Remember when technology felt fun and life-changing? | Alex Clark
A younger member of my family has been known to leave the room, wailing: "They're talking about sweets again!" when those of a certain age rhapsodise about the confectionery of yore; Spangles, Sherbet Fountains and Kola Kubes do not float his boat. Thus we are made to realise how tiresome group nostalgia is to youth, which immediately sparks a slew of memories of how irksome it was every time one's parents insisted that David Sylvian was all well and good, but they preferred songs where you could hear the lyrics.
So the first rule of writing about the BBC's (sort of) revival of Tomorrow's World, the future technology programme that ran for nearly 40 years, is to avoid banging on about how back then we were all told we'd be swallowing pills instead of roast dinners and be strapped into personal transporters. (The latter became so ingrained in the collective culture that there is a band called We Were Promised Jetpacks, formed in 2003, the year Tomorrow's World last aired).
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