Two Excerpts from 1978 Black And White Minsterel Show and some questions

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

some questions for the britshes:

1) is this really what punk was working against? because if this went out to 18m homes, and sold number ones, that is the story of punk defeating traditional middle class culture? i dont have my reynolds with me, but i do not remember he mentioning this?
2) why are the men blacked up and not the women?
3) Why was this so popular, between the stage shows, the traveling revue, the tv show, the singles, the albums, the charting--this was a massive success.
4) How do critics of pop integrate this kind of material into the narrative of the UK? If we are poptimists, is there a way of redeeming this? I mean Where Dead Voices Gather by Tosches has a connoisseur's taste, a crate digger's sense of history, and founding mythology to rest his rennovation of Emmet Miller on, if one was going to write about this, what lens would you use?

I am mostly thinking of Tom's upcoming entries on early 70s pop on poptimist, an the comments about the history of UK no. 1s, but anyone can pop in.

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

in the abstract i know that the BaWMS was still on the TV as punk emerged, but it feels like something from an utterly different age -- as if it had ended, yes, a decade before

i assume i must have seen it now and then -- certainly i never watched it, and have it filed in my youngster head as incomprehensible and boring rather than any kind of cultural foe... it wasn't in any sense aimed at me, and no one was hectoring me for not being interested

(there was another show which i forget the name of at the moment, where the audience dressed up as edwardians: it was entirely repro music-hall from 70-odd years before, ie pre-1910 -- this too appeared to be enormously popular in the sense that old people were in the audience massively enjoying themselves, but to anyone under 16 it was total wtf-time)

(and besides, no old people i knew liked it: my grandparents were pretty rigorously high-culture oriented, tho my mum's mum adored morecambe and wise; to the extent that i absorbed my mum and dad's tastes, they were also simply bored by this species of light entertainment -- they were groovy young things, beatles fans!)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

haha the edwardian music-hall show was of course called "THE GOOD OLD DAYS" <--- plz to find youtubes of this also anthony! even this -- which is far more obviously in-island-nostalgic -- is only very marginally to do with imperial nostalgia, i would say: imperial nostalgia was explicitly about BEING ELSEWHERE, under other hotter suns

[anatol-merklich.livejournal.com]

This was v popular on Norwegian TV as well when I was little! Round 1976, I guess? It may well be that "lol englishes" was a sizeable part of the appeal btw.