If you could wind back the clock ....

[Guest]

..over the last 50 or so years, what would you like never to have been developed or allowed? [note to readers...if we could refrain from anything political or making snide remarks about politicians of any party that would be much appreciated !].

Here are mine:

No-win-no-fee solicitors/lawyers

TV soaps....because anytime I happen to dip into one of them (by accident) it seems to me that any interaction is always confrontational with people shouting at each other.

Violent video games.

Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter (because of the damage that can be done, especially to children, in the form of cyber-bullying)

Hackers

Derivatives/CDO's and other exotic financial instruments

[John Shelton]

Homo sapiens.

(Oh sorry - 50 years. Colour television).

[John Shelton]

The idea in the UK that food is an interesting subject (foreign notion which doesn't work here at all. Hence the proliferation of TV programmes all of them in colour in which glamorous people assemble ridiculous and impossible meals and people watch them in the pretense that it's possible to replicate the thing at home then throw the resultant toxic mess away).

Neglected British Music. Once it was perfectly OK to sneer at neglected British symphonists etc. Now they are all over the place and there are organisations devoted to turning the Proms into a festival of Cotswold Rhapsodies etc. Perhaps, psychologically, it's a compensatory mechanism for having to pretend food is an interesting subject?

[Hornspieler]

QANGOs

Professional Olympic competitors

Musicologists

[Nick Armstrong]

No-win-no-fee solicitors/lawyers

Interesting. I wonder why you think that. Because they tend to foster an excessively litigious society à la US ?

[salymap]

People who set themselves up as 'healers', chiropractors, sometimes osteopaths, with inadequate or no training.

This doesn't apply to all such people, perhaps a few, but they can do limitless damage.

[Northender]

I agree about Facebook, Twitter and similar social networking sites. Any advantages they offer are (IMHO) far outweighed by the harm they do.
I would also never have allowed TV programmes in which members of the public not only provide the performers (or 'content' as they say), who often make fools of themselves in the process, but also encourage everybody else to sit in judgment on, and often humiliate, their fellows by voting for or against them by phone (thereby covering the cost of producing the programmes).
24/7 TV news was also a mistake, I think, especially on the evidence of the last week.

[mercia]

24/7 TV news was also a mistake, I think, especially on the evidence of the last week.

are you referring in particular to some of the reporting from Wales ?
[........... which I thought was incredibly insensitive in parts]

[Resurrection Man]

Interesting. I wonder why you think that. Because they tend to foster an excessively litigious society à la US ?

Yes, very much so.

[amateur51]

The idea in the UK that food is an interesting subject (foreign notion which doesn't work here at all. Hence the proliferation of TV programmes all of them in colour in which glamorous people assemble ridiculous and impossible meals and people watch them in the pretense that it's possible to replicate the thing at home then throw the resultant toxic mess away).

Neglected British Music. Once it was perfectly OK to sneer at neglected British symphonists etc. Now they are all over the place and there are organisations devoted to turning the Proms into a festival of Cotswold Rhapsodies etc. Perhaps, psychologically, it's a compensatory mechanism for having to pretend food is an interesting subject?

[vinteuil]

... well, of course the rot really set in with the French Revolution, and it's been downhill since then - but if I had to single out (double out?) two things from the last half-century, I think I wd specify :

a) chewing gum

b) the populist notion that the opinions of the Public are, per se, 'Interesting', and to be accorded an equivalent status of Seriousness to the Judgments of the Experts.

[scottycelt]

A computer Operating System that has no shutdown button because apparently the original American programmer thought it was surplus to requirements and, in any case, he considered it a thoroughly innovative and 'cool idea'.

'Cool Ideas' in general.

Elephants in rooms, monkeys on backs, and cans being kicked down the road.

The end of steam trains.

Partick Thistle getting relegated.

Flying Teapots (well you did say 50 years OR SO!).

[Flosshilde]

Nuclear weapons, or nuclear fision/fusion generally (I've just realised that 50 years back was 1962 & I was twelve, & the nuclear bomb had been invented long before that. Oh dear. )

[vinteuil]

'Cool Ideas' in general.

... I am glad to see that scottie does not reject in toto the - timid - advances of Vatican II, which started almost exactly fifty years ago (16 October 1962).

[Northender]

are you referring in particular to some of the reporting from Wales ?
[........... which I thought was incredibly insensitive in parts]

Indeed I am. When it wasn't insensitive, it was often repetitive. I suppose the problem is that no news editor can risk not having somebody 'on the ground' if or when something happens, and if nothing has happened the hapless reporter still has to say something during a scheduled bulletin, as it otherwise becomes even more difficult to justify the already questionable allocation of resources.