Of course, there is the sort of, you know, you look at it differently now because you know the story. But what you have to realize above all else, Charles Dickens voice, what you have to realize is a significant amount as the series went on of the children requesting that Jim will fix things were sick. They were ill. There there was stuff going on with kids who were like we're in hospital. That becomes very important later on in the story. Yeah, we'll get to that. So a little bit about Savill himself. So Savill is from Yorkshire. And he basically started out as like a sort of local DJ. He is apparently credited with being the first person to invent using two turntables

as a DJ. So there you go. If you're a DJ, you do owe something to Jimmy Savill. And so apparently he was briefly a professional wrestler, which is one of those facts that just raises more questions than answers. And he was like a mega like fitness freak. He was like into like running marathons all the time and shit. So he basically like kind of worked his way up through DJing and he hosted Top of the Pops, which was like a show they used to have on TV in Britain, which I think got cancelled in like the mid 2000s, where they would just play. They would have like top 40 artists come and like play their songs live on TV. They were lip syncing. But if you know bands from the era, you know, you'll see like live performances of people from places like

I've seen Top of the Pops for like bands all the way up until the early 2000s was the thing. But it was a huge thing in the 80s and 90s for sure. Yeah, I have a vivid memory like when I was a teenager of Eminem performing Toy Soldiers on there. So that tells you how late it was. It was looking like at least 2006, 2007. I remember seeing Blur on Top of the Pops in a recap because famously they didn't like the fact that they had lip syncs. So they just all took ecstasy. And so if you watch them like they aren't lip syncing and their eyes are wider than fuck. So it's a normal British TV show. Awesome. Yeah, just just having a fucking a regular day. And so now now we get to this important part, right? So during his lifetime, Savva was known for fundraising and supporting

charities and hospitals, in particular Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury, Leigh's General Infantry and Broadmoor Hospital in Barkshire. Broadmoor Hospital is a secure mental hospital for people who have committed crimes but are deemed to be like unfit to stand trial or to be better off basically in a mental institution than in a prison. I don't know if there are any inmates at Broadmoor who aren't convicted of crimes. I'm not sure on that, but that's what it's certainly in like the British imagination that is like the psychiatric prison. And so like a lot of like really infamous like serial killers and stuff, they're all kind of like locked up there. And so anyway, as a result of all this charity work, he was given like a

load of honours and he became quite matey with Margaret Thatcher. Yeah, another famous figure from the 1970s. Weird how that happens. Yes, and she died I think before the Savva thing came out, or slightly after. Yeah, I think she died in 2013 and I think Savva died in maybe 2011. So it's kind of circa of the same sort of time. Anyway, so yeah, but basically it turns out that this whole time he was using all of this charity work as a way to pursue his passion for noncing and like, you know, I don't really want to like rank severity of sex crimes, but like Jimmy Savva's are like particularly gross and important. For Americans who may not be familiar with the slang, why are you listening trash to if you aren't familiar with British slang? At this point,

I will just say what Milo is saying is that Jimmy Savva used his position to gain access to mentally or physically unwell children so he could sexually abuse them. Yeah, and he was doing this like in hospitals and like care homes and kind of and the whole thing is like extremely grim. And I think that was that was like the extent to which it was shocking. I think if it had been like him trying almost some underage girls in his dressing room or something, I don't think people would have been surprised at all. That's the thing that John Peele turned out after he died. The the BBC DJ had done he was famous for like being creepy with teenage girls, but John Peele's legacy hasn't quite been as it hasn't been like enshrined in the British

consciousness as like this guy was a fucking creep because Jimmy Savva's was so much worse. Yeah, and also it's important to know what Jimmy Savva was like, right, which kind of it's so easy to like imagine this man as a huge creep because he just acted like a huge creep all the time. So here's another passage from his Wikipedia. Savva was frequently spooked for his dress sense, which usually featured a tracksuit or shell suit and gold jewelry. A range of licensed fancy dress costumes were released with his consent in 2009. Damn, imagine having 10,000 of those to sell and then 2011 happens. Yes. Yeah. Savva was often pictured holding a cigar. Yeah. Always smoke a cigar. He claimed to have started smoking cigars at the age of seven saying

my dad gave me a drag on one at Christmas thinking it would put me off them forever, but it had the opposite effect. I think here we just need the drop of Arnold Schwarzenegger talking about Stoge's. My wife's father, he likes a Stoge. Now no one can say to me anything about my Stoge. I smoke a Stoge whenever I want. Why don't you smoke a Stoge? Are you gay or something? Yeah. I mean, well, I mean, letting a seven-year-old smoke a cigar is an energy, I suppose. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if that's true or not, but there's just something about just like imagining just like Yorkshire in the 1940s of just like Jimmy Savva's father in a flat cap holding a whip at just like giving him a puff on a cigar. One of the things in his background

was he was a Bevan boy, which if I'm not mistaken is like children who were working for the war effort kind of thing. Is that something to that effect? Something like that. Yeah. I'm not sure exactly what it involved, but... I mean, his life trajectory is... I mean, he was a miner as a child, like as a young man, like 14 years old. He participated in the war effort to some extent. Miners continue to be a passion of his. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Basically, he had the sort of life trajectory of someone who came from a famously not metropolitan part of the country and became like this cultural icon. But as you said, hiding nowhere beneath the surface was the Savva problem. And I mean, we've kind of tackled the heavy shit with Jimmy Savva now.

I now have some lighting because something that you really can't get over with Jimmy Savva is just like, how weird he is as a... Yeah. I'm just going to read it. Savva was a member of Mensa and the Institute of Advanced Motorists and drove a Rolls-Royce. He was made a life member of the British Gypsy Council in 1975, becoming the first outsider to be made a member. He was the chieftain of the Locarba Highland Games for many years and owned a house in Glencoe. His appearance on the final edition of Top of the Pops in 2006, okay, well, that's what... was pre-recorded because it clashed with the Highland Games. My man, my man, tossing a caber. So it is, man. Honorary Scott, honorary traveler. What a... what a just diverse range of interest this man had.

Yeah, so then it's also about... So through his support of charity, Savva became a friend of Margaret Thatcher, who in 1981 described his work as marvelous. It's been reported that Savva spent 11 consecutive New Year's Eves at checkers with Thatcher and her family. Do you know what this fucking means? This means that Mark Thatcher grew up around Jimmy Savva. Normal. Now then, now then, now then. Want to become the ruler of an equatorial African state. Okay, well, this is another important thing to know about Jimmy Savva, as he was known for all these like weird catchphrases such as now, then, now, then, now, then, and the band was, sure, what did, what did? Yeah, his accent is something else. I mean, it's not the strongest, but it's there.

Yeah, it said, yeah. And there was a terrible band in the 70s called Shawwadiwadi. For some reason, they were just always on, Jim will fix it. Milo showed me a video of them. And I strongly recommend that you take a look at it, because ultimately, what stands out to me is everyone is wearing a different color pastel leisure suit. It's just not even pastel. They basically represent the entirety of the fucking color spectrum in horrible 70s suits in ways that I've only seen people wear in the United States as like parodies of the 1970s. But this is the real thing. And they play music that sounds like, like a shittier version of the Bay City Rollers, like it's just not good. Yeah, it's kind of like, it's kind of like the Bay City Rollers,

if they were being done by Glee, it's kind of got a very weird, yeah, it's lots of like do-wapping. And like, it's very, it's very old fashioned by the standards of the 1970s, strangely. Yeah, yeah. I mean, because when this stuff was being filmed, it was the late 70s. So I mean, it's just, it's weird. It seems a little- It's almost like quite 50s in its vibe. Yeah, I would say, I would say when you watch this stuff, British TV now is different than American, it's a little bit weird, but like technically speaking, outfits, attitudes, etc. It's not that, it's not, it has more in common with American TV than it does, you know, the differences, I suppose. But you look at this stuff, it's, it looks like something not out of a

different time, but out of a parallel universe. Yeah, yeah. It looks, it looks kind of like a sketch or something, like from some like incredibly dark sketch show, just the disguise and a tracksuit introducing a band who are all wearing shirts that are somehow like twice the size of their entire body. I mean, there's one that you showed me where Jimmy Savile does the whole episode, wearing a completely open shirt, like just like chest out, like he's in like the hungry, like the wolf video. I mean, it's weird, weird shit. I'm hungry like the wolf. Yes, I mean, we're not saying anything about the members of Duran Duran. So now we get to my favorite part of Jimmy Savile, which is all the, all the honors that he

received, which were revoked after his death, some of which are kind of incredible. So in the 70s, he was given an honorary green beret by the Royal Marines. So for American listeners, the reason why American special forces are called green berets is because they came out of the World War II commandos. The Royal Marines, which were kind of what came out of our special forces of the day, also are called Royal Marines commandos, and they also wear green berets. So getting a green beret in the Royal Marines is like a very serious thing, and you have to do all this kind of like fucked up shit to get it. Their training lasts like almost two years. And Jimmy Savile completed the Commando Speed March, which is like infamously the hardest

thing on that. You have to basically like walk 30 miles with like a load of shit and incredibly short amount of time. I'm not sure exactly what it is. And he was buried with his green beret, like fucking clutching it in the coffin. And they approached the Royal Marines for comment about whether they were able to rescind the green beret. And they were like, it's very embarrassing, but actually we're not legally allowed to rescind the green beret. And so they've just like taken him off the list. So there it is. He's been expunged from the records, but he does still legally, you know, have his honorary. There is still a green beret in his coffin. Yeah, there's still that. So if anyone wants a green beret, he had his honorary law doctorate

from the University of Leeds rescinded. He also had an honorary doctorate from the University of Bedfordshire rescinded, which is like, come on, lads. He also had he was a freeman of the borough of Scarborough also had that removed in 2012. There's something funny to me about this, to an extent where like all these people were like happy to give this like incredibly creepy dude, all of these honours. And then like, oh, they're like, well, well, you're no longer welcome in Scarborough. And it's like, he's dead. To me, also, I think it speaks to the extent to which he was such a fixture of sort of like UK charity stuff that he was just, I don't know, I'm trying to think of an analogue in the United States and I'm coming out blank. But like,

you think of the sort of like dark Regis Philbin kind of thing, like he was somebody that was famous for being a TV personality, but also like whatever the charity thing involved was, like he was there, he was, he was the spokesman. He was a person who like was, he was constantly, he was basically permanently known for his philanthropy. And the best way to describe it is he's like Jared, subway Jared did a Jimmy Savile speedrun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but the thing is that with Jimmy Savile is that like, this like damn Natio Memoria of him has gone like extremely far. And it's like, it's not unjustified, but it's just, it's kind of interesting the way in which to the extent where like, he doesn't have

a headstone, his family had it removed when this came out. So he's just in like an unmarked grave. Like this is like the level of like, no one wants anything to do with this guy that we're talking about. Do you want to hear the absolute funniest removal of an honor? Because the way that they comment, it's just beautiful. Savile was honored with a papal knighthood by being made a knight commander of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St. Gregory the Great by Pope John Paul in 1990. After the scandal broke, the Catholic Church in England, Wales asked the Holy See to consider stripping Savile of the honor. In October 2012, Father Federico Lombardi told BBC News, the Holy See firmly condemns the horrible crimes of sexual abuse of Martiners. And in light of

recent information, this honor should not have been bestowed, as there does not exist any permanent official list of persons who have received papal honors in the past is not possible to strike anyone off a list that does not exist. The names of recipients of papal honors do not appear in the Pontifical Yearbook and the honor expires with the death of the individual. So basically, the Catholic Church said that Jimmy Savile was too much of a nonce for their liking. Yeah, it's sort of amazing to me that the Catholic Church made that step without feeling the need to put in any sort of caveat. Well, I mean, they were just like, we can't believe that a guy that was affiliated with the Catholic Church. Their PR machine has gotten a lot of practice in this

regard. So, I mean, I guess they figured better to not comment. Yeah, I mean, cool boy. So, yeah, that's Jimmy Savile. I feel like that's kind of like the gross part of the episode. I think though, what is right, what's interesting about Savile and what he says about the 1970s is that a lot of other TV personalities from the 1970s were like as weird as Jimmy Savile. Yes. And some of them were pedophiles and some of them weren't. And it's quite unlike without knowing it's quite hard. It's like developing the theory of the British nonce is quite difficult because like there are a lot of people who like you think they must be, but they're totally not. And yeah, it's a very like, so let's talk about some more British TV. So,

I thought that like a good foundational place to start was Dad's Army. Nate, I know you've seen some Dad's Army. Would you like to explain it to American listeners? Dad's Army is a 19 early 1970s TV sitcom basically about a bunch of old men in World War Two who have been drafted to serve in the territorial army of the Home Guard. Basically, their role is to defend Britain in the event of a Nazi takeover of Britain or an attack on Britain that they are the home protection force, if you will. And they're all old and bumbling except for randomly, they have some young people who are in their unit as well who have just been assigned to serve in this unit. And it basically just follows their, the big dynamic is that their company commander is

served in the army in World War One, but wasn't in combat. And this is just like weird self-important buffoon. Their color sergeant was actually an officer in World War One as well and was decorated for actions and combat, but constantly has to be deferential to this complete idiot that's in charge of him and the rest of the formation. Basically, the whole thing is a metaphor for the entirety of Britain and the way that it works. Exactly. And the thing I would say is that dad's army started in the early 70s and ran, I think, as Milo said, into the early 80s, but the thing about it is, is it's in a way, I think, instrumental in explaining how everything that Britain does or does not do and does or does not succeed in is always explained through the lens

of World War Two, even though we're getting to the point where there are very few people left alive who served in the armed forces in World War Two. Yeah. It is absolutely foundational to a certain generation of British people, primarily the boomers. Yeah. And what's interesting about dad's army is that it's very much intended as a parody of the absurdity of the kind of people who, like, think they fought in World War Two, but didn't, even as early as the 1970s. Like, it is kind of, it's a parody of, like, the absurdity of, like, the concept of, you know, the home guard and we're all in the army sort of thing when they're just, like, not at all. They're this kind of rabble of people with, like, not enough, not enough weapons who have absolutely no concept of what would

happen if the Germans actually invaded, which is why I've linked you to that particular episode, which is where basically a detachment of German U-boat, like some U-boat officers and seamen are picked up by British fishermen after their U-boat sinks and they're brought to the coastal town where this unit of the home guard is based. And the home guard has to take them prisoner, but the home guard is so incompetent that they end up being taken prisoner by the German prisoners of war who managed to, by some chicanery, turn their own weapons on them. And it only, the whole thing only gets kind of undone when the Germans are frog marching them down to the, down to the port to put them on a boat to Germany and then, like, some actual regular soldiers show up and

like, what the fuck is going on? But throughout this whole thing, like, the captain manoring the company commander is constantly like, I've got this situation under control. We'll simply, we'll turn tables on the Jerry one at this precise point. Yeah, and then the only way the tables get turned on them is by just, like, confusion and things going wrong. And this is sort of like the recurring idea of this is just like, they only, they only succeed by just getting lucky at the last moment, which is such a perfect kind of laser point fucking satire of exactly what happened with these people that it's hard to do better or less. I would say that Dad's Army as a show is similar to the American TV show MASH, but MASH used the Korean war as a lens to talk about the war in

Vietnam. And I think there are boomers and Gen Xers who were really, really big fans of MASH back in the olden days. But I feel like there is less of a fixation on, for one, there's, there's not a fixation on talking about the war in Korea. In fact, the Korean war is probably the least talked about of modern American wars. But also, I think like the way in which this review of the Korean war, this, this, this was the, this was such a generational moment, it seems with regard to, to how people see themselves and see what happened in Britain in World War Two as well. Yeah, because it's become like, it's, it's sort of not remembered as a parody in the same way. It's kind of become remembered as this sort of like jolly hockey stick spirit of the British

home guard who would have resisted the Hitler to the end. And it's like, that's not what the show is about. The show is about how fucking stupid they are. Yeah, it's weird. I mean, people don't, it was didn't run anywhere near as long, obviously, but people don't, you know, reinterpret World War One because of the fourth season of Blackadder being about World War One. It just, to maybe it informs people's mental, you know, visual perception of what they think the war was like, but the whole thing is obviously a huge farce. Like that's, that's the point. It certainly doesn't make people turn around and say, oh, I'm, I'm, I'm re-envisioning this patriotic success because of, you know, Captain Blackadder and Private Baldrick and stuff like that.

But Dad's Army weirdly has kind of become the thing that people, that they think of that in Dunkirk and the Blitz, but like Dunkirk was nearly a disaster that was saved by, as Milo was famously pointed out, blokes who fish, and the Blitz was a fucking massacre. So it's weird. Yeah. And it's funny how people, that people remember these events in this kind of like weird, like sort of mysterious mists of time way, like, oh, well, you know, in the Blitz, everyone did as they were told. And it's like, no, they fucking didn't. They didn't. The government tried to put people in really insufficient bomb shelters or have them shelter at home. And it was through like massive unrest with people basically forcing the government

to allow them to take shelter in the tube because that was safe for them to shit the government had built. The extent to which, yeah, it's a misremembering, but I feel like what's important in bringing this up is that maybe if you're online, you'll perceive this, but certainly I feel like unless you live here, it's hard to understand how much in British media and popular culture, the notion of the Blitz spirit and the Dunkirk spirit get invoked, even though, as we said before, there are very, very few people left alive who have any real adult memory of that. My grandmother is still alive. She's in her late 80s. She was a child in the Norwich Blitz, which was in 1941, I think, or 42. The London Blitz was primarily in 1940. So like you think

about, like I said, my grandmother is almost 90. She's still alive. She was six years old in the Norwich Blitz. Yeah, my grandmother's 92. And she remembers the Blitz pretty well. She would like sleep in the tube station and stuff. And then eventually she got evacuated to the countryside, which the countryside then was Luton. That's a whole interesting story with evacuation and like the way it went very differently to different people. Lots of child abuse has been involved in that as well. I was going to say, I mean, the line the witch and the wardrobe is basically, if you're familiar with that story, the whole point is that they're children who've been evacuated to the countryside because children just got placed in rural villages. Yeah. I mean, my grandma got

really lucky because she had like fucking eight siblings and they lived in a fucking tenement house in a room in Islington. And she got evacuated to some like wealthy, like practically like landed gentry family in Luton. So she had like a great time. But I think a lot of people got sent to like some fucking interesting places. Yeah. And so, so weirdly, this, this huge generational trauma in which the government, the country was basically facing hostile occupation, a significant chunk of people in the country were actually pretty pro-Nazi. And instead, it's gotten misremembered deliberately, deliberately misremembered or re-remembered as this grand old thing that brought everyone together, which I mean,

we are now dealing with the weird byproducts of that. Yeah. The boomers who were raised by the PTSD generation and also inhaled a lot of leaded petrol fumes. They did in fact. But yeah, in conclusion about dad's army, actually a good show. And it's like very much like quite a good satire of a certain kind of British worldview that like, you know, that your sort of boomer dad is just going to like solve Hitler on his own. And so we definitely recommend that. If you've not seen it, it's worth checking. I think there's like lots of old episodes on YouTube. It's like genuinely a well-made show that's like actually funny. And famously, the song in the beginning is not a real World War II patriotic song,

but it's so cloying and bad that you could be fooled to thinking that it is actually real. Yeah. Yeah. It was made especially because it's like the lyrics to which are, who do you think you're kidding? Mr. Hitler. Yeah. Yeah. A believable British World War II song along with what was it? I'm trying to work out now if the if the Hitler has only got one ball song was actually a real World War II song. If that's a later interpolation, but that is a great. Yeah. Hitler has only got one ball. Himmler has got something similar and poor Goebbels has no balls at all. I will only say though that when you think about two World Wars and one World Cup,

the way that this stuff gets reframed into popular culture, like it is definitely a thing people are still fucking dealing with. We're constantly being reminded of it here in this country. Another thing we're constantly being reminded of is weird cultural artifacts of things that you don't necessarily know the history of. Like for example, both in the film Joker, which came out last year. And also if you've ever gone to a sporting event ever in America, you'll hear a song called Rock and Roll Part Two by a British artist named Eric Glitter. Oh, yes. Now we're back into nonce territory again. Weird how that happens. Yeah. I mean, I don't want to talk about Greg Glitter so much because

he's kind of more boring because he kind of he got into like nonce territory a bit later in life. But basically he was like a big glam rock star of the 70s and 80s, very famous, dressed in the way that glam rock stars do, i.e. mad. And then he kind of in the late 2000s, actually no, as early as the late 90s, he got in trouble in the UK for child pornography. And then he got in trouble for basically underage prostitution stuff in Vietnam. Yeah, he was in prison in Vietnam for a while. And then he came back to Britain and he got in trouble again for something also kind of related. So yeah, he is definitely VAR decision nonce.

And like he was like a big pop star of that era. And a guy who was just like outwardly kind of like a weird dude. And so sort of like there's kind of a theme developing here if we're to pull something out. So to like to take us back to kind of like innocuous 1970s stuff, we've got Morkham and Wise, which was that the first time you'd seen Morkham and Wise? Do you have a reaction for Morkham and Wise? I mean, it just seemed like weird 70s vaudeville, I guess. I mean, like in a way that yeah, I mean, I've realized now from watching these things that

you've sent me all the stuff that that Mitchell and Webb look were parodying. Right, because some of that stuff, I mean, okay, it's objectively like absurd and funny in that regard. If you watch it as an outsider, but then when you start to see how much of this is based on what TV was actually like in the 70s, then you're like, man, this is all shit. This was really bad. Like it's not funny. They were like still working it out as a format. And I mean, Morkham and Wise is some of the best of it. I mean, like Morkham and Wise again is one of those shows that's like much beloved.

Like they still show it at Christmas time and like it's a whole like, and those guys became like real like elder statesmen of British television. But I think your description of it as like a vaudeville act is kind of right. Cause a lot of British TV of that era, I would say came out of like music hall culture from like the 40s, 50s. You talk about, I don't really know that much about music hall stuff. So music halls, well, I can talk about musicals. I don't know so much about music halls in the north, which I think were also a thing,

but I'm not sure exactly what the tradition was there. Certainly London music halls like the Hackney Empire and the Palladium and stuff like that were kind of like sort of working class entertainment, I guess. Like certainly like places that my grandparents would have gone. And for what they would describe as a knees up, if you want a real, a real bit of fucking British terminology from back in the day there, real cockney hours whoop. So they would, and they were basically there were variety shows.

So they would be hosted by like an emcee who would kind of be something between just like just a host and a comedian. They would sort of tell some jokes and they would do some like riffs with the audience. But the acts would be like quite diverse. They'd have like singers, dancing acts, like magic acts, comedy acts. Like there could be like a whole, it was like true variety. And it was just sort of purely seen as like, just kind of like go and be entertained by this mixed bag of entertainment.

And so it's quite old fashioned in that way. Just like here, enjoy these mystery meets. And that was like a huge culture thing. People went as a very like, it was kind of cheap and fun sort of entertainment thing for working class people before like television or sort of like mass broadcast entertainment was as much of a thing. Because another important thing to note is that British broadcasting was like exceptionally shit until like the late 1960s because there were really restrictive rules.

Like there was only the BBC and there were very restrictive rules on what could be on the BBC. Basically everything on the BBC was like, and now for an hour of crochet with Doris Wilders, she's going to be talking about different kinds of sewing that you can other things that women enjoy. So please, please watch that. Later will be the remembering the empire hour. Yes, thank you. That was basically the timbre of like all British broadcasting like they didn't have.

So now like they invented, they've invented, they introduced radio one in I think the late 1960s or maybe the early 70s, which became huge and radio one I think is still probably one of the biggest like pop radio stations in the world and like radio one plays like the flagship BBC radio station and it plays like top 40 music basically. But until that point, like all that the only music they played on like BBC radio would be kind of, you know, like almost like nursery rhyme type stuff or like classical music, sort of like they would not allow anything that was kind of like hip or like of that era to be played.

And so everyone listened to Pirate Radio and where Pirate Radio got its name from is they would literally do it on boats from the English Channel. So some listeners might have seen that film, The Boat That Rocked. Like that is absolutely basically a true story. That's based on I think Radio Caroline and Radio Luxembourg, which were both like really popular ships, which were just like moored in international waters. A preview of things to come in the future. Yeah.

And yeah, they would broadcast like just kind of like high quality like pop and most of those DJs went on to become like BBC radio DJs or like other kind of commercial radio DJs. Like people like Tony Blackburn and other like super famous British DJs that came from that pirate. Yeah, people like that. Yeah, I was just thinking about, I mean, it's weird to me because I only know about this because there is a huge disconnect, I think, between how shit British TV was in the 70s versus British music.

A lot of stuff has endured a lot longer. Whereas like it seems to me that a lot of the stuff that was popular then, TV, film-wise, aside from a few standouts, it's mostly like Boomer nostalgia machine versus it having any kind of like enduring appeal. So there's some more common wise stuff that really like is kind of a bit ahead of its time. Like the one thing I didn't, so the sketch that I sent you at the Andre Previn sketch is like one of the things that they're most known for, where like Andre Previn being like one of the most celebrated composers at the time and they just get him on and he has to conduct them playing

the song and then they're just doing it wrong, but they keep blaming him. And like a lot of the jokes in that are like quite clever. He's like, they keep threatening him being like, I am playing the right notes, just not necessarily in the right order. And like the way that that was like a popular thing they would do is they would get like a really famous celebrity on who would just like play along with being humiliated by them, essentially. It's kind of like like a British version of Laugh-in.

If you think about it, I mean, you've heard this word. I've not seen it. Laugh-in was a TV variety show in the American 70s and famously Richard Nixon went on Laugh-in when he was president. I think when he was like, suck it to me. That's Richard Nixon. Yeah, the president. Oh, you're playing the wrong notes.

But yeah, I think watching it, maybe because I don't have any cultural memory like that, this is when it's familiar to me. It was just, I'm struck by how incredibly old fashioned it seems. How much it seems like a filmed vaudeville act as opposed to like there are camera cuts and stuff like that, but there's not that many of them. It feels very much like you're watching a stage show. Yeah. Well, that's the thing.

And those guys were like real live performers. Like more common wise, they were kind of known as comedians, but like they could both like tap dance. Like they could both like sit, like those guys were like fucking, they could do all of it. Like the whole fucking thing, they could like dance, sing, whatever, like do the sketches. Like they were kind of like properly a relic of a bygone era even then, but there was that transitional phase from like live entertainment to recorded entertainment, which saved us all quite the middle of. I would say probably a comedy show that endures slightly better,

which I think is from the later 70s into the 80s is the, the two Ronnies with Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker, which was a sketch show, which has a lot of kind of very, very quoted sketches. Like the infamous, there's an infamous sketch about a guy goes into a like a hardware store and he's trying to, and he asks for four candles and the guy gives him four candles. And he's like, no, four candles, like handles for forks. And then the guy, and then there's just like, it's like an endless series of these confusions where he asks for peas and the guy brings him like garden peas, but he wants like

leather peas to like screw onto the wall and then O's and then he asked for O's and the guy brings him a letter O, but he actually wants a hose and like this is like just like absurdists, like kind of shit. But I think their most famous is probably the mastermind sketch where the guy's specialist, there's a, there's a BBC quiz show called mastermind and everyone has a specialist subject. It's still on TV now. You have a general knowledge round and then a specialist subject. And the guy's specialist subject is answering the question that was previously asked. And it's like, it's genuinely like an extremely clever sketch that like the interplay of the

questions and the answers and like the, I would recommend that to everyone. If you go, if you put into Ronnie's mastermind sketch, that is like, if I was going to recommend you one bit from the seventies from the UK, which is funny to me also, because I think in the United States, the thing that has endured the most is probably Monty Python. And that, I do think that it's probably less so now because it's just, it's an older thing. But like people in my age, certainly like Jen Xers, people who grew up who would have been too young even, I mean, they probably would have been too young to watch it if they'd grown up in Britain.

But people in the eighties and nineties in America, remember my brother, my, our public library, you could rent VHS cassettes. And I remember they had like the entirety of all of Monty Python every season, you could rent it. And my brother was a fan. He, he liked Monty Python a lot. And he, over the course of the summer, like, we just ride his bike to the library and like rent like two or three cassettes and bring them home and watch them. And like, two things I recall was that for all the memorable Monty Python sketches, so much of them are just shit, like total shit. Oh yeah, they were real thrown shit at the wall and seeing what stuck. Yeah, exactly. A lot of it got broadcast.

Yeah, it's incredible. And also the thing that I think was the most disconcerting, well, I mean, people who know the show will know this, like there's a laugh track that doesn't correspond to what's happening. It's just like, like they put like a record on in the studio of like recorded laughter. So like the audience laughter has no correspondence with what's going on on screen, which is awesome. If you aren't expecting that as like, in my case, an 11 year old, you're like, what the fuck is going on? But then also Philip glass of comedy, just like nothing makes any sense. But also another thing too is that it was always interesting to me was reveals how old this stuff is and how, how, how much, how long ago this was is that if you watch

Monty Python stuff that's filmed in the soundstage looks like I say new, but it doesn't look hideously out of date. Yeah, where's the stuff that's filmed outdoors. It might as well be like the fucking Zapruder film from JFK's assassination, like it's just complete dog shit quality. And that's the thing that really, I mean, it makes you realize just how I don't know, like, of like a fledgling medium it was, which in America, I think people more associate with the 60s, the 50s to some extent, but like TV, most people in America didn't have TVs in the 50s. But the 60s, like that's sort of like the real kind of like fledgling medium of TV, whereas it seems like that decade of that sort of transitional decade happened more so here. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, in the 60s

was when people were just starting, just starting to buy a TV off the back of Dave Courtney's van. By the end of the 70s, I mean, you had stuff like I Claudius and stuff like that, like full on produced TV dramas and things like that. I think the 70s was like a real, yeah, a big transitional phase in British television. It's interesting that you bring up Monty Python. I think that Monty Python is like, it's a sort of, it's a show that a lot of people in Britain like really enjoyed and it's very, it's very like popular, but it doesn't, it hasn't sort of endured in that kind of like cultural institution way that some of these things have. Like, I think particularly for that generation, like stuff like more common wise and yeah, two Ronnies and things

like that is more kind of ingrained in a kind of cultural consciousness than Monty Python is, whereas Monty Python was more like of a kind of certain cultural milieu. It's a thing people like, but there's, I mean, like all dad's army, even as a great example, because like there's started around the same time. Yeah. And there's that the, in the episode I sent you, there's the incredibly famous scene where the German officer starts getting annoyed that everyone keeps saying all these like insulting things about Hitler. And he says, I, right, I am making a list and then when we are all back in Germany, you will stand trial for these things that you have said and it starts putting people's names on the list. And then Pike, who's like the kind of like

idiot private begins singing this song about how Hitler is a twerp. And then he goes, your name will also go on the list. What is it? And Captain Manning says, don't tell him Pike. And then the German officer is like, pike. And this is like, I think if you like, you can almost go up to anyone in Britain over the age of like 30 and quote, don't tell him pike at them. And they will know exactly, like it is like properly, like fully and deeply ingrained in the consciousness, almost to the extent of like calling scandals gate, like that degree of like, Matt, I mean, I'm just trying to think of something from the early 70s in America on TV that would still be that embedded with people like say my age or,

I don't really know. I mean, it's, it's tough to think of like, yeah, it's, but I mean, it's weird because yeah, you do have that direct sort of that lens to look at and say, okay, well in the US, at the same time, we have a show that's about the Korean war that's really like a commentary on Vietnam. And then in Britain, we have a show that's just like, oh, it wasn't World War II will laugh. It's just weird how that's like refracted over time. You know what I mean? Like in a way that, I mean, the boomer fixation on the Vietnam war is a huge thing in America. Like that has governed so many fucking things. Even to this day, you still have some of like the echoes of that in the way war films are made or like the Rambo franchise

still fucking happening and stuff like that. You know what I mean? But in Britain, you didn't have that. No, you didn't have that. And you, and the one made and gas didn't get to go and fight in a war. So they had to imagine it. And that reflects in some ways, the different psychoses of the British and American boomer. Exactly. Well, yeah, because think about that. I mean, the closest thing you have is the Falkland Islands war, which was in the 80s. So by that point, most boomers were probably too old. And when there was no draft, it was fought by professional soldiers. And it was over in what, six weeks? I mean, it was a very, very quick thing. I think the British Army, I think sent troops to the Gulf War, but also a war that lasted four

days. Yeah, again, professional soldiers, like not, it didn't. It just wasn't a universal cultural phenomenon the way that the previous wars were. And when the United States, you had the draft, so like Vietnam was a much more universalized thing. And it was applied in an equal and fair way. Exactly. Exactly. Which is why Ted Nugent and Dick Cheney and George W. Bush all served proudly in combat in Vietnam. They definitely didn't ship themselves in the draft board. That's Ted Nugent. They definitely didn't just completely blow it. I'll get like five deferments. And then when asked why you didn't serve Vietnam, Dick Cheney say, I had better priorities. Yeah. Just really normal stuff. Normal stuff. Normal stuff. Yeah, exactly. Better priorities than

defending democracy, Dick. Damn. The one good thing Dick Cheney ever did is not go to Vietnam, basically. Well, exactly. And then I think the other thing you need to know about British TV from the 70s is, of course, the game shows, which are completely mad. I mean, one of the game shows I've included here is actually from the early 80s, but it's so 1970s. It's called Bullseye. And I think we've talked about it on Trash Future before, but it's hosted by Jim Bowen, who is like this kind of 1970s, like comedian guy who's gotten this gig on TV hosting and is like a proper like working men's club comedian. And again, it's like, kind of like, sort of gives off a slightly, a slightly odd vibe, but it's like, definitely like not a nonce. Like not, he's not in that.

Doesn't give off a Jimmy Savile vibe at all, though. That's not... No, but it's similarly in that kind of like personality milieu. And this show is just absolutely bizarre. It's like they, the contestants have to play darts. And then, depending on and various rounds where they score points, and then they can like, if they hit certain bits on the dartboard, they win prizes. But the prizes are all just like absolute dog shit. Like the best prize you can win is like a lawnmower in most of these rounds. But then at the end, there's always like a grand prize where they can gamble all of the prizes that they've won to have a shot at this grand prize. And the show was notorious

for having just like bizarre grand prizes. Like you've got these two guys who've come from their fucking like council flat to play this darts game show. And then the grand prize is like, it's a speed boat. It's like, what are these motherfuckers gonna do with a speed boat? But yeah, this show was notorious for having speed boats as prizes. I don't know why, but like just it's a surreal thing to watch. You showed me also the British prices, right? And what surprised me about that was the host had that... I don't have a great British person to compare it to, but I'm reminded of like Vincent Price. He had that like old timey entertainer energy in a way that like that has kind of gone away in America. Like even people... Because the big,

the big generational guy on TV, I mean, maybe going out on a limb to make a claim this broad, but I would say it's Johnny Carson. And Johnny Carson's demeanor is way more of like, he's like the funny like, you can't bullshit me, Jack kind of TV guy, but it's not the same as like... Well, Johnny Carson is kind of more of a chat show guy, right? Yeah, but I mean, it wasn't a variety show, but he was a comedian. I mean, you think about Johnny Carson's sort of like the guy that was sort of his understudy who then took over his show was David Letterman. And you know, like that it's jokes and stuff, but it's not a sketch comedy show. It is a talk show. But like that is the more of like the... When you

think of people hosting, you know, any game show in America, it kind of draws on that. But like just this was a show from 1997 that you showed me. It still felt very like, oh, I've just come in from the country. Oh, my arm's tired. Like that kind of thing. It's very... So yeah, so the person you're referring to is Bruce Forsythe. And I put in the prices right because it's kind of Forsythe that is most Forsythe. And like, again, huge personality from the 70s who continued to be a like massive TV staple until he died quite recently a couple of years ago. So he, American viewers who've watched the British strictly come dancing might be familiar with Bruce Forsythe because he hosted that for like quite a lot of seasons.

He also, musical guy, right? This guy is like, Bruce Forsythe can like sing, dance, all that shit. But he kind of has made his name as a TV presenter. And in the 70s, they got him to host this game show called The Generation Game, which was like conceived as... They stole it from some Dutch format, which is just deeply cursed for a number of reasons. Oh, if it's as much a thing as they took, didn't take in the original. Oh, you get to win this shoe polish. But yeah. And it's like, they play all these like stupid games. They'll get like families on there to compete. And then like the prizes were like deliberately dog shit. I actually listened to this recently and they were talking about they

had a discussion amongst the presenters and the producers about the prizes. They were saying like Saturday night, like primetime TV and like the stuff you can win is like a toaster. And they were like, and then they said, the prizes have to be shit or the show won't be entertaining enough. And it's like, because the people have to do these stupid things, which they will fail to do. And if they're failing to win something like actually good, people will feel too sorry for them and it won't be funny. And they're like, so the prizes need to be dog shit. That's like an important part of this. So it's like a really deliberate conceptual point. And the really famous bit about Generation Game is like towards the end of the game,

the family that was won, there's a round where one of them has to sit and watch a conveyor belt of prizes and then they can win all the prizes that they remember. So the conveyor belt, and it's like always just like a cuddly toy, a six piece fondue set. And there's like just like going past and you see them like they're sat behind the conveyor belt and they're like looking directly into the camera. And it's like deeply, again, it feels like someone's come up with it for a sketch about 1970s television. And yet it's completely real. It's incredible. I mean, there really is, I do feel like the reason I know what I know about Britain in the 70s is just because I've read a couple of books about it because it is a subject matter that like,

it's this pivotal moment. It goes from, you have effectively like a post-war consensus to thatcherism. In the beginning of the decade, you start with like a Tory prime minister who's basically like, we're going to have more funding for the NHS. By the end, you have thatcher who's just like, what if we do Pinochet but in Britain? Weird how that works. And it's, there is such a change, but also I feel like it's such a foundational thing. And every time you hear British celebrities or British, you know, Canadians, actors, TV people, they always talk about how everything was so bad in the 70s. And I feel like this echoes because so much of what we saw you know, leading up to the grand defeat that we experienced or not grand defeat, the total dog

shit fucking defeat we experienced at the end of the election last year. The big harken cry was basically Jeremy Corbyn wants to take Britain back to the 70s. And you have to understand that in the Boomer imagination, that is bad. Yeah, you're going to have to be guessing cuddly toys off a fucking conveyor belt. Exactly. The best you can hope for is a fondue set mate. You might win a speedboat, but you'll have nowhere to sail it. Yeah. And the irony is that Britain was actually pretty good in the 70s. Income inequality reached its lowest point post-war in Britain in like 1976. Yeah. Like pretty much anyone could get social housing. Like it was,

like it was a reasonably good time to be rich. And if you couldn't get social housing, housing didn't cost that much money. Yeah. Like as a multiplier of average earnings, it was like... The big thing was inflation. But the thing about it was is that inflation doesn't really affect people. I mean, it affects people in terms of prices. But inflation makes it a great time to get a mortgage. Yeah, exactly. But if you're somebody who has a lot of savings, who has a lot of cash investment, or you're somebody who is profiting off of that, like it's a bad time. Like if you're the person who's buying and selling products, like, yeah, things aren't great. But I mean, obviously inflation caused problems.

But I mean, to begin with, in consideration, people complain about, you know, mild social democratic policies potentially like, oh, inflation might go up in Britain. Inflation basically legally has to stay at 2% or lower in the United Kingdom. In 1978, Jim Callahan, the labor prime minister, their goal was just keep inflation under 10%. To give you an idea of like how different of a world it was. And what happened was is there was just a series of industrial actions that led to pay rises, which led to the winner of discontent. And basically, if labor had just called an election in October of 1978, they probably would have won. Probably that was right about the time the North Sea oil and gas money started rolling in.

We'd probably live in a country closer to Norway. But instead, like, how to describe the British version of, I don't know, fucking God, Barry Goldwater won the Prime Ministry ship. And we now just live in the consequences of that. Yeah. I mean, I think though, what people have to remember about Thatcher and amongst other things is that like, I don't think, I don't think Thatcher you can really compare with Barry. I mean, I don't know that much about Barry Goldwater, but I mean, Barry Goldwater was like very much an extremist. Whereas like Thatcher wasn't really an extremist. Thatcher was just like an effective right wing leader. And like Thatcher knew exactly how much she could get away

with. Like Thatcher, it was like way to the left of the current crop of like Tory people who are like less maligned than Thatcher in the public consciousness, because people remember the things that happened on Thatcher. But like Thatcher was like way more pragmatic than like, you know, your current bunch of Tories like Thatcher would like, would have been horrified by the concept of Brexit, because Thatcher was like a money person, right? Like Thatcher cared about the fucking trade deals and like that. And that's why she was so successful, because she won the trust and confidence of like a coalition of the British people who were like, Oh, this woman's going to make us rich. Where it like, as opposed to like your kind of like

Goldwater, like Trump type people who are kind of like mad, like it like they satisfy a certain kind of like rabid right wing desire to own the libs. But they don't think they can't have the same longevity, because they simply don't, they don't like earn trust in the same way as like your kind of like effective right wing psycho. I will say in Thatcher's first premiership, it was widely understood that it was a massive failure. She was considered incredibly right wing. She was her becoming the Tory Labour, the Tory party leader was considered a huge misstep, because she was so extreme given the politics of the day. And Labour under Michael Foote was pulling it like 22 points ahead for a significant amount of time.

Two things changed. The libs formed a splinter party and a bunch of Labour in peace quit and joined it. And that's never happened again. That's becoming the Lib Dems and sapping some of Labour's vote. And then the Falklands war happened. And had had the election happened, but had the Falklands were not happened, Labour would have massively differ also if the SDP LP hadn't split. Yeah, it would have been different. But you know what? You really have to hand it to Thatcher for reading the Rome on the Falklands war. That war just fascinates me so much that the Argentines thought that they kind of had this idea in their heads that they could invade this little British territory in the middle of nowhere. And that Thatcher just wouldn't care. And the extent to

which she completely was just like, yeah, just send the fucking fleet. Just like two hours later. And it's just one of the most bizarre geopolitical incidents to have ever because that was their entire game plan. They were just like, the British just won't defend it. Yeah. And we should do an episode on the Falklands war because it is so much fascinating shit. Yeah, it is such a real GI Joe, like mad, like there's not going to be another war for a while. We'd better have fun with it levels of just like mad stuff going on there. Yeah, it's a it's a whole wild story. So that would be I guess to be that our 80s episode that 80s episode. And of course it involves the French does it does and a ship named after an Argentine general that did not meet a happy fate.

No, indeed. As just like a coder to this, I will say something else about Bruce Forsythe because Bruce Forsythe, I think is possibly of like British celebrities of that era is the one who has had like the most enduring effect on British culture. He's like had proper elder state. I'm not surprised I didn't give him a fucking state funeral, like the extent to which that guy had like an almost like 60 year career in show business is mental. And like he was famous having all these catchphrases, which have sort of endured as like so one of his big things was that because I think this was from the generation game, he would sort of had this kind of slightly weird like kind of cockney voice and you come in and go good game, good game.

And from prices, I had higher or lower, higher or lower. But his huge thing was he would come out on stage and he would go nice to see you to see you and then they would shout nice back at him. And I may I fucking guarantee you if you walked out on stage at any comedy club in the UK as an MC, even now with a room full of people who were like under 30 and went out there and went nice to see you to see you, they would shout nice back at you, even though no one has said that on television in like 30 years. That is so fucking weird, man. Yeah. This is like fucking deep level, like Bruce Forsythe is a kind of British MK ultra, like he is so he is more ingrained in the British psyche than almost any of the actual government propaganda efforts. One thing that I think that

many people not not, I mean, a lot of the younger fans might not, but if you've seen the film Trainspotting, the Danny Boyle film from 1996, there's a part in the film in which Ewan McGregor's character, Mark, is going through withdrawal. His parents forced him to basically lock up in his room and go through heroin withdrawal and he starts hallucinating wildly. And in one of the scenes, his whole family is on a deeply cursed British game show, like and he sees himself and his parents like on his parents are always watching these fucking game shows in their flat in Edinburgh. And he sees like he envisions his parents as contestants on the show. And I feel like as an outsider watching that, like you come away from this sort

of benign thing. But if you realize that's making reference to those kinds of quiz shows and game shows were are not just still popular, but were incredibly popular at a time and that they were just I want to say shabby, but like in retrospect, they seem weird and shabby and unpolished and just generally kind of even game shows. When I was growing up in the 90s, like we had like family fortunes and stuff, but it was hosted by like Keith Cheggwin and like it's a knockout and stuff that just like really yeah, just like really like low rent. Like well, like Chris Evans, the guy who went on to eventually host the like weird soy boy version of Top Gear. He was on a show in the 90s called TGI Friday. It was just like dog shit. Like when they had

that beef fad in the 90s, having like in Britain anyway, like really like mad cap television, where it'd be like, oh, it's a chat show, but there's all this crazy stuff going on. And so they just all these people in the 90s became really big celebs off the back of just being like simpering morons, but who were like really enthusiastic. And like that is the whole like Chris Evans trajectory is just him going like, hey, hey, we missed out. We didn't talk about Britain in the 70s. What? Benny Hill. Oh, Benny Hill. Well, that kind of started earlier, but Benny Hill, I believe not a nonce, surprisingly. Maybe a sex pest. Maybe a sex pest. Yeah, but I don't believe an entire show about him being a sex pest. Could he be a sex pest in real

life? We don't know. And he's also massive in Russia. They fucking love Benny Hill in Russia. I mean, he is long dead, but yeah. Yeah, Benny Hill, man. Benny Hill, another person we missed out is Rolf Harris, a man so Australian he became British. As one does. VAR decision nonce very much has gone to jail for noncing. He had a show where he used it amongst other things where he used to like paint paintings and then when they were like really bad and then like turn to the camera and go, can you guess what it is yet? Another catchphrase, isn't it? He's also credited with inventing a musical instrument called the wobble board. He was kind of like it. He was like known for like playing music, but always something

weird like the didgeridoo or whatever. And there's one where he just used to get a sheet of metal and just like wobble it into a microphone. Yeah. Honestly, Britain in the 1970s, we could do 10 episodes on it, but you only get one. Well, the only thing I'm just going to say is Google Watney's party seven. Look at the size of the can. Look at the hand it's being held in and notice. Yes, it's the size of a can of paint from the hardware store. It's got seven pints in it. And you can pour out seven beers for your friends or you can drink the whole goddamn thing yourself because you can have exactly seven friends. Exactly. No more, no less. So it's not sus. Anyway, this has been Britnology. Milo, thank you again for illuminating so much of the history

and culture of this bizarre island I've chosen to move to for some reason. Yeah. I mean, thank you, Nate, for indulging me. I would say that it has been nice to see you to see you. Nice. Exactly. Thanks for listening, guys.