You know you’re getting old when TV starts getting nostalgic about eras during which you were already feeling old and nostalgic. Take Pogs, the subject of one of those ‘Whatever happened to them, eh?’ moments in Badults (BBC3, Tuesday), an amiable sitcom about twentysomething flatmates. Pogs were these collectable discs originally made from fruit-juice bottle caps (passion fruit, orange and guava) that were a massive fad in the mid-Nineties. Tragically, though, the reason I know this is not that I played with them myself but that my stepson Jim the Rat did.
How depressing is that? What it means is that even the generation below me, Jim’s, is already beginning to feel sufficiently past it to start lamenting its lost youth. I look at these late twentysomethings of Jim’s age, now fully formed, and opinionated, with a reasonable amount of life experience and their wilder moments behind them and plans to settle down, and I think, ‘At 48, I’m old and screwed and it’s all over, basically, is it not?’
About the only consolation is watching others being shafted by the same cruel process.
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