Grumpy Guide to the Eighties, BBC Two

“The Eighties – where do you bloody well start?” Geoffrey Palmer’s lugubrious voiceover seemed even more world-weary than usual as this hour-long special on the decade everyone loves to hate began. And I felt for him, I really did. Because I am, appropriately enough, the grumpy old hack who's not at all happy to be assigned the task of revisiting this decade in which, it has to said, just about everything was shite. But let’s get one thing clear. I hated this decade at the time, unlike most of the minor-celebrity talking heads hired to give their 10 pence worth on this show.

It soon becomes apparent that their perspective tends more towards the idea that they’d perhaps been drugged at the time (cough) and had only come to realise long after the event that they had lived through a politically and aesthetically abhorrent nightmare. Lines like “What were we thinking?”, “What was that all about?” and “How did we fall for those mile-wide shoulder pads, brick-sized phones, bible-sized filofaxes, boil-in-the-bag meals…?” popped up with tiresome regularity throughout this very, very long hour.

But it wasn’t just this forced revisit to the Eighties which has got me all grumpy. It was watching a programme in which, much of the time, the contributors seemed to be taking umbrage over the most innocuous of things. For example, one of these mostly interchangeable grumps got all worked up about compact discs. “CDs; they’re useless!” he cried, clearly proud of making such a definitive statement. CDs have been serving us well now for nearly 30 years, and they still give us much more detailed sound reproduction than MP3s. Maybe all the best stuff to moan about had all ready been taken, and so this poor chap was left having to try to get cross about this perfectly respectable and highly successful way of storing digital data.

Then there’s always at least one talking head in these let's-be-nostalgic-while-pretending-we’re-not-being-nostalgic shows who has no right to be there. Comedian Russell Kay must have been around five years old when the Nescafé Gold Blend couple that seemed to so upset him first suggestively flirted while shaking handfuls of coffee beans in each other’s faces. Such nostalgia frauds always seem to possess an uncanny amount of insight into the TV, music or politics of the decade in which they weren’t even teenagers.

So often it’s clear that the opinions being expressed, or observations dredged up, are the equivalent to the memory implants of a Blade Runner replicant. I can’t help but suspect that the likes of Huey Morgan, Ed Byrne and Penny Smith have simply been sat down in the studio and shown one or two old clips which they are then required to describe while adding, if possible, a personal slant. Then the process is reversed for the TV audience, so that the talking head comes across as having extraordinary recall when the clip illustrating the point they have just made is shown directly after what they’ve said to camera.

However, there were a few contributors who came across as more spontaneous and genuinely witty, such as Ronni Ancona, Shappi Khosandi and Andi Oliver.  The latter’s gleeful recollections of the Eighties as a time of “proper riots, before the police got proper protection” was priceless. But this was the nearest we got to something other than a surface skim of this daftest and darkest of decades. Otherwise it was all just the usual: Thatcher was mad, and Reagan – shock, horror – was an ex-actor.

When the Grumpy franchise first appeared on our screens in 2003 it made for refreshingly irreverent and novel viewing. But this time around, wit, wisdom or even just a juicy burst of genuinely felt bile were in very short supply. Where were all the wry old regulars like Will Self, A A Gill or even Jeremy Clarkson?  There’s still some mileage in the formula, but the producers need to bring some of these heavyweights back if they want the programme to once again become indispensable viewing.

It would have been edifying and amusing to have had Germaine Greer putting the spectacularly naff but ubiquitous mullet into some kind of sociological or psychological context. And if only John Peel could have returned from beyond the grave for just long enough to deliver a perfectly honed put-down to sum up the aberration that was Kajagoogoo. I mean, has there ever been a more gauchely named band in the history of popular music, never mind how they looked and sounded?  Finally, no one even mentioned my favourite thing to hate about the Eighties: the nuclear-explosion snare-drum sound which makes almost every pop record made in the decade impossible to listen to today. Don’t get me started! What were they thinking?! What was that all about?!

• Watch The Grumpy Guide to the Eighties on BBC iPlayer
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