GOODBYE GREY SKY, HELLO BLUE [459]

Living in a country that still venerates the sitcom “Dad’s Army”, I find it odd that “Happy Days”, set a decade later, is nowhere to be found on UK streaming services.

I last saw “Happy Days” about twenty years ago on Channel 4, whose mornings remain full of old sitcoms like “Cheers” and “Frasier”, which were also produced by Paramount. With no other TV channel airing the show, I thought it must be found online on Paramount+, but it wasn’t there. Paramount runs two other streaming services in the UK, Pluto TV and My5, the latter through their ownership of Channel 5, but “Happy Days” was not there either. Also nowhere to be found were any series spun off from the show, like “Laverne & Shirley”, “Joanie Loves Chachi” and “Mork & Mindy”.

A sitcom about 1950s teenage life growing up in the American Midwest, arriving in the same moment as the film “American Graffiti” and the original stage production of “Grease”, “Happy Days” ran on the ABC network for so long – January 1974 to July 1984 – that it was set in the early 1960s by its end. Starring Ron Howard as archetypal teenager Richie Cunningham, with Marion Ross and Tom Bosley as his parents, the Bugs Bunny of the show turned out to be their lodger, Arthur Fonzarelli, an effortlessly cool leather-jacketed greaser mechanic on a motorcycle, who turned on jukeboxes just by knocking them, and who owned the show’s catchphrases: “sit on it”, “Ayyyyy...” and “Whoa”. Henry Winkler, as “the Fonz” or “Fonzie” was the star of “Happy Days” long before Howard left the show in 1980, at which point Fonzarelli had become a high school teacher and a pillar of society.

I don’t think there is a specific reason for “Happy Days” falling off the radar. The phrase “jumping the shark”, for when a series exhausts its original premise and mutates into something else entirely, comes from “Fonzie” doing exactly that on a fifth-season episode in 1977, taking advantage of Henry Winkler’s experience as a water-skiing instructor – the same season also saw Robin Williams make his first appearance as the alien Mork, before getting his own show.

However, these were only the latest “jumps”. With “Fonzie” moving to the foreground after the first season, what began as a more filmic show, shot with a single camera and canned laughter, “Happy Days” was filmed in front of an increasingly raucous studio audience after the second season. Even bigger was the changing of the sitcom’s “sit”, as Winkler was established as the sole lead after Ron Howard left. I don’t remember seeing many episodes without Howard, suggesting the eighth season onward may have been too different a show when taking “Happy Days” as a whole – again, I can’t see it to check.

Before the advent of streaming, Paramount only released the first six of the show’s eleven seasons on DVD, with only the third and fourth seasons retaining the original music used - the show’s atmosphere was set with much use of needle drops and the cast singing what were now “golden oldies” for the audience. Nostalgia for that period of music and culture has also receded with passing generations, but with the post-war baby boom seeing the birth of popular music and of popular culture, as we understand it today, happening in the 1950s, it remains an important point to which culture still returns – as of July 2024, a proposed BBC radio service concentrating on music from the 1950s, 60s and 70s is held up while further consultations determine if it is not stepping on the toes of the aptly-named Boom Radio.

This is one more nail in the coffin of thinking that streaming services would be great repositories of television and film history, especially with Paramount having begun in 1912. It is possible that “Happy Days”, or any show not produced in the last forty years, is no longer nostalgic or profitable enough for inclusion on any of their services, to which I think: “Cheers”, you’re next.

GOTTA MAKE YOU UNDERSTAND [458]

Especially in situations where I have given myself a deadline, I don’t normally think about how easy these articles are to read. I am more worried about the clarity of the points I am making – if I managed that, then legibility takes care of itself.

 

Apparently, the last paragraph scored 52.3 on the Flesch Reading Ease Test, producing a Flesch-Kincade reading grade level of 11.5, just below American college student level. It was “fairly difficult to read”.

 

Even more apparently, the paragraph just gone scored 31.9, placing it almost at college graduate level. It is “difficult to read”.

 

That last one went back down to 47.1 – still college level, but at the “easier” end of the scale.

 

Except for this sentence, this article scores 51.0 so far – we’re still going to college.

 

I only found out last week that Microsoft Word can calculate your document’s score on the Flesch Reading Ease Test, and I still don’t care for it now. Devised in the 1970s for use in evaluating technical, electronic and teaching documents in the United States Navy, it is an equation most often used by Government institutions to check the readability of their documents, weighing the number of words per sentence over a written work, and syllables per word. The higher the answer to the equation, the easier your document can be read: documents written in “plain English” will achieve a score over 60.

 

Of course, it doesn’t consider what those words say, only the numerical detail produced by the particular words used, a quick-and-dirty approach to checking your document, and one I won’t be using again because it doesn’t account for style, if I truly have a writing style.

 

The first article I published on this site in 2016, about the argument over how The Beatles got their name, had a readability score of 67.2, in the “plain English” bracket. For my previous piece about keeping the internet at bay  to reach the college-level score of 44.8 is, to be honest, where I expect writing by a college graduate, and my consistently reaching that level confirms I must be more confident at reproducing that level for public consumption.

 

Interestingly, the essay scripts made for video, like my first about the HP-12C calculator, and my personal best video, about Memphis furniture, achieve a “lower” score – 56.0 and 54.9 respectively – because they were deliberately written to be more conversational in tone, using shorter sentences but, then again, the test isn’t made for the spoken word.

 

In short, I’ll concentrate on clarity.

WE’VE GOT THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE [457]

You do not have to accept the internet pushing information to you that you don’t want to see. It has taken me long enough to act on this advice, but taking a few seconds to complete small actions have, and will, make using the internet, and social media in particular, more serene.

This began only around a year ago, when I stopped clicking “Accept All” to cookies on websites. Reading the disclaimers on cookie notifications reveals scores of companies listed that use data generated by your interaction, anonymised or not, for whatever use they need, even if just for counting your having accessed the page, or how long you stayed there. 

Choosing “Reject All”, or taking the time to scroll through and deselecting options on personalised content and advertising performance, gave me peace of mind that, down the line, I might get fewer phishing scam e-mails for services I know I don’t use. The phrase “legitimate interest” comes up a lot: “Some vendors are not asking for your consent, but are using your personal data on the basis of their legitimate interest” – following that by stating said interest would be helpful, especially if some sites rely on information about advertising to help them stay in business.

Having taken care of the wider internet, social media remained problematic. Usually, the best thing to do would be to avoid the “For You” tab now prevalent on many such sites, keeping to accounts you already follow, but algorithms may still throw up a surprise that finally fits your interests, like YouTube recommending the “third episode” of “Turn-On” I spoke about recently.

The “For You” section on the other sites I use are as follows: Threads has people moaning about Elon Musk, Donald Trump and Apple computer products; Mastodon’s equivalent “Local” tab doesn’t display anything written in English; Instagram has brutalist architecture; and Twitter – I’m still not calling it “X” – is a cesspit of rage, telling people what they can and cannot believe, or be.

Twitter has always been a bit of a puzzle for me – I can choose to search for something someone said on Twitter, because the news is reporting it, and I will then be recommended similar stuff from then on. I cannot pretend to understand Twitter’s algorithm, even with its program having been posted to the technology development website GitHub, but suffice to say that, if you engage with something, you become stuck to it.

Fortunately, I have found a more straightforward workaround, although its location is a little buried. Going to “Settings and privacy”, then “Privacy and safety”, then “Content you see”, then finally “Interests”, you are presented with an almighty list of what Twitter thinks you want to see, gleaned from my fifteen years of using the site. 

Having taken the implied compliment that my interests are wide, I started wondering why it was recommending football to me, something I have never searched for. I have followed the broadcaster and music journalist Danny Baker for years because he writes entertainingly, and has stories to tell from across his career, but he also broadcasted about football for years, and writes about that as eloquently as he does about everything else. All that eyeball time has built up, along with any time any of the other people I follow talk about British politics, American politics, Dungeons & Dragons, protests both for and against transgender rights, Star Wars, and Star Trek.

Fortunately, I can start unticking some of these “interests”. Out goes the football, the politics, and “Good Morning Britain” (the current one, not the TV-am original). Why is Kanye West there, or Piers Morgan, or J.K. Rowling? I’m not American, so who is Herman Cain? Why the fixation on female news presenters like Fiona Bruce, Victoria Derbyshire and Susanna Reid?

So much of this speaks to the “Sturm und Drang” that is the background of Twitter, that my having gone past it appears to have been mistaken for my reading it. I have taken to muting some accounts to prevent some subjects appearing, usually those that provoke the most reactions in other people.

I have been unable to find similar lists for Meta’s websites like Facebook, Instagram or Threads, but the content I am being pushed on there appears to be benign enough for me not to worry about it, and only Twitter was causing concern. Now just need to make sure I keep an eye out for something that might snowballs on social media, or avoid clicking “Accept All” by accident.

YOU BETTER NOT LOOK DOWN [456]

Sir Keir Starmer's official Prime Ministerial portrait

“Whoso pulleth out this sword from this stone and anvil is the true born King of all Britain.”

The opening spoken passage of Rick Wakeman’s “Arthur” is just about the only part the BBC have not used to introduce their General Election coverage since 1979, but with each seat having been contested contested on the premise of “may the best person win”, a place could surely be found.

I followed this election through my fingers from the moment it began. The unforced errors of Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party campaign ranged from calling it in the pouring rain, announcing the return of National Service, leaving the D-Day commemorations in France early, through to investigations into party members’ insider knowledge for betting on when the election would take place, and the disputed “£2,094” per household that having a Labour party in government would cost. Having a working state for the cost of a Sky TV subscription, something Sunak counted not having as a deprivation in his childhood, could be a good deal.

While Sir Ed Davey seemingly went on an extreme sports holiday to bring attention to the Liberal Democrats, and Nigel Farage decided we were worth his attention over Donald Trump, all Sir Keir Starmer had to do was remain statesmanlike, talk about returning politics to service, and following through on that once elected... 

Then the election became about keeping transgender women out of women’s spaces, with Starmer saying he thought they shouldn’t be allowed, and offering to meet J.K. Rowling to discuss her concerns, as the de facto leader of the “gender critical” movement, which abjectifies an entire group of people by asserting sex over gender at all costs. Starmer wants there to be a “reset moment” for trans people, removing the toxicity from the national conversation, but I would love to find out how he will do that.

Once again, I tried to watch the election results through the night, expecting the momentum prompted by the exit poll’s prediction of a Labour Party landslide to drive the TV coverage. I had seen enough polls predicting a “supermajority” of five hundred seats for Labour, but I was expecting a result like that seen in 1997, which was 418 Labour seats to the Conservatives’ 165 seats. The exit poll had 410 versus only 131, and while the thirteen forecast seats for the right-wing Reform UK were concerning, this was explained as being due to lack of sampling data, expected to be revised downwards. There was enough to talk about, but the first hour of coverage was dominated by a race to declare the first result. 

I mostly stayed with the BBC’s TV coverage, as ITV and Channel 4 had opted to include former politicians in their core teams – one verbal spar between Alistair Campbell and Nadine Dorries put me off Channel 4 for the night – and ITV had centred its coverage around one massive, visually uninteresting desk. After a full day’s work, and no longer able to keep my eyes open, I wound up retiring to bed at 12.45am, with only six results having been called. I woke up again at 4.40am to Rishi Sunak winning his seat for the Conservatives, but conceding the race – Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer had become Prime Minister, his party eventually winning 412 out of 650 seats, with a total of 33.7% of votes cast, on a 60% turnout.

What the public was voting for appeared not to be Labour, but Not-The-Tories, or Not-The-SNP in Scotland. Tactical or protest voting caused seats previously safe for one party to become more marginal this time around. People punished the Conservative government for leaving the country in a worse condition than when they assumed power in 2010. Meanwhile, some independent candidates won over parties due to specific issues like the war in Gaza. The First Past the Post system rewards the winner, but it means Labour enters Parliament with a shallow voter base.

The biggest protest vote was for Reform UK, the fourth party under which Nigel Farage has run for Parliament, which won five seats despite receiving 14.3% of votes, splitting the right-wing vote with the Conservate Party. If your party gets few seats because most of your candidates came second or third, then of course you could have done better if the rules were different. Changing to a proportional representation system would have benefitted the Liberal Party in 1974, the SDP in 1983, and Reform UK in 2024, but wanting to change the system because it would benefit you specifically is suspect, especially after a referendum in 2011 to change to an “alternate vote” system was, well, voted down.

It is imperative that, for whenever the next election take place, the Conservative Party regains its focus. British politics is usually fought from the centre ground, moving further left or right leaves people behind. Voting for Farage’s parties has been used most effectively as a blunt instrument in previous local, general and European elections, and while Farage talks of professionalising Reform UK, still currently a limited company over which he has the most voting shares, his stated aim of supplanting the Conservatives won’t happen if the Conservatives take his place first.

As for the new Prime Minister, all he needs to do is make our lives better while keeping the noise down. If he does, we might allow him to keep doing it.