Tuesday 29 December 2009

TV Cream Features Coronation Street - But Not Very Accurately!

On New Year's Eve 1979 Elsie called the '70s "a bad ten years". But history can be rewritten!

Isn't it strange how so many things from the 1960s and 1980s are now called '70s?

Take TV Cream's new write-up of Coronation Street (here).

It claims that Coronation Street went into colour in the '70s.

It was 1969.

It claims that Eddie Yeats was a CB radio enthusiast and a binman in the '70s.

He became a binman in 1980 and his CB craze was 1982 - after legalisation of CB radio in November 1981. Is 1980 actually 19710? Is 1982 actually 19712?

It claims Renee Bradshaw died in the 1970s.

It was 1980.

It claims that comedy became an important part of the Street's story-lines in the '70s.

But this is one of the daftest Wikipedia-style myths of all time - comedy was always important to the Street - and Bill Podmore simply sought to replace the comedy which had gone missing during the first half of the 1970s.

Nitpicking? Well no, I don't think so - if sites are set up to write about telly trivia, they can at least get it right.

And it never ceases to amaze me in general how many enjoyable items of 1960s and 1980s pop culture are attributed to the '70s.

TV Cream is far from being alone in this!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pretending the '70s are the '60s or '80s has been going on for years. It's odd - but not as odd as your belief that Coronation Street has ever been any good. TV for the lame brained.

Drew said...

Ta, lovey. I've never claimed to be clever!

Maria said...

The 1970's revival was built on importing stuff from the 1960's and 1980's. The 70's were too empty as they actually were!

I recently went to look at photographs at Rex features. There were loads of piccies from the UK soaps Crossroads and Coronation Street from the 1960s and 1980's - catalogued, guess what? Yep, you guessed it, "1970's". Actors and scenarios of the 1960's and 1980's were simply marked "1970s".

So, if you purchased the right to reproduce a Rex photograph and used their incorrect decade info for a project or article you could end up looking like a proper twit!

The "70's" thing is a sickness. The wrongful labelling of things as "70's" is far too common for it to be simple mistakes.

I call it "70's hype"!

Darlene said...

TV Cream likes to make smart alec comments. I suppose you either love the site or hate it. When it doesn't do it's research, it's a letdown. But then this is the internet.