Skip Channel4 main Navigation
INTERVIEW WITH CLIVE ANDERSON
Clive Anderson is back, entertaining us as the presenter of Back in the Day. We take a trip down memory lane with him to the "good old days" of Tony Hancock, to the lows of reality television. Find out his take on British traditions, the Royal Family and how he imagined the fax machine would be surpassed as a communications technology.
Nostalgia based TV programmes seem to be in fashion at the moment. Why do we have such an interest in watching nostalgia?
There’s mild delight that can come with watching nostalgia programmes. For example, watching a programme about rock stars, you look back on their fashion then and remember how you were dressing then. You can compare what they looked like then to how they are now, and what they are doing now. There’s an interest in looking back, whether you look back in horror, or look back in anger or look back in wonder, or just look back and cry, and think "Oh no! Things were better then."
Given the chance, is there a decade before your time which you would have liked to have lived through?
As it happens, I was born in the fifties, and the decade before that was the forties which was such an important decade. Obviously, you'd know who the prime minister was in the forties [Winston Churchill], and what was going on, because it was of such epic proportions. There's a bit of me that feels that, although it was horrific, it must been quite spectacular to live through the war, to be removed from ordinary life and join the Army, Navy or Airforce. At the end of it, whatever the horrors and the dreadfulness of it, Britain won the war, to some extent against the odds.
Do you think that because we live in a time in which we aren't experiencing first hand an historical event of global significance, we pick up on pop culture ephemera instead?
I think there are always things of great historical significance going on; it's just that some are a bit more obvious than others. A war is a very black and white win-lose thing. Looking back, fighting the Nazis had a beginning and an end. Fighting terrorism, which might be a roughly corresponding thing, seems as though it has no end. If we’re not blowing ourselves up, we might be just slowly heating ourselves up with global warming. The planet might just drift to a simmering end rather than a bang.
Global warming or terrorism might not have any great impact on us in our lifetime, so should we worry?
They are intractable problems. It can be difficult for individuals to work out what to do, and it’s not obvious that many Governments have any idea what to do either. What a depressing line of thought! No wonder we look back nostalgically at the past. The problems back then had all been lived through and coped with by other people.
Do you think it's important to preserve the past, and are there any British traditions that you might get rid of?
I think we should be tinkering with traditions all the time, not to abolish them but to update them. The Royal Family, as an example, still rides to and from Parliament in a horse drawn carriage because that was how it was done in Queen Victoria’s day. If you were updating them you’d suggest they travel to Parliament by car. Perhaps they’re actually ahead of their time and when fossil fuel runs out they’ll be seen to be doing the right thing.
Read more about Clive's most memorable TV moment, Arsenal and his take on reality television
Clive Anderson is back, entertaining us as the presenter of Back in the Day. We take a trip down memory lane with him to the "good old days" of Tony Hancock, to the lows of reality television. Find out his take on British traditions, the Royal Family and how he imagined the fax machine would be surpassed as a communications technology.
Nostalgia based TV programmes seem to be in fashion at the moment. Why do we have such an interest in watching nostalgia?
There’s mild delight that can come with watching nostalgia programmes. For example, watching a programme about rock stars, you look back on their fashion then and remember how you were dressing then. You can compare what they looked like then to how they are now, and what they are doing now. There’s an interest in looking back, whether you look back in horror, or look back in anger or look back in wonder, or just look back and cry, and think "Oh no! Things were better then."
Given the chance, is there a decade before your time which you would have liked to have lived through?
As it happens, I was born in the fifties, and the decade before that was the forties which was such an important decade. Obviously, you'd know who the prime minister was in the forties [Winston Churchill], and what was going on, because it was of such epic proportions. There's a bit of me that feels that, although it was horrific, it must been quite spectacular to live through the war, to be removed from ordinary life and join the Army, Navy or Airforce. At the end of it, whatever the horrors and the dreadfulness of it, Britain won the war, to some extent against the odds.
Do you think that because we live in a time in which we aren't experiencing first hand an historical event of global significance, we pick up on pop culture ephemera instead?
I think there are always things of great historical significance going on; it's just that some are a bit more obvious than others. A war is a very black and white win-lose thing. Looking back, fighting the Nazis had a beginning and an end. Fighting terrorism, which might be a roughly corresponding thing, seems as though it has no end. If we’re not blowing ourselves up, we might be just slowly heating ourselves up with global warming. The planet might just drift to a simmering end rather than a bang.
Global warming or terrorism might not have any great impact on us in our lifetime, so should we worry?
They are intractable problems. It can be difficult for individuals to work out what to do, and it’s not obvious that many Governments have any idea what to do either. What a depressing line of thought! No wonder we look back nostalgically at the past. The problems back then had all been lived through and coped with by other people.
Do you think it's important to preserve the past, and are there any British traditions that you might get rid of?
I think we should be tinkering with traditions all the time, not to abolish them but to update them. The Royal Family, as an example, still rides to and from Parliament in a horse drawn carriage because that was how it was done in Queen Victoria’s day. If you were updating them you’d suggest they travel to Parliament by car. Perhaps they’re actually ahead of their time and when fossil fuel runs out they’ll be seen to be doing the right thing.
Read more about Clive's most memorable TV moment, Arsenal and his take on reality television
