Things are different?

When I was a kid . . .

There probably isn’t a greater turn-off opener than that one.  It is the sort of phrase that is regularly used as a weapon by the older against the perceived privilege of the young.  There is nothing that riles a certain proportion of the older generation that seeing a very young child with a mobile phone.  And especially the young child using it with a proficiency that the resentful oldie can only wish for.

Technology means that kids have things like music players, film players, TV, radios, cameras and, yes, telephones way before the generation that includes me ever had, but – just think about what my generation had and continues to have.

Free milk, free school, university grants, free university tuition, full professional employment, good health care, generous pension scheme, professional retirement at 60 with professional pension, state pension at 65, membership of the EU throughout my working life, free access to foreign countries within the EU, access to the work markets of the EU, and so on.

Yes, my parents did not buy a television until I was 11, though we did have the radio.  I did not have a ‘real’ record player until I was in my teens, though I had had a second hand wind up version with some old 78s for one birthday.  Our holidays were usually in the UK and in B&Bs, though I did go to Spain when I was 7, and I was the only kid in my year in primary school who had been abroad.  Our camera was a Kodak box camera, until we had the next model up, eventually – and those two camera kept us going for years and years and years.

Although we were not rich as a family, I did not lack anything important.  I was loved and secure and, most importantly (as I was really too young to truly worry about the Cuban missile crisis) I felt secure.  I felt that I had a future and that I would easily be able to get a job and that I would be able to keep it for the whole of my career.

How many young people today can say as much?  I know younger colleagues in teaching who are dreading the extra years that they will have to work until they are able to retire and I sympathetically share their dread, though I cannot imagine what the awful reality must be like.  In my view you cannot be a classroom teacher beyond the age of 60 in any sort of normal school.  Forcing people to work beyond that is like a sort of death sentence, or at the very least they are not going to be paying many pensionable years for the unfortunates who are able to make it.

This serious thought was brought on my thinking about cartoons.  One channel on the television this year has been given over to a whole series of ‘blockbuster’ animated films and I am constantly amazed at their quality.  There was a scene of one of the monsters from Monsters Inc II where he was sitting by the side of a lake in moonlight which was stunning, a beautifully rendered part of the film.  And in another film I was fascinated by the sheer complexity of the rendering of hair and fur with a naturalness that would have had early animators reaching for their crucifixes!

It used to be that Christmas would see the latest-old Bond film trotted out to general delight, but I am not sure nowadays that there is a single screen franchise that would bring viewers together now in the way that 007 did.  After the gloriously clever first film of the 'Pirates' franchise, for example, the whole series descended into a narrative nightmare which denied coherence to the story, but did give individual moments of success, as for example in the umpteenth film when the company baddy walks, with manic serenity, down a flight of steps as his ship is destroyed about him.  It is a sublime moment and deserves a better film around it!

But the mechanics of showing films have changed.  When I was in school we did have 'Christmas Treat' films.  The two I remember are 'Fanstasia' and Tony Hancock's 'Punch and Judy Man' - the first we loved and the second we hated.  But both these films were shown via a film projector, the cans of film had been rented and were shown projected onto a screen.  In an age when films are available on your phone, the attitude towards a 'grand' production has changed somewhat!

So time, place, technique, everything has changed, and the 'gift' of a major film at Christmas is not longer the 'treat' that it once was.

But for me, at least, the power of a great animated film, something like 'Up' for example has me as glued to the picture as if I were a child watching fireworks - and you only have to see my open mouthed wonder and fixation with exploding rockets to understand how quickly I can regress to childhood!

Perhaps cartoons are the nearest things we get to keep us together, to bring back the sense of wonder that over exposure to CGI in so-called reality films has taken away.