Age

What follows here is opinion, not fact. It will probably be of no use to you in your essays. HINT: Why not develop your own ideas on this topic?

After gender and ethnicity, age is the most obvious category under which we file people, and there are a whole range of judgements which go along with our categorisation. We quickly deem other people too old, or too young, or criticise them for being immature or fuddy duddy. We criticise mature women for going about as mutton dressed as lamb, and young girls for tarting themselves up as jail bait. Film stars who start to show signs of aging in their forties are swooped on with cries of horror by gossip columnists ("Movie star gets wrinkles... and her tits start to sag" shocker!!) while those who succumb to the surgeon's knife are written about with equal distaste ("Movie star can't raise eyebrows and her tit's DON't sag" equal shocker!!!). Thanks to the media, we appear to live in an age obsessed world: a world obsessed with youth and its attendant beauty. Old people are often subject to the most rigid stereotypes of all (old = ugly, weak, stupid). The future looks pretty bleak for all of us. I can't even find any other websites which deal with age and representation. By denying that ageing is a natural part of the process, we condemn ourselves to an eternal adolescence (God! No!) and do not acknowledge that our tastes may grow and change. Will you still want YOUR MTV when you're 80?

Things are changing, however; as the baby boomers of the 1950s and 1960s move on towards their 'Third Age', they demand the same consumer comfort they have always done, and also demand the right to see themselves fairly represented on TV. There have been some high profile representations of the elderly in recent years (and I'm not talking about Bruce Willis playing Ross's Dad in "Friends"). US sitcom The Golden Girls is perhaps one of the most famous, centring on 4 female characters all determinedly over 50 (and it can make Sex & The City look like Sesame Street - I'd back Blanche over Samantha any day!!! Just glance through this episode guide to see what i mean). Soap operas too have their part to play in eroding stereotypes - usually because the audience of soaps has a relatively high 'grey' segment. Old people can provide a deeply comic element to television ("I don't believe it!") whilst balancing the humour with frightening vulnerability and pathos. We're all going to die, after all.

Soap is no exception. Ralph and Harry were the two best characters EVER on Brookside (Why oh why doesn't www.brookie.com have an archive), Harold gave us a lot of laughs on Neighbours, and Percy Sugden's cantankerous nature kept audiences entertained for years on Corrie. Two of the most powerful Old People in Soap, have, however, been the inimitable Dot and Ethel off EastEnders. Dot has lived a life that would make Job weep, with a no good bigamist husband, a murderous junkie son and now Ashley, the grandson from Hell. Ethel, on the other hand, was a hell-raiser till the end, and even her slide into terminal cancer could not quell her zest for life. Her dignified death, screened in late autumn 2000, was riveting viewing.

Old people on TV rock. You heard it here first.

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