Séamas O'Reilly: Nostalgia isn't what it used to be - especially as we get older

Alan Davies as Jonathan Creek: probably has that windmill house of his paid off by now

Our TV remote broke about a month ago, and it’s been stuck on the same channel ever since. 

We did try and remedy things, but new batteries didn’t make any difference, and getting a new remote just seems like too much hassle. 

I did it before once, and remember having to send off for a new one, which involved putting in an order, speaking with robot-voiced representatives, and following their instructions. 

You then programme it yourself via a step-by-step process so painstaking, it suggests your remote is being given the power to take down the national grid in the event of a nuclear event, not the freedom to flip over to Homes Under The Hammer on your day off. 

I’d sooner pull teeth than suffer through that again, and having vintage telly as our TV landing page seems a small price to pay to avoid it.

The channel is called DRAMA (all caps) and I’ve never watched it before. 

I’m not sure how we ever landed on it in the first place, but presume it must have been the last stop on a channel hop before our hapless remote breathed its last. 

It’s an anonymous sort of channel. So anonymous, in fact, that despite its logo being stuck to the top left corner of our screen for the past five weeks, the earliest drafts of this piece erroneously called it UK Drama, an entirely different and now defunct channel which rebranded as Alibi 15 years ago. 

It plays old soaps, thrillers, and cosy murder mysteries all day, giving you a 24-hour retinue of British telly first shown decades ago.

Actually, I’ve just noticed that it’s DRAMA+1, so it’s more accurate to say it gives you a 24-hour retinue of British telly first shown decades (plus an hour) ago.

I have no idea of DRAMA+1’s usual viewing figures, but we didn’t add much to them for the first week or two. 

Not being able to watch the terrestrial channels didn’t really prove much trouble, since we mostly use streaming apps for daily viewing. 

So for a while, it was just a briefly glimpsed shot of some old series or other, flashing on screen for as long as it took me to fire up the iPlayer, YouTube or some other streaming platform. 

But then something strange began to happen. I’d dawdle at the controls, my eye caught by some actor or show I vaguely recognised.

Soon I was hovering for five or 10 minutes at a time. It’s the stuff from the 80s and 90s that has me fully in its claws; modern enough that you can still reliably notice actors from subsequent work, while being old enough that you’re shocked by certain things. 

Is that an impossibly young Jude Law in an old Sherlock serial? Is that Tamzin Outhwaite off Eastenders in a cop show that involves time travel for some reason? And for the love of God, which one is Dalziel and which one’s Pascoe?

There’s a comforting gloom to these programmes. 

Their every frame is suffused with intoxicating drabness, and not just because they remind me of rainy Saturday evenings of childhood, spent watching potboiler entertainment with my family. 

Nineties TV still shot its interiors on video, outside shots using film cameras, so bright, airy studio photography is invariably followed by external scenes that look like they were shot in 1956, on potato peel. 

Horrible, boxy little cars drive down grey streets in resolution so poor you might as well be watching YouTube. 

The people, too, are dreary. Everyone looks hungover and wretched and pale, draped in baggy bomber jackets and stretched denim. 

Nowadays, even the background characters of most shows are bewilderingly gorgeous. 

I don’t know if it’s due to subsequent developments in make-up, lighting, or dentistry, but back then every cast looked like it was assembled from the people the producers found in the nearest bookies. 

But they also seem like grown-ups, real people with interesting interior lives. They may be a rugged bunch, but you get the sense they could probably fix a remote control.

Modern life intrudes in the commercial breaks. 

They’re all for walk-in baths and miraculous substances that either nourish or kill plants. 

The average viewer of this channel appears to remodel their bathroom eight times a year, in between installing their many and varied roof lights, and planning Mediterranean cruises. 

Channels aimed at my own demographic don’t advertise such things, and I chuckle to myself that I am still one of life’s spring chickens. 

Alas, I will be 38 in a few weeks, so I must concede that my boundless youth is not the issue, so much as the shifting calculus of advertising to anyone nearing 40 in 2023.

Like most of my friends, I’m still renting. Among my fellow parents, home ownership is a little more common but, as in my case, many paused the treadmill of saving for a deposit while caring for small children, and now find that prices have jumped so high during this parenting pause, that our previous savings have been dwarfed by the difference. 

It’s doubtless that balancing child-rearing and home finance has been difficult at any time in history, but I will say that the year my father turned 38, he had been a homeowner for 13 years and was about to welcome his ninth child — me — into a grateful world. 

At the time, he was a prime target for every conceivable home improvement and gardening gadget going, as the steadily decaying contents of his garage still attest, it’s just that my generation is less likely to seek such things, as we’d rather not go to that much trouble for a landlord who might turf us, and all our rakes and skylights, out into the street at any moment.

I don’t have time to wrestle with this. The ads have ended and Jonathan Creek has begun. 

He steps out of his windmill home and a mystery unfolds in my mind: just how much did that cost him in 1997?