covellistake

Over the last decade or so I’ve noticed something, well, not just me but everyone has. Apparently, we’re expected to look back at everything we watched, listened to and laughed at thirty or forty years ago through the moral standards of 2026.

I’m not entirely convinced that’s how history works.

Now, before I get myself into trouble, let me make something absolutely clear, I’m not suggesting everything from the past was acceptable.

It bloody well wasn’t.

There are films, television programmes, jokes, characters and attitudes from the 70s, 80s and 90s that haven’t aged particularly well. Some of it was offensive then, some of it is offensive now and some of it probably makes you sit there today wondering how on earth it ever made it through a script meeting.

But here’s something to maybe ponder.

Something being unacceptable today doesn’t necessarily mean everybody who enjoyed it thirty years ago was a terrible person. Because people were products of their time, the world was different. Society was different. The things we considered normal were different. And that’s particularly obvious when you look at entertainment.

When I was growing up, you could go to the cinema, rent a VHS or sit down in front of the television and genuinely have no bloody idea what you were about to watch. You looked at the TV Times (Not sure that’s a thing anymore) or you nipped to Blockbuster (I know, another Blockbuster reference) and picked something from the shelf; you read the back of the VHS case. You took it home and you watched it, you laughed. You were frightened. You loved it or hated it.

And then you returned the thing before you got charged another night’s rental. But something else happened during those years. For example, let’s look at comedy.

Comedy was allowed to be uncomfortable. Sometimes deliberately so.

Comedians pushed boundaries. They said things that made you laugh because they were outrageous. They poked fun at politicians, celebrities, men, women, foreigners, themselves and pretty much anybody else who happened to wander into range.

And sometimes they got it spectacularly wrong.

I’m not going to pretend every joke I laughed at when I was fifteen would pass a modern morality test, some of them probably wouldn’t even make it through the front door.

But that’s where context matters.

Sometimes you laughed at something because you genuinely believed it. Sometimes you laughed because it was funny. Sometimes you laughed because it was so bloody outrageous that you couldn’t believe somebody had actually said it on television.

Those aren’t necessarily the same thing, and I think we’ve become slightly confused about that distinction. We’ve started looking backwards and judging everything as though the people who made it were sitting in a room in 1987 thinking: “Right lads, how will this scene be received by somebody watching it in 2026?”

They weren’t. Because why the hell would they? They were making something for the audience of their time and that’s something we have to remember. Standards change, language changes, attitudes change and society? That’s most certainly changed.

And sometimes, thank God, they change for the better. But they don’t change overnight. That’s the bit I think we sometimes forget. For example, look how long it took us to sort the lack of women’s rights in Western Europe.

We look at the progress we’ve made and rightly recognise that things are considerably better than they were for previous generations. But it didn’t happen because somebody woke up one Tuesday morning and announced:

“Right, that’s it. Women are equal now. Everybody agree?”

It took centuries. Centuries of cultural, political, legal and social change and even when things did start changing, they didn’t change everywhere at the same speed.

It took generations.

Some people accepted change quickly, some fought against it, some didn’t understand it and then there was those who probably didn’t even realise the world around them was changing until it had already had.

And eventually, attitudes moved.

Not because everybody suddenly became a completely different person overnight, but because the society around them changed. That’s how social progress works.

Slowly. Painfully sometimes and often with an awful lot of arguments along the way. Which brings me to something I find interesting. We quite rightly look at other parts of the world today and question the way women are treated.

We see practices that we consider completely unacceptable and think: “How can people possibly still think like that?” And yes, we should challenge things that are wrong.

Absolutely.

But perhaps we should also remember how long it took us to get where we are. We didn’t wake up one morning and become enlightened.

We took a bloody long time. A very long time.

So perhaps we should be slightly careful about expecting every society on Earth to complete in a few years a journey that took Western Europe centuries.

That doesn’t mean excusing things that are wrong. It means understanding that changing deeply embedded cultural attitudes takes time.

And people are exactly the same. If someone was born in the 1940’s, 50’s or 60’s, they grew up surrounded by ideas, attitudes and behaviours that were considered normal at the time.

Some of those ideas were wrong. Some were harmless and some have disappeared completely. Some have evolved. And some, thankfully, have been challenged.

But expecting somebody to have the social awareness of 2026 when they were raised in 1965 doesn’t really make much sense.

I’m not saying being brought up in a different time is a free pass for behaving badly today. If somebody does something offensive now, saying “Well, that’s how we did things in the 1970s” doesn’t magically make it acceptable.

But understanding why somebody thinks differently isn’t the same as approving of their views. That’s the distinction I think we’re losing. And that’s why entertainment becomes an easy target. An old film gets shown on television. Somebody watches it. They laugh. Then somebody else points out that one of the jokes wouldn’t be acceptable today.

And they’re probably right.

But does that mean we have to pretend the film never existed? Does it mean we have to erase it from history? Does it mean everybody who enjoyed it at the time was secretly a terrible human being?

I don’t think so.

Sometimes we can simply say: “That hasn’t aged particularly well.” And leave it there. We can acknowledge something was wrong without pretending it never happened. We can enjoy an old film while recognising that some of its attitudes belong firmly in the period in which it was made.

Because here’s the thing.

If we continually judge the past exclusively through today’s standards, eventually we lose the ability to understand the past at all and surely that’s dangerous. History isn’t supposed to make us comfortable. It’s supposed to show us where we’ve been and sometimes it shows us things we’re proud of and other times it shows us things we’re bloody ashamed of.

And sometimes it shows us how much we’ve changed. That’s actually something worth celebrating. Think about comedy again. Today’s comedians operate in a completely different environment. Everything can be recorded and clipped. Everything can be taken out of context.

A joke told to 500 people in a comedy club can be uploaded to social media and watched by five million people who weren’t there, don’t know the comedian’s style and haven’t heard the ten minutes of material that came before it.

Suddenly, you’ve got a completely different conversation. I’m not saying comedians should be allowed to say whatever they want without consequences.

Of course they shouldn’t.

But comedy has always relied on pushing boundaries. If you remove every uncomfortable subject, every controversial joke and every possibility of offending somebody, eventually you’ve got a dude or lass standing on stage telling everyone how lovely the weather is.

And let’s be honest, we’ve already got the BBC for that.

I’m joking.

Mostly.

I think the same principle applies to television and film. We don’t need to pretend everything from our childhood was perfect.

It wasn’t.

We don’t need to defend every joke we laughed at. Some of them were bloody awful. We don’t even need to like everything that came before us. But perhaps we can stop pretending that the people who made it were living under today’s rules.

They weren’t.

And perhaps we can stop assuming that everybody who watched it was automatically endorsing every attitude contained within it. Sometimes people just wanted to watch a film. Sometimes they wanted to laugh. Sometimes they wanted to escape reality for a couple of hours. And sometimes, frankly, they wanted to see somebody get hit in the face with a frying pan while being mocked for something that could now be deemed as offensive.

It was the 80s.

We weren’t overthinking it. Maybe that’s the lesson here. We shouldn’t be afraid to recognise progress, and we shouldn’t be afraid to say that some things from the past were wrong.

But we also shouldn’t be afraid to remember things fondly. Because nostalgia doesn’t necessarily mean approval. You can look back at something and say: “That was part of my childhood.” without saying: “Everything about that period was perfect.”

It wasn’t.

We’ve changed. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s probably exactly what we’re supposed to do. People change. societies change and moral standards have definitely changed.

The things we accept today might look absolutely bloody ridiculous to somebody living in 2076.

And I hope they do.

I hope people look back at us and think: “Jesus Christ, what were they doing?” Because if they don’t, perhaps we haven’t progressed very much.

I just hope they don’t decide to cancel everything we’ve ever enjoyed because somebody in the future decides one of our favourite films was problematic.

Although, knowing my luck, they’ll probably discover something I’ve written on this website and decide I’ve offended somebody.

By then I’ll be 99 years old.

So frankly, they can piss off.

Maybe we don’t need to erase the past. Maybe we just need to understand it. Maybe we can watch an old film, hear an old joke or revisit an old television programme and recognise that some of it hasn’t aged particularly well while still remembering why we enjoyed it.

We can acknowledge the bad bits without pretending the entire past needs to be deleted. We can recognise how far we’ve come without pretending we were always this enlightened.

Because we weren’t.

None of us were. And perhaps that’s the most important point, the world didn’t suddenly become better.

We’re slowly making it better.

And hopefully, the people coming after us will do the same. Because somewhere out there, someone is going to look back at 2026 and think:

“Bloody hell, they really thought that was normal?” And you know what? They’ll probably be right but hopefully they wont judge us for it.

Or it could just be me.