Faking the 80s

Just watched the first part of the BBC's adaptation of Martin Amis's novel Money. Entertaining stuff, but a quality it shares with Ashes to Ashes and other recent 80's revivalist dramas is the unconvincing nature of the 80s revivalness. Putting it bluntly, the people making these dramas want to make them look good, so instead of convincingly horrible 80s hair or 80s clothes they use tastefully repositioned versions of 80s hair or fashion that doesn't actually look like stuff from the 80s. Something else to bear with these shows is the incredibly minimal and sparing use of location filming. The urban environments of Britain in 2010 are so different to how they were in the early 80s, it would be almost impossible to shoot convincing location footage without feature film money, hence the extreme familiarity of the three small roads they seemingly used to film the majority of Ashes to Ashes and the escalator and alley that made up 90% of the outside world in Money. It's just interesting that such a recent period of history is so aesthetically different to ours that it can only really be presented by impressionist hints.

That just about makes sense. Hi!