Moog dancers prove that TV was more adventurous in the 70s
synthtopia.com
synthtopia.com
I can't describe the disappointment of rushing home from school to find the Looney Tunes slot on BBC 2 be replaced by a "cultural exchange" cartoon from Eastern Europe.
No offence to anyone from Eastern Europe but having Bugs Bunny replaced by geometric shapes fighting via the medium of Free Jazz is ...well it's culture shock on a level that no 7 year old should be put through.
Interesting. The Simpsons had a bit about cartoons being replaced by weird Eastern European cartoons [1]. I didn't know that actually happened in real life.
They used to show stuff like this on PBS back in the 70's. Even as a kid I got the message.
But the bulk the animation shown on PBS came from the NFB - The National Film Board of Canada, which provided the retro aestheics that were later adopted by Boards of Canada.
1970s TV was a bunch of turtleneck and beret wearing, moustached, communist acid heads working for public broadcasters trying to subvert American dominance. The "film strips" I watched as a child in classrooms from Canada's National Film Board were dementedly surreal. The electronic band Boards of Canada were apparently directly inspired by them.
I have been tempted to pitch a netflix series set in a public broadcaster making decisions about film funding and distributing those things to elementary schools, and how absolutely insane these people must have been. Chainsmoking theorists and Quebecois nationalists with government expense accounts trying to create a post-national global society through conceptual art during the hangover from the Montreal Expo. Americans in the 1970s had rock music. Canada had something else. You have no idea how weird this place was. A kind of greater soviet Wisconsin run by small town French pseudointellectuals.
That whole era was just gross.
Also it's just incomparable how quality vs price has changed in camera equipment and related. You can put together a setup that rivals broadcast quality for about the price of an economy car. We live in a golden age of independent productions being much more affordable.
So celebrate the Moog dancers if you like, but I think this subtext that we've lost something or become less adventurous totally preposterous.
I'm torn on this. I suppose it's a beautiful thing to enable more creators but we are also awash in garbage content with BS at scale.
Streaming is still I think going to be the middle ground that can deliver somewhat weird but with a good production budget.
This was shown where everyone might stumble across it. That's completely unlike today's insular interest bubbles. The unspoken bubbles are a loss for the larger group. The bubbles make us less adventurous.
Broad media consumption all just formulaic and uninspired.
The 60s and 70s were just full of weird, exploratory, boundary-bending shit, which is what makes them a time of such progress.
It ignores that the majority of people wouldn’t actually watch this or want to watch it. Most people would watch more conventional content, much as they do today.
This leads to a lot of people seeing something historically interesting and conflating it as a norm of adventurousness. In reality, many of them ignore the avante garde stuff on TV today.
So what it leads to is people thinking TV today is safe. But that’s because they’re safe people, and because they can’t consider the wide range of content that existed then, they think that any notable example is representative.
In reality, there’s lots of experimental content today.
Look at many children’s shows like Amazing World of Gumball or Adventure Time that is straight up bonkers for adventurous content.
On the adult end of the spectrum, there’s shows like Atlanta and Pen15. And that’s just the mainstream content. There’s so much adventurous stuff out there right now that I’m honestly flummoxed how anyone can hold this view seriously.
IMHO people are too eager to glorify the past because it‘s an easy hit of dopamine . I’d posit that those same people are likely just too safe in their choices and wish they weren’t, but either don’t know how to discover it, or worse, don’t want to.
In my group of close 25 - 32 ish year old friends, encompassing maybe 10 households I don't know a single one who actually has their TV hooked up to regular TV, all of them consume content through a combination of streaming services and piracy.
Expand your search past regular broadcast television and you'll find there's a thousand times more weird, avant garde stuff out there today if that's what you're into.
Hyper-social without real interactions, constant choice but nothing ever changes, maximum stimulation without satisfaction. It's going to be impenetrable and exhausting to anyone over the age of 35.
This is the same as the game market. People constantly lament the state of the mobile game market as if it's replaced PC/console games of old, but in reality it's just a new but separate market. There's still just as many (actually many many more) traditional, non incrementally monetized games being made still.
Let's put "algorithm driven" aside for a while. I was of the same opinion that long form isn't going to die but then Netflix came, and i ran into 5-10 minute shorts on youtube that can be better than most overlong streaming service "content".
Today's long form is too -ing long.
I think it is true that there used to be more of an attitude to broadcasting ‘things the public ought to see’ more than the things they actually wanted which meant more things like classical music, history, dance, etc. Although I’m not sure if this clip was due to that attitude. If you look at TV today, things like nature documentaries can still be very popular and high quality.
Some of the ‘high-brow’ content was relegated to special channels and so just seen less. Nowadays, it seems like Netflix, YouTube, etc is actually a good place for more niche things to be able to reach a wider audience.
Prime example: Dr Who. This was the era of Tom Baker as the Doctor. Honestly, it was amazing. But there were other shows that were just plain goofy like The Goodies and Monkey. On the sci-fi front you had Blake's Seven, which was way ahead of its time in moral complexity. To this day, Avon is an amazing character.
We saw very little American TV. Sesame Street was a notable exception. At the time this even dealth with complex issues (eg the actor who played Mr Cooper died IRL and his death was on the show).
As I got older you got into shows like Grange Hill, which actually dealt with issues like a kid dying of a heroin overdose.
In my teens I got into more adult shows like Yes Minister (which, to this day, is amazing). We had in-depth news program that was of exceedingly high quality (ie Four Corners and the 7:30 Report) that included such gems as [1] (referring to the Kirki [2]).
But what happened in the 1980s to the BBC in particular was that children's TV got really dumbed down. Dr Who was viewed as "too scary". So all this innovation basically disappeared under the guise of the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
It wasn't really until the 2000s that TV recovered from this and even now I believe even now that children's TV is simply awful. None of it seems to be intellectually engaging at all and certainly not "adventurous".
Avon is indeed amazing. And it's no accident Terry Nation, the creator of Blake's Seven, was the author of what made Dr. Who a smash hit with his script for the second serial titled "The Daleks."
Just squeezing into the "1970s" in 1970 was ITC/ITV's UFO which was also great SF, I watched it a few years after in weekly syndication in the US. Didn't get a chance to watch the previously mentioned BBC shows until the 1980s.
A friend who lived in Newcastle went to the corner store to buy rubber bands while watching The Curiosity Show. The bewildered shopkeeper asked why so many kids were coming to buy rubber bands at that moment. What a heart-warming story, I never knew if anyone else watched it.
Recently rewatched Blake's 7, the SO loved it. I mentioned that to a friend in Bulgaria, she said "What?? Blake's 7?? We used to play Blake's 7 in the street when I was a kid. Guess who I was? Gan haha"
"We saw very little American TV." Weird, I watched an awful lot of terrible US series that I'm too ashamed to list. With ads! Moonlighting was about the only really good one.
My early years I spent in a rural year where we only had one channel: the state broadcaster. That's why we saw American TV rarely. By the teen years it was different: we got a second channel! With ads. Actually we had some of that when visiting family in a large city (with 3 then 4 channels!).
The A-Team, Different Strokes, Cheers, the Dukes of Hazzard, Family Ties, LA Law (which was dope), The Wonder Years, the list goes on.
This was back when there were two BBC (public) channels and one commercial channel. And they all shut down at bedtime.
Old UK TV shows look weird to todays audience (not adventurous) because they are a reflection of a time we have long moved on from. The pandering racism of "Love Thy Neighbour" and "The Black and White Minstrel Show", the scantily clad "totty" in Benny Hill.
I suppose on an incredibly naive way it might seem adventurous but I'm very glad we've moved on.
You get that both parties - the white guy and the black guy - were bigoted racist idiots, neither were right, and their wives who actually got on fine were exasperated with them, right? I mean, you've actually seen the series, I'm sure?
Because if you'd seen Love Thy Neighbour, you'd know that both guys were racist bigoted idiots.
You'd also know that even in the 1970s when it was aired, everyone thought it was shite.
That the show was shite is neither here nor there.
The first is the reason the dancers are there is classic "for the dads" tv to check out the bodies of some young, fit, conventionally physically attractive women. The men being involved in the dancing is a fig-leaf to enable the pretence that its motivation is some higher, more noble artistic endeavour for both performers and audience. If there is some small amount of "for the moms" going on as well then fine but that's not why its there.
The second is that this is dance. By its nature dance is sexual "vertical expression of the horizontal desire" and all that. There is nothing inherently exploitative about having a choreographed, mixed group of young fit humans, dressed for dance on tv dancing. Dancers self-select for physical fitness. Conventionally physically less-attractive dancers don't fare much better than conventionally physically less-attractive movie-actors. Pick your fight with what humans like but don't cry exploitation.
So would these dancers be on tv without a background "for the dads" mindset from tv producers? If not, does that matter?
(For me, those last two are "no" and, "yeah, maybe it does." At least to the extent its worth point out but not necessarily raging against). YMMV.
The man who hasn't seen a ballet dancer of either sex they found attractive doing remarkable things with their body and let their imagination go at least a little probably has some pretty profound health issues and my sympathies. Something similar may well be true for women in the audience, not sure if this is really the place to ask for people to speak up on the point.
tl;dr sex sells and always has.
A 4 year old dancing to music is NOT AT ALL an "expression of the horizontal desire". For the same reason, adults can and do dance for the joy of it.
If you view dance through the viewpoint of sexual desire, then sure, ALL forms of human interaction are a result of sexual desire.
That wouldn't be wrong, abstractly speaking. But there would be no reason to single out dance.
As someone who used to dance a lot, your interpretation seems bizarre and strongly at odds with my observations and experience.
For perspective, I could make the BS argument that American football is popular in the US because it's a culturally-safe way for males to satisfy their suppressed homoerotic feelings. The vast majority of fans will disagree. The onus therefore is on me to present a strong and compelling case that they are wrong.
Just like there is now for your views on dance.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/09/11/dancing/#:~:text=%E....
Taking dancing in the manner we are discussing in this thread? TV, body hugging lycra etc. Yeah, ok, maybe not always..? Mostly? I think the point being made remains.
There are no children in those clips and rightly so.
My view is that you think this kink you describe is far more common than I do. I want to see evidence supporting your view.
We know the BBC developed programs for "man appeal", as seen in the choice of the very name "Emma Peel" in The Avengers. We can look at "Hill's Angels" in Benny Hill, or Leela of the Sevateem in Dr. Who (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leela_(Doctor_Who)#Conception ) to see what the BCC in general viewed a "dad appeal."
These Moog dancers don't fit that mode. I mean, the second dance ends with about 40 seconds just watching the cameras, which have crowded the frustrated dancers off-screen. How is that "dad appeal"?
Yes, there are bare midriffs, but that's all that's needed for "dad appeal" then there are far easier and cheaper ways to do it.
And the third video is in mostly in half-darkness with the women in flowing dresses, where if the goal is to "check out the bodies of some young, fit, conventionally physically attractive women" then it failed miserably.
This looks like standard avant-garde/modern dance, which has it own audience. A small one, yes, but that's why these shows aren't common.
Maybe that's a question of taste? Of opinion? You're obviously not wrong I just disagree it's so clear cut. This stuff is not Benny Hill. Note that the "Moog dancers" don't have to be tailoring their stuff to "Dad appeal" for some tv exec to look at it and think, "yep, that works and we can defend it on the grounds of high art when Mary Whitehouse and her ilk start yelling corruption of youth" or whatever. Obviously to view it completely solely through a lens of sexuality is as silly as viewing anything in life in those terms. There is colour, there is movement, there are visual patterns ranging from the simple to the more complex, there is order that degrades and is restored, it can be appreciated and discussed completely ignoring the sexual elements and there are circumstances where it is utterly reasonable to do so.
Benny Hill had some really terrific, visually clever and hilariously funny gags [1] that weren't about women with big tits bending over or a man with the head of a swan coming out of the fly in his trousers. The Moog Dancers really aren't much like that kind of brazen "for the 12 year old in the dads." Note that I've argued both sides of this w.r.t. the moog dancers and don't claim to have "the" answer. Your opinion is as good as anyone's. "Not as bad as ..." Doesn't mean "has absolutely nothing in common with."
[1] I wanted to link a sketch here that I remember that is probably on youtube but google in their infinite wisdom are murdering searching for what you want in favour of algorithmic curation of what they want to show you so there's no way I can find it, or anything Benny Hill that doesn't involve bikini clad women and additional misogyny concerning women who are of a different age and shape. He got the rep for good reason.
Again, this is all very conjectural of you. This argument can be used to assert that a show with an attractive woman is on TV because the woman is attractive, and not because of other merits. It's demeaning.
That's not saying it isn't true. Like I said, there is solid evidence that "Dad factor" did influence the BBC.
But it demands something besides conjecture. Else we could conjecture that the BBC scheduled association football because the TV execs wanted to appeal to the repressed homoerotic feelings of its viewership.[1]
> Note that I've argued both sides of this w.r.t. the moog dancers and don't claim to have "the" answer.
"Argue" is what people do in a bull session. Give some evidence that one or the other has basis in reality.
My experience and understanding tells me that the decision to program this sort of act because of the "sexualising the women", in the "both points of view" you see IS NOT TRUE.
While people can and do sexualize just about anything (people have probably shipped Rumpole of the Bailey), what I see in these video shows no signs of deliberate titillation, and yet with many opportunities to do so. And I see many parts which are a turn-off, like the crowding out by the camera.
Further, unless this was part of a continuing series of sexualising acts, why would a tv exec care? It's not going to affect ratings.
While on the other hand, we do know modern dance and avante-garde performance exist, and some look like this of their own accord without attempts to sexualize, and we know variety acts of that era also included novelty performances for the oddity of it.
[1] Personally, I only watch Time Team because of the pure eroticism of Philip Harding, and anyone who hasn't looked at him and "let their imagination go at least a little probably has some pretty profound health issues and my sympathies".
It’s hard to imagine where you might see something like this today
Ironically, you are more likely to see something like this on YouTube than on TV (I mean not just viewing old TV clips).
Aside: The BBC Archive channel on YouTube is a great dip into some of the BBC archives.
Sometimes I do miss the days of being forced to watch "what ever is on" but I think that is more of a failing in curating the programming for these services. I wish there was a website I could check-off my interests, list my location and the streaming services I subscribe to, and it would just give me my next show to watch.
I also wish something like that existed for video games, collating my steam library + subscription services (EA, PS+, Gamepass, etc.) and just tell me what game to play next, before they age off etc.
Honestly, in this digital age where everything is automated and the era of search I find the curation and recommendation of all of these subscription services to be really very poor.
If you find these recommendation services poor, did you give them feedback on the initial and subsequent recommendations in order to train them?
It is painfully annoying as I have downloaded apps for Disney+, Prime, etc. but I will not get recommendations for shows/films on these platforms, or simple integrations such as the option to continue playing from the google landing page. Any recommendations I do get end up being for media that I need to buy or subscribe to a service I do not have. Considering I have to download and login to each of the streaming apps, you would think google would know what I want to watch.
As for the recommendations in-app, they are not good. Ok, so Netflix shows me shows that I probably would like more than what it shows my wife, but 90% of them are still not good. If there is a show I know I want to watch it is painfully difficult to find it without specifically searching for it with textual input.
I don't think these platforms are actually recommending what they think you want to watch, more some overlap between what will decrease their bandwidth bill the most (i.e. currently cached closet to me) and some broad category like "horror".
There is definitely a market for a good cross-subscription/service recommendation platform for both TV/film and video games. It's definitely not google TV.
One thing that I noticed about Google TV is that it’s buggy. I can’t even add another separate account and just have it work. I’d try your luck with another streaming box like Amazon.
OK, I'm not in the UK. However, I always like to defy conventional wisdom that everyone knows, and that is certainly some of it.
Broadcast TV is digital now, in the US at least. An antenna will cost you $50-75 or so, it's tiny, and if you have line-of-sight with the tower, you get a perfect picture. It will be in 4K soon, supposedly.
What's on? Well, sports, if you like that. I watched the US v. Netherlands match yesterday on broadcast. All the big college football games were on yesterday. If you don't watch sports, then yeah, there's not much.
Still: local news, much better than you find on the web. And PBS stations. And ancient TV shows, e.g. Frasier, Taxi. It doesn't replace streaming, but it IS free.
Can't you find the exact local news broadcast on the web to watch at the time of your choosing? If not why not? Seems odd.
They're a blast from the past. They never changed. It's like the crew from The Mary Tyler Moore Show is still putting on the news.
Every time I visit family and watch the TV I am maddened by the adverts, and general quality of the programming.
Regarding news, the internet is a better fit for me. If we're talking about "general" news rather than reading change logs, then I get my fix with written news on half a dozen outlets ranging from public media, political left/right media, and then some more specialised websites for tech/cyber news.
I don't think I would go back to "normal" TV/broadcast media. It makes me emotionally angry and I can feel a physical response to the annoyance of it.
YouTube or TikTok, because broadcast TV is all but dead.
I mean there’s the three broadcast cameras dancing plus operators plus more broadcast cameras shooting operating on a full soundstage with crews of gaffers and grips and catering and scale wages.
I am not saying that YouTube and TikTok aren’t possibly as creative. Only that nobody is putting that level of resources behind a TikTok because nobody will put that much money at risk.
Try:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FwiMlDQ7rI
I did not look hard.
In terms of creative expression, I think TikTok and YouTube are vastly more egalitarian allowing greater artistic expression by many many more people.
And I think they are certainly filled with better dancing in terms of technique, aesthetics, and expression.
What they don't have is the production value of a crewed soundstage...plus three additional studio cameras in the dance. There's the equivalent of a few million dollars worth of hardware as a "prop."
Yeah but they kinda do nowadays don't they? I mean I look at 70s tv clips like these ones and stick that search term into google and do not see a drop in production values from one to the other. Picture quality is frequently an improvement, yay tech advances? Sound mixing can sound great using inexpensive equipment and some recently learned expertise? Lighting, kind of couples with camera tech but seems to be able to be ok without it costing everything?
In fact my guess is a bunch of professional dance companies get grants and funding to professionally video their stuff and stick it on the web while being totally under their own artistic control, not needing to wait for an invitation to a broadcast tv station and not having to give up so much for the requirements of that medium?
I dislike the way youtube does things, but I'm not doing it better so there's that. There is surely an ocean of manure there. I really do like the diamonds in amongst all that stench that otherwise would not have been made, let alone found an audience. Especially and particularly the educational resources.
(I like it more when they don't do that, since they had more room to play with reactions - like Phlox at movie night in Star Trek: Enterprise. He found it a lot more interesting to watch the audience.)
First:
> This would have been at the height of ‘Moog mania’, when the success of Switched On Bach led to an explosion of interest in electronic music.
How adventurous is it to follow a trend?
Second, let's see what else the BBC was showing in the 1970s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_and_White_Minstrel_S...
> The Black and White Minstrel Show was a British light entertainment show that ran for twenty years on BBC prime-time television. Running from 1958 to 1978, it was a weekly variety show that presented traditional American minstrel and country songs, as well as show tunes and music hall numbers, lavishly costumed. It was also a successful stage show that ran for ten years from 1962 to 1972 at the Victoria Palace Theatre, London. This was followed by tours of UK seaside resorts, together with Australia and New Zealand.
Getting it out of the way: Product of the Times, Different Era, Nobody Knew Any Better, Long Ago, Nobody Remembers, Worth The Licence Fee Alone, Stop Being Sensitive. Am I forgetting anything? My point, though, is that the BBC was hardly a fully progressive institution back then, and it showing weird-but-unchallenging pap hardly proves it was more adventurous than TV now.
I'm rather fond of the dancing in Raumpatrouille - https://youtu.be/evx-1CtRlek?t=25 .
"Alive from Off Center" had some avant-garde modern dance in the 1980s and 1990s - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3O6YHHN5dA .
A bit more light-hearted: "Nine Person Precision Ball Passing" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaidOy8-Hdo . Only 29 views.
More avant-garde dancing - https://youtu.be/ITBIagJImNk?t=249 .
Going on a tangent: the social protests from this collection of spoken-word pieces in this 1991 episode are, sadly, essentially unchanged - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY7pKQ-Imco .
We had red, yellow, and green LEDs by then. While I don't know the history, I stuck "green led" into archive.org and found things like "At one-fifth the current, these red, yellow and green LED seven-segment numeric displays are equal in brightness to the previous displays." in a 1975 advertisement at https://archive.org/details/sim_i-d_july-august-1975_22_4/pa... .
Though I think you mean high-intensity green?
That said, what green lights do you mean? The closest I could spot was in the skates, and they didn't look all that green. Can you give a time code?
The shots are only a few seconds long. There's plenty of time to replace batteries as needed.
Or perhaps it's more that they reflect green well, rather than emit green?
I suspect those would be incandescent in a greenish tube, though. I've got a replica glowing lifeclock from Logan's Run (supposedly molded from production molds), and it's a little mini incadescent. Stuff some batteries in the skates, change them between takes if you need to.
Oh my god! Are they still available?
Had a Logan's Run themed birthday party for my wife's 30th. Party favors included ankh necklaces (ankhs from some party supply for $1/each or something). I'm a year younger, so I wore a red life clock, and made her a flashing one... But I'm no movie magician, the timer kit and battery and wires to go with it were waaaaaay too cumbersome. If only she had rollerskates on her hand, we could make it work ;)
Also, I was powering with a 9V battery... It was important to keep some with varying states or charge, because with a fresh battery, the light was too red.
If you email me to remind me (in profile), I can try to find the ebay receipts from several years ago and see if there's anyway to contact the seller. I may also be willing to part with mine. Gotta find it first, but I'm past renewal age now, gotta move on to reciting cat poems.
Big Chuck and Little John come to mind
I agree, but at a personal level I find it sad how that, given the gargantuan amount of media available, and the ease of consuming it, how quickly things fall into the "old fad" bucket.
For example, I find that there is a lot of content on TikTok that is truly amazing. I like watching parkour videos, and I'm amazed at these people's skills and daredevil tricks. But it's so easily to quickly scroll through hundreds of these videos that they lose their unique luster too quickly, and after a while it feels like "meh, that was cool, what's next".
I guess I'm arguing that this overabundance of consumable media content has some big negative consequences, similar to how the overabundance of food in the middle part of the last century had grave health consequences for most Western nations.
Some people dancing proves that TV was more adventurous then than today — shows like Naked Attraction, Documental and The Briefcase notwithstanding!
Someone was paid to write an original composition and another to choreograph the dancing.
Those are expensive cameras dancing on a proper soundstage operates by professionals and shot with a multi-camera setup by another set of professionals…it’s all choreographed, rehearsed, directed, and edited.
Nothing like that happens today without a celebrity.
Now that's an interesting insight.
Dance groups still do works like that. Here's ODC San Francisco.[1] Not many people watch that sort of thing.
The modern equivalent would be a stage full of Boston Dynamics robots choreographed by an AI with an AI-generated trap music score.
Although it reminds me that the BBC had musique concrète station idents in the 70s. Also used more famously for incidental music for Dr Who and a few other shows.
Or more generally, to the degree humans are hardwired and/or culturally programmed to watch dance, I think it is to watch people dance.
Watching waves break on rocks, clouds blow by, and fires crackle is a different type of experience for me than watching dance or sport or juggling.
I have a higher degree of isomorphism with other humans than non-humans and I believe that creates a different context for my experiences.
Unlike this clip, it was built around celebrity and commercial music.
That probably explains why it had such a long run.
Incidentally, Wikipedia says it started in 1971 the same year this clip purports to be.
I dont think its that hard to imagine in a time where weird dancing memes are what the kids are doing on tiktok