Here’s one thing which mildly irritates me. When I get round to watching an old film or comedy show which I haven’t seen before, and I decide to talk about it on whatever social media platform I’m not sulking with at the time, I sometimes get the magic words:
“What, you’ve never watched that? How?!”
The easy answer is: I often go deep, not wide. I spend so much of my time researching and writing ludicrous, never-before-published nonsense about The Young Ones and similar. I ain’t got time to watch everything a sensible person does.
The grumpy answer is: OK, have you ever seen [a cool show that not nearly enough people have watched]? No? WELL I HAVE, NOW LEAVE ME ALONE.
But the hard answer is: I seriously want to push back on the idea that there’s any kind of canon that anybody is “supposed” to have watched. There is no such thing. I can’t think of anything more tedious than watching film or television by rote. Surely the best way to destroy Fawlty Towers is to blink quizzically at people who haven’t yet had the pleasure.
The joy is in our own personal route through a world of fun things, not a bizarre expectation that everyone who lived through a certain decade have all watched the same thing. Some of us were busy.
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Anyway, I’m currently watching Seinfeld for the first time, and I finally know what comedy is.