OPINION
ITV has made a truly bizarre decision (Image: Getty)
They do say that if you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t there. Well I was around in the Sixties and I can’t remember them, but the reason in my case was that I’d just been born and so hadn’t quite got round to the remembering phase. But I can remember the Seventies and what an innocent time that was. Years later, I heard dark tales about shagpile carpets and wife-swapping (the two always seemed to be linked) but not where I was brought up, in the suburbs first of Chicago and then . It could not have been more above board.
Mine was an astonishingly innocent childhood of a type that seems almost impossible today and that included the television. And that included the series George And Mildred, starring Brian Murphy and Yootha Joyce, which ran from 1976 to 1979. And now, with the last vestiges of common sense in this country flying firmly out the window, has slapped a trigger warning on it. Are they out of their tiny minds?
The“offending” episode is one in which frustrated Mildred takes their dog to the vet to encourage him to mate and makes some glum remarks about her own sex life. Yup, folks, that’s it.
Shocking, no? Actually, the real shock is that we live in a society that allows children to access not only porn but beheading videos and then we get upset about this.
And this is not a one-off. Midsomer Murders and Only Fools And Horses have had the same treatment. Perhaps someone got triggered when Del Boy called Rodney a plonker. And wasn’t there a character in it called Trigger? Maybe that was the problem?
We live in a dangerous world that is growing darker by the day. There is a real possibility that, in the not too distant future, we will be at war with , and the way things are going, the US too. Trade tariffs, as my economist husband has pointed out, lead to recessions. Societal breakdown is a real concern.
And how do we prepare the younger generation for this? By slapping trigger warnings on some of the most innocent tele-vision ever created. Some of us had hoped that the election of President Trump was going to put an end to all this nonsense: sadly, that appears increasingly unlikely to be the case.
But if we don’t get our act together and start focusing on what is important in western civilisation, pretty soon there isn’t going to be any western civilisation left to care about.Triggered by George And Mildred? …give me a break!