Nestled among Netflix’s list of most streamed shows for last month lies an unexpected entrant. In between major production series like Stranger Things and The Sandman, and hotly anticipated new releases like Selling The OC and I Am A Killer, innocuously sits Channel 4’s own Gogglebox.
Gogglebox first hit the streaming site in February 2021, and with series one to 16 available to watch ad free and a long-lived love affair launched by a similar Ode written in my University paper ten years ago, I decided to spend one slovenly hungover Sunday morning harking back to a simpler time with some vintage Gogglebox episodes.
Taking a trip back to 2013 and the living rooms (and one bedroom) of Britain’s very best armchair critics had me cackling with laughter – and that was even before Scarlett Moffat joined the cast - but also grimacing at some of the horribly outdated views that somehow made it into the final edit.
Now, don’t get me wrong – throwback Gogglebox is truly wholesome content, a touching insight into the universal experience of fraught family fissions and tender moments – just like when the Micheals’ family’s ‘secret son’ Pascal returned home from Uni to surprise his mum, Carolyne.
It also had some of the most relatable TV commentary and delivered two of the funniest Gogglebox scenes ever, that have lived rent free in my head ever since: During an episode of The Cube and a particularly tense Operation-style game, Leon Bernicoff telling his very much silent wife June to ‘Quiet June, hold your nerve June’; and Steph and Dom Parker, the posh owners of a 17(!) bedroom house in Sandwich with a penchant for weekday binge drinking, laughing so hard they tipped over the sofa they were sat on.
Note their unphased sausage dog puppy bottom right, who is clearly very used to this shit.
But there’s little signs of the times everywhere, from some of the ‘boxers smoking indoors, to barely-veiled racism and altogether more flagrant misogyny. In the very first episode, a news segment asking whether women who work for the NHS should be allowed to wear full face veils in hospitals elicited a firm response.
‘Of course they shouldn’t wear a bloody veil, it’s ridiculous,’ said Michaels matriarch Carolyne. ‘How would you feel if you went to the hospital and a doctor or a nurse was looking at you through a flipping slitty thing?’
Another short-lived ‘boxer, who himself was referred to by then narrator Carolyn Ahern as a ‘qualified balloon-bender’ (he and his partner ran a fancy-dress shop), pointed out ‘You’re not allowed to go into a bank wearing a motorcycle helmet’, and fan favourite Leon claimed the veil itself wasn’t ‘a religious thing’.
While some pointed out the nuance to the debate, there was very little to illustrate this in the final edit we saw on screen, with a largely single-sided, arguably xenophobic feel to the segment which wouldn’t fly in 2022. We’d expect today’s producers and editors to present a balanced view from the British public, not just the more extreme opinions to flare headlines.
What was unignorable from some of my most loved cast-members was the outright sexism directed at nearly every female host or presenter on their screens. From vitriol about Carol Vorderman’s age – ‘what does Carol Vorderman know about food? Look at her hands, look how old her hands look!’ – to graphic assessments of her bang-ability, it’s the kind of editing which just wouldn’t cut it with a modern audience.
When the ‘boxers sat down to watch a documentary fronted by renowned Egyptologist and professor of archeology Joann Fletcher, they were so distracted by her eccentric appearance – which, by the way, is basically a uniform for enthusiastic historians – that they were, in the words of Steven and/or Michael from Wigan, ‘put off learning about the Egyptians.’
In the space of a two-minute segment she was compared to Ozzy Osbourne, John Lennon, and ‘a cross between Annie and Ken Dodd’, with longest serving Goggleboxer (alongside the treasured Siddiqui family) Stephen Webb saying, ‘Where do they find these people? [It seems] like they’ve pulled her out of a bingo hall.’
From the casual lumping together of all Eastern Europeans as ‘Polish!’ by Brixton royalty Sandy and Sandra, to Steph Parker ‘affectionately’ calling her husband ‘such a poof’, the musings of the Great British Public from the comfort of their living rooms might not be cause for outrage in itself, but the decision of Channel 4 to broadcast it to telly might certainly raise an eyebrow in today’s world.
All that said, in the murky waters of badly aging TV (of which there is PLENTY from the era), Gogglebox is certainly a minor offender. There’s loads about the early series’ that’s positively unproblematic – a sketch from one show where a woman called Tatiana lifted weights with her vagina prompted only the mildest of language for the female genitalia, and some good-natured, PG friendly sexual objectification of a pre-Summer Monteys-Fullam era Paul Hollywood landed gently. A news report about the Queen being hospitalised due to Gastroenteritis sparked universal incredulousness from viewers: ‘Mate if it’s all over the news now that the Queen has got the shits, what’s going to happen when she finally pops her clogs?’ pointed out Steven or Michael from Wigan - great comedic talents of their day, gone too soon. ‘There’s people dying around the world and the news is telling us the Queen has got the shits.’
Weirder still is the insight from the recent past into current day events. In episode three, teary-eyed Goggleboxers watched footage from the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee festivities, mournfully asserting that she was unlikely to see another one – ten years later, Her Madge has just celebrated her Platty Joobs with even more elaborate fanfare, marking seventy years on the throne. A 2013 BBC documentary called The Irresistible Rise Of Boris Johnson had all of them chortling away at his ‘scruffy hair’ and scoffing at his chances of landing the top job.
‘The thing is,’ asserted Dom Parker, who would later go on to film a TV show with Nigel Farage, ‘if I actually genuinely thought he was up for a chance, I’d back him.’
There’s something very uncanny about looking back at recent history. If you want a reminder of how it really was, Gogglebox is a great place to start.