gone but not forgotten

It started with some office banter about classic TV ads. My colleagues simply went to YouTube and revisited the ads that had marked their youth. I wanted to do the same but in many cases couldn’t. My being a few years older makes all the difference. The ads of my childhood belong to an age that lies beyond YouTube,  neglected in some graveyard of an archive. Yet some of them lie tantalisingly close. Yes, I can check online and see references to the wonderfully camp 1970s hairspray ad, “Not Tonight Josephine”, but it took me forever to find it – I thought it was Harmony, it was in fact Super Soft, so that didn’t help in my search! Even further back are murky memories of a man eating Rolos with a jerky, spasm-like motion that terrified me as a young child. Then there’s the Cadbury’s ad, for who knows which brand, which I recall featured a family in a car driving along a Spaghetti Junction-like motorway landscape and which marked me with its ugly modernity and spawned a child-ecologist of me on the spot. These two ads are undiscoverable. Are they a figment of my imagination, a false memory, will I ever know? And does it matter?

Then there are the educational films of my early childhood. Thankfully most of them have been carefully catalogued and are easily accessible. But what of that gruesome rabies scene shown to me at school when I was about six or seven? If it was an  educational film warning us of the dangers of patting stray dogs while abroad, then it most certainly did the trick.  I remember grainy black and white images of a poor African child in the last throes of death, frothing at the mouth and terrified by the glass of water mockingly held before him. What were they thinking of? To this day I’m still terrified of foreign dogs, foxes and bats. Once again, lengthy online searches for this childhood memory throws up the heart-sinking ‘0’ results, Google’s taunting equivalent of Eurovision’s “Nul points.” Let’s just say that such visions set me up nicely for the Nuclear Holocaust leitmotif of my teenage years accompanied by the spectre of AIDS and its tombstone scenarios. Oh happy days. Love did most certainly tear us apart.

It doesn’t stop there. Some of the fabric of the popular culture of my childhood and youth is also gone for ever. It’s well known that the BBC lost loads of TOTP footage from the 1960s and 70s. I remember, just a few years ago, the remaining members of Queen putting out a call to find anyone who might have made an early video recording from the TV of them playing one of their first hits – I think it was Seven Seas of Rhye – to include in a documentary that was being made. I think they finally got what they were looking for, but it took some effort. Then there are my significant first gigs…Queen, U2 right at the start. Well before the days of mobile phones and before video cameras became commonplace. All except the biggest gigs went unrecorded, unattended by TV crews. We simply have our memories to rely on and few forums populated by fellow devotees who share their memories of set lists, venues, the atmosphere on the night, what the band wore and how they performed.

For kids of today, this must seem like a foreign country. Yet I can’t help but wonder which version is better. In an age where everything is documented, every moment is captured and nothing is really ever lost, what will become of memories and will we evoke them and interact with them in the same way? There is a certain wistfulness to be felt for what has been materially lost, but still remains as a cloudy memory, that perhaps later generations,  the children of the digital age will never know. We talk of Proustian moments as a shorthand for this fleeting memory tinged with an aching longing, but in our modern age where most memories can be preserved, perhaps we are indeed at risk of losing something quite uniquely human.

Or maybe I’m just being sentimental. It’s quite likely that if I were to find all this lost footage of my childhood I’d be bitterly disappointed. The ads and educational films I remembered as the stuff of nightmare would probably be tame and risible. The gigs would be wooden and flat. Maybe, it’s best that they remain as memories.