Nostalgia Night

Saturday is my nostalgia night. I watch old shows that are like old friends and fond memories of old days.

Saturday is Britcom night on VPT and Mountain Lake PBS. I've watched Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced “Bouquet”, if you please) on “Keeping Up Appearances” for what feels like forever. I remember my dad complaining about her antics close to twenty years ago! I don't watch as many episodes as I used to - most weeks there are at least two ... both of which I'll know practically verbatim. Whenever I do, though, it brings me back to happy Saturday nights in our living room on Belmont, watching with Mommy and Daddy, and maybe Dan and Ajay too after a nice homemade pizza dinner.

More recently I've become a fan of another oldie: “As Time Goes By”. I'm appreciating it's humour more and more, and somehow I'm feeling a real affinity for the main characters, Jean and Lionel. I like the way they bicker yet have such love and tenderness underneath it. I like the quick witted verbal repartee. And I like the familiar old British expressions like “in two shakes of a lamb's tail” and “if you think --- then you've got another think coming” that I've heard all my life - and use regularly myself too.

And to start off the evening, there's “The Lawrence Welk Show”. I don't watch it every week; it's really not Dan's favourite. But if I like the theme and the songs they're going to perform, I try to get away with it. It's really an oldie. The episodes they show jump around from black and white days in the 1950's until it wound down in the early 80’s. It was in its last days when I was young and watched it with my mom. Even my parents found it kind of outdated really. I still like it though. It's so wholesome and reminds me of simpler, happier, more refined days that maybe never even existed ... but that I like to imagine did. Even their recent Halloween show was a kind of “fun” scary that I could handle. So even though I may be the only person on the planet (at least under the age of fifty - or maybe sixty or seventy) who actually voluntarily watches, I enjoy it too.

So that's my Saturday night. Not everybody's cup of tea I'm sure. Perhaps nobody else's cup of tea. But to me it's an absolutely perfect way to end the day and I couldn't think of any better or happier way to spend a Saturday evening.