7 Reasons The 1950s Were Better Than The Present
1. Pipes. In the 1950s if you smoked a pipe, you were a stand-up fellow, a good chap, a pillar of society who drove a Morris Cowley and wore a hounds-tooth sports jacket with leather arm-patches. In the present if you smoke a pipe, you are probably embroiled in a downward spiral of addiction and degradation that will ultimately lead to you living in an alley and offering to fellate strangers in exchange for something called crack (according to television).
2. Crooners. In the 1950s there was Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Perry Como. Nowadays, we have someone called Michael Buble. He points a lot.
3. Prime Ministers. The Prime Ministers of the 1950s were Atlee, Churchill, Eden and Macmillan. That’s the man voted the greatest Briton of all time and three men with impressive moustaches. Now we have Gordon Brown. He has one eye and a clunking fist.
4. Writers. In the ’50s Kerouac wrote On The Road in a benzedrine-fuelled prose-frenzy on a continuous roll of paper, while Burroughs shot his wife in the head in Mexico and moved to Tangiers, using newspapers to form novels of rare brilliance with his pioneering cut-up technique. Modern writers tap away at their laptops fuelled by tea and ginger biscuits while a fat cat dozes contentedly by their side, frittering away most of their words on blogs and…Hang on, this is a rubbish argument, pretend you haven’t seen it.
5. Ladies Undergarments. In the ’50s ladies wore stockings and suspenders. Stockings and suspenders are brilliant. They are complex enough to be interesting from an engineering viewpoint but simple enough that, with practice, a man can learn to undo them easily. They are also great fun to tweak, resulting in a satisfying slapping noise when released – they’re even more fun to tweak than bra-straps. The modern equivalent to stockings and suspenders are tights. Tights are rubbish. The only excuse for ever choosing tights over stockings and suspenders is if you are a pair of bank-robbing Siamese twins.
6. Ladies Undergarments. In the ’50s bras were plain, under-wired things which gave some indication of the proportions of the protruberances contained within. Nowadays, women wear Wonderbras, which are awful things. You take an apparently spectacularly proportioned woman home, reach for her bra clasp and, having deftly unhooked it with a single-handed flourish, discover you’ve made molehills out of mountains.
7. Television. In the 1950s people on both television channels spoke with received pronunciation and wore evening dress while addressing weighty and sensible topics. These days, there are hundreds of channels full of the working classes. They sing and dance badly, there are women painted orange, men wearing horizontally striped jerseys with their tracksuit bottoms tucked into their socks, ruffians setting upon one another drunkenly, Piers Morgan. It’s rubbish.
Using the comments section is like asking if we can come out to play.
Yeah, the present would be better without Piers Morgan.