Nearly 11.30 at night seems like the perfect time to watch old show on cable, so we are watching Fun House.  It is worth it for the mullet alone.  Once you factor in the day-glo pink shirt with...actually, I can't quite work out what the pattern is.  My brain is refusing to process it.  Whatever it is, it is making me anti-nostalgic for the 80's.

I spent a good long time firmly believing that children's shows from the 80's were better.  We all remember Nightmare, right?  (I know at least one of you does - still on the look-out for that episode, by the way.)  Well, we have watched a few of the most up-to-date ones, when they brought it back for a bit.  They were dire.  At first, I was certain it was a drop in standards.  The show I remembered had been witty, clever, well-acted...right?  Well. No.  Not when I have rewatched a few of the originals.

Oh, there was wit and fun.  I actually rather enjoyed it, still.  It just wasn't quite the special effects joy-ride I remembered.

This only confirmed something I had been suspecting for a while.  TV hasn't, in fact, got worse.

Who used to watch Thundercats?  He-man?  Dogtanian?  Transformers? I will leave out such shows for even younger kids as Alastiar and Crystal Tips, as a rewatch of that suggests it was designed by people high on something.  The others, though... Oh, how my memory had reworked those as masterworks, with complex and complete plot lines and fully realised characters.  Ten minutes into the box set of Thundercats, and we were treated to a character who lived on the top of a snowy mountain.  He had a giant cat.  It was called...snow-meow.  There was no resolution to that story, either.  They just went home.  (Which, admittedly, is more than the kids on Dungeons and Dragons ever managed to do.  You would think, at some point, one of the others would have pointed out to the little barbarian kid that the unicorn was going to be an issue every week.)

I also had fond, somewhat smug, memories of the way He-man slotted in messages at the end of the show, and how they tied into the plot, but then we watched one where, in response to nothing at all, they all stood around reminding us to brush our teeth, then laughing.  If anything, the wide-shouldered stance and head-back laugh of Prince Adam almost put me off brushing my teeth now, and I know what happens if you don't brush your teeth.  The tooth fairy comes and hits you in the jaw with a stick of rock (Right?  I am right?), so it is not something I will be risking.

It's not even just kids' shows, is it?  Who has watched episodes of Bullseye on the reruns?  Go on.  You know you do.  Even some of the kids in my Year 8 class have watched it and they weren't born until after Richard of Richard and Judy fame had to admit the emergency millennium cupboard was a waste of time.  The hostess trolley seems to have amused them as much as it does me.

I am not saying the TV is automatically better.  There have been gems in each TV age, I daresay.  I find myself captivated by Buffy anytime it is on, and the dialogue more than stacks up.  I realise that is not from the 80's.  Hmm.  80's which stacks up?

Huh.  Having trouble, there.

I love many 80's shows.  And 60's shows.  BBC2 and Channel 4 must have bought a job lot and played them on repeat in the 90's.  The A-team, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Battlestar Gallactica, Cagney and Lacey, The Champions...  all good.  Mostly American, too, come to think of it.  Then again, so are most of the kids' shows I mentioned.  Perhaps that is a separate issue.

Shows from the 90's are still great.  Well, Red Dwarf is.

Perhaps that is the thing.  Witty, clever genre shows hold their water.  They have to, to stand a chance in the first place, what with not having the special effects budgets of bigger shows.  They just aren't necessarily better than what we have today, either.

And if nothing else, there are fewer mullets.