Television Review

THERE'S A CULTURAL smugness implicit in the way we deride our own past. Days Like These (ITV) relies for its comedy on the collective assumption that we've come a long way since 1976, when the sitcom is set. We no longer have cascades of blow-dried hair, nor, like one of the characters, do we think that pineapple exoticises everything we eat it with. But surely we all understand that, laugh though we may at the tackiness of the 1970s, in 20 years' time, someone else will be falling off their stools at their memories of the 1990s. How smug will we look then?

Another problem confronts a sitcom that laughs at the 1970s. It may be the decade that taste forgot, but in Fawlty Towers and Steptoe and Son, it yielded perhaps the two best British sitcoms. So the 1970s weren't all bad, and any sitcom that says they were might as well aim a pistol at its own foot. Days Like These, an anglicised version of an American series, is mostly bad. Its title is an echo of Happy Days - "days" is a trigger word for nostalgia - but it has none of the affection for the 1970s that Happy Days, made in the 1970s, had for the 1950s. It's not even that interested in them. The scattering of knowing jokes about perms are a seasoning, rather than the main meal, like the up-to-the minute references written into Drop the Dead Donkey at the eleventh hour of the production schedule.

Days Like These isn't really about the 1970s any more than Drop the Dead Donkey was about the news. It's actually about teenagers from Luton (played by actors in their mid-twenties) trying to circumvent parental authority, and, as such, it could be set in any post-war decade you care to mention, including ours. It suggests a lack of confidence in the material that they had to gun for the most risible decade. It's tantamount to bullying. Pick on a decade your own size, like the Sixties, or the Thirties.

Unlike Days Like These, Never Mind the Buzzcocks (BBC2), which returned this week, isn't about to pretend that the 1970s happened to somebody else. It acknowledges that the glamrocker is father to the man. This week, Simon Le Bon was ye olde guest in the stocks, and submitted with grace to the barrage of mockery that is one of the show's many bequests from Have I Got New For You. He looked identical to his team-mate Kathy Burke, heartwarming proof that even at his age, he can still look like a girl.

And finally to Pig at The Ritz? (C5), a surreally pointless documentary about a woman who aspired to take a member of the eponymous species to the eponymous hotel. Don't ask why. The last time the Ritz was in the news was because Charles and Camilla were spotted by 5,000 cameramen on its doorstep. The hotel management correctly judged that a pig taking tea on its premises might not be quite such good PR. So the pig didn't get the gig, and ended up going to some hovel - sorry, hotel - in Gloucester. I think the Ritz should sue for wrongful use of its name. Channel 5's defence would be that no one actually watched the programme. They didn't miss much.