Progressives against progress

BBC4 has beeen showing an alleged comedy series entitled The History of the world backwards. The rather complicated premise of this is that time runs backwards form now while people still continue to age normally, so we have people born in the 1980s looking back nostalgically (or otherwise) from the 1910s at the age of high technology -long since passed- of their youth.
This premise, which would have formed the basis of a sketch a generation ago, is stretched out to several half hour episodes. I have not been minded to check how many since watching even part of one was more than enough for me.
This show has been masterminded by Rob Newman, once a darling of the British comedy scene, who along with his partner David Baddiel, were credited with making comedy the "New rock'n'roll" selling out, in the process, huge London arenas. It seemed, in those halcyon days, that Newman was the genius and most predicted that he would move on bigger and better things while Baddiel would probably fade into obscurity. This proved not to be the case, however. After their partnership expired, Baddiel found himself part of the hugely successful Skinner & Baddiel act. David Baddiel, like the composer Richard Rodgers, has found himself part of two huge double acts, wearing out one Hart before finding another Hammerstein.
Meanwhile, Rob Newman went awol from the comedy scene. There were quiet mutterings that he had become an activist and "eco-warrior". Latterly he has returned to his roots via stage to television. Appearing as it does on BBC4 it will have a small audience by comparison to his old shows. Frankly, whatever audience it gets will be too high for its merits.
This show makes the cardinal sin of comedy. Namely it is not very funny. Actually it is so appallingly unfunny that it is at times quite numbing. Newman has clearly got an agenda -an anti-globalisation, anti-technological one- and that does not make for good comedy especially since he adopts a very preachy tone (ie using terms like "climate change criminals" etc). Newman's world view appears to be so Luddite that I wonder if he should consider changing his name to Oldman? It would suit his agenda a lot before.
This series represents a kind of Polpottian wish fulfillment among the Newman-luddites of this world, a blithe return to an agragarian idyll, living in a world of plenty communing with mother nature. It is as realistic as Marie Antoinette dressing as a shepherdess and acting out her milkmaid fantasies while the real shepherdesses were starving around her. We should never forget the world is a harsh place and it is only in the scientific age that famine and disease have been tamed although not yet entirely expunged.
Needless to say, as time runs backwards in Newman's fantasy world, only technological advances would disappear not the social progress that went with them, so that a return to tilling the land would not be accompanied by a return to sexism, racism et al even though these advances were only made possible by the advances in science.
Newman is one of a number of priveldged westerners who might be termed "Progressives against progress". At least they tend to portray themselves as progressives, and would see themselves in a Leftwing tradition except that is, that the leftwing tradition has been very much pro-technology until very recently. This is another example of the tpsy-turvidom of our times; we now see "progressives" aligning themselves to positions which were adopted by the most arch-conservative reactionaries in the past.
As I was writing this blog I looked up the phrase "progressives against progress" on google. The first site listed was a funny and highly accurate parody of this kind of thinking which unfortunatey seems to have been removed. One of its slogans reads:
The past is in our future
You can see find it in google's cache. I suggest you have alook at it. Its a lot funnier than The Hostory of the world backwards