Original subtitles

(Getranscribeerd door TurboScribe. Upgrade naar Onbeperkt om dit bericht te verwijderen.) These men are angry.

Well, they're not so much angry as fed

up.

Well, not even fed up really.

What these men are is grumpy.

Instant, you walk out your front door, you

see something that annoys you.

School plays are universally and uniformly shite.

They call me Victor Meldrum.

My band call me Victor Meldrum.

My kids call me Victor Meldrum.

Actually, I think when my hair finally falls

out, I probably am Victor Meldrum.

Death penalty.

It has to be public and it has

to be a beheading.

Men over 30 would pay attention.

I hate the phrase traffic calming.

People don't believe you.

When I say I am not Bob Harris,

I never did the whistle test.

Turn the f***ing music down!

The 35 to 54-year-old group of

men is the grumpiest of any in Britain

today.

Grumpier than their parents, who survived the war

and felt lucky to draw their pensions.

Grumpier than their children, who seem perfectly happy

doing a lot of drugs and spending all

night on the Internet.

Who wants to surf on the net?

Am I computer literate?

You've got to be out of your mind.

IKEA.

It comes in a handy flat pack.

Today's generation of grumpy old men grew up

in a world they believed was getting better.

Love and peace.

Tolerance and freedom.

The world would be a nicer place.

Instead, their legacy to their children is global

warming, political non-entities, killing dark-skinned strangers

in far-off lands and Rupert Murdoch.

These men are grumpy because the drug-induced

dreams of the 60s have turned to dust.

When I was a child, there was a

sense that the world was improving, that somehow

everything was going to get better, that there

would be world peace, there would be no

hunger, that people would live in fraternity and

sorority and happiness.

There was a sense of optimism.

And yet, of course, you grow up and

it turns out to be just as crap

as it always has been for every other

generation.

We like to think that things would get

better.

We don't feel they have in lots of

areas.

I'm an extremely grumpy person.

Whether or not it's just because I'm a

sour bastard or whether it's because I fit

some demographic trend, I'm not entirely certain.

In fact, the very suggestion that my grumpiness

may not be entirely my own tends to

put me in a bit of a grump.

I put on this sort of thing on

telly that I'm sort of like Mr Nicey

Nicey, but I'm just always, you know, grumbling

about something, but I think it just keeps

me happy.

But grumpy old men know they can't continually

go round saying how things were so much

better when they were young.

So they've ended up just being quietly grumpy

about, well, everything.

And that's what this series is about, all

the things that hack them off.

They're grumpy about mobile phones they can never

get away from, about people who wear designer

labels on the outside of their clothes.

They're grumpy about traffic calming that may calm

the traffic but make them want to drill

out their own brains in frustration.

They're grumpy because they don't know if they're

allowed to open doors for women or to

look at their breasts, even when they're obviously

on show.

They're grumpy about tattoos and about body piercing.

They're grumpy about the trains and the abuse

of everyday language, and they're all grumpy about

automated call centres.

And do our grumpy old men get phoned

up at home while eating dinner by double

-glazing salesmen?

Er, I do, and I tell them to

f*** off.

People try to put us to death This

was the generation that hoped to die before

it got old and has instead found itself

old and not dead.

Instead, they are increasingly out of step with

the world around them.

At school, they saw films showing how computers

and hovercraft and vitamin drinks would make their

lives relaxed and carefree.

It won't overheat.

Nuclear power would bring electricity too cheap to

meet her.

They were encouraged to dream, but the dreams

they dared to dream just did not come

true.

I remember the 60s, I was a child

in the 60s, and I remember golden promises

echoing in my ears as I went to

bed.

I'd watched Tomorrow's World with Raymond Baxter.

Another example of the way in which the

world will shrink.

And Raymond promised me that in the future

I'd live for free, I wouldn't have to

pay my electricity bills because that would come

free, and that I could fly to America

as a young, thrusting businessman in 60 minutes.

And he lied.

The emphasis was always on technology and monorails

and being beamed up, you know, to the

Starship Enterprise.

And now we do have those sort of,

you know, intellectual communicators, of course, but you

just stand in Tesco's and ring home and

say, they haven't got shredded wheat, will sugar

puffs do instead?

Yes, what do you want?

Today, this is the group least likely to

believe that our leaders know best or that

the NHS works or that technology will improve

our lives.

The idea we'd all be going around in

jetpacks and eating our dinner with a pill

and live to be 900 and that the

planet was conquered and soon space would be.

But even the alternative visions, the kind of

60s countercultural visions, were also exceedingly utopian.

Wall-to-wall free love, raffia work of

naked limbs heaving in orgasmic delight, no need

for a government, peace and love, a mad

man stoned out of your gourd, artificial paradise,

fantastic tickety-boo.

Part of it is just about getting old,

finding themselves shouting at Top of the Pops

because they just can't write good songs anymore,

or telling their kids to turn that bloody

racket down, just like their dads.

And it's all so much worse because the

last thing they expected was to end up

talking to their kids just like their dad

talked to them.

I'll tell you how I knew I was

getting old the other day.

This is with my daughter shopping.

The great thing of shopping with your daughter

is you go to all these girls' clothes

shops that you wouldn't normally wander into, and

all the loud music.

But you get to see all these girls

wiggling in and out.

You can see them trying on.

How do I look in this?

I actually look fabulous.

I wasn't talking to you.

Oh, sorry.

And I was looking at all these things

thinking, this music is getting on my nerves.

And I went to the cashier and said,

Yes, ma'am?

She said, Ah?

I said, What are you trying to do?

Sorry?

I said, Turn the bloody music down!

She said.

And I thought, this is now, this is

a milestone in my life.

I am older because I am in a

girls' clothes shop, the place I want to

be, complaining about the music.

You know, that is, I've crossed over the

line now.

We thought this wouldn't happen to us.

It happened to our parents because they were

staid and boring.

But this couldn't happen to us because we

were the generation that discovered rock & roll,

an experience no-one had ever had before,

or, so we believed, anyone could ever have

again.

It's only because I'm exactly the right age

to have had my life transformed by hearing

Elvis Presley that, so, you know, nobody else

has kind of had that experience.

So nobody can have their life transformed in

quite that way again.

They can be excited by something they've heard.

They've grown up with the tradition of popular

music and it's impossible to convey to people

what it was like hearing Heartbreaker Hotel coming

out of a radio.

Our grumpy old men were brought up to

believe that women were mysterious creatures to be

cherished.

You opened doors for them, gave up your

seat on crowded trains.

The ideal family had father at its head

who would come home from work to the

smell of homemade cooking and find that mum

had spent the day boiling up the Sunday

leftovers to make delicious soup for him and

his two delightful children.

Then came women's lib and the rules of

engagement changed forever.

Wanting to be the breadwinner became oppressive.

Opening doors or giving up your seat became

patronising.

No matter how little clothing women wore, men

had to pretend not to notice.

Today, modern women compete to show off as

much flesh as possible and our grumpy old

men don't know if they're allowed to look

or not.

It is difficult to know where to look,

you know, when people have got kind of

rather obvious breasts pointing at you and you're

talking to them and you, you know, you

feel yourself kind of drawn and trying not

to look at them in a rather deliberate

way and staring into the middle distance.

When I was a young boy and there

was a pretty girl walking past, you know,

you tended to sort of stop and, you

know, just look round and see, you know,

oh, she's looking.

But when you get to my age, you

have to look like this.

They say, you've got a problem, mate?

Yeah, I'm mentally undressing you.

They looked around and said, what are you

looking at?

I'd say your tits, you know, or your

legs, or, you know, you've got a beautiful

bottom or whatever and that's it, you know.

However, so grumpy are our grumpy old men

that even half-dressed young women don't necessarily

make them happy.

What I find amusing is when a woman

is wearing one of those short tops that

exposes the stomach and she's got like a...

Well, a bear gut, I suppose, is the

only word for it, you know, as if

you're not going to notice, you know, cos

it's like a woman wearing it, you know.

Cos if you're going to wear one of

those tops which finishes like halfway up and

exposing your stomach, you just have to have

a flat stomach.

So I find that, like I want to

say, you've got a bear gut, you should

take that off, you know.

The other thing I find, I suppose, is

with the very low-slung jeans combined with

the thong, you see, like, a woman's thong,

you can tell that she's wearing a thong,

it's like the sort of new female equivalent

of Builder's Bump, cos you can actually see

down to the start of the crack of

her arse, and you're thinking, I don't want

to see that!

And the thong is actually not even like...

If she's got a thong on, it'd be

quite nice if it was actually, like, in

place, but sometimes the thong bit is off

to the side.

And you're watching this and you're walking along

and you're thinking, I'm actually turned into a

perv, though I don't want to be.

The things may come and thongs may go,

but one fashion gets right up the noses

of all our grumpy old men, without exception.

Piercing.

I cannot abide piercing.

Oh, God.

I mean, one little tiny stud through the

nose, maybe, but girls who have rows and

rows of rings and things through their tongue,

I mean, that must be so unpleasant.

It all comes from some Indian god, apparently.

The Indian god of pissing your parents off.

This is what this is all about.

And it goes way back in history that

an Indian god really wanted to annoy her

middle-class parents, so she had her tongue

pierced and her nose pierced and her eyebrow

pierced and all her ears.

And I find it very hard to hold

a conversation with someone who's got various bits

of metal hanging off them.

To me, particularly a woman with a nose

stud there, you know, those little nose studs,

it looks like she's got a spot.

Just looks like a zit, you know, a

slightly exotic zit.

Body piercing is the most disgusting, horrendously horrible

thing that I've ever seen in my entire

life.

I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous.

I actually knew a girl who pierced her

navel and got it stuck on the chain

on the plug in the bath.

I have a theory that it's sort of

in inverse proportion to the intelligence of the

person.

The more metal there is, the dimmer they

are.

I personally have no plans in that area.

I don't think I'll be having my, you

know, any penile sort of stuff be done

any time soon.

I did see a sort of diamond in

someone's navel relatively recently and I did find

it vaguely moving.

For the most part, grumpiness among our grumpy

old men remains this side of deranged.

Sometimes, however, the OTT filter malfunctions.

All these kids walking around with all these

piercings, they don't realise what's going to happen

to them.

When they die, they're going to piercing hell.

The devil will unlink every single ring and

rivet out of their bodies and thread them

onto an enormous kebab skewer and then toast

them slowly for eternity over a charcoal fire

before stuffing them in an enormous pita bread

and saying to some greasy demigod, would you

like some chilli sauce on that?

That Nobel laureate of grumpiness, the poet Philip

Larkin, wrote, sexual intercourse began in 1963, which

was rather late for me, between the end

of the Chatterley Ban and the Beatles' first

LP.

Before that, the only place it was going

on was in our febrile imaginations.

For years, I mean, I mean, many, many

years, I did not know that girls had

nipples.

I kind of knew I had, but they

were nipples cos they were on me, you

know what I mean, and boys don't have

tits, you know.

And I had two sisters, but I never

saw them naked and had absolutely no desire

then or now to see my sisters naked.

Yes, it was an age of innocence.

None of today's vast array of colourful titles

for our grumpy old men.

They had the coyly named Health and Deficiency.

It came in a handy size, small enough

to study carefully with the aid of a

torch under the bedclothes.

The trouble was that it left so many

questions unanswered.

Guys would say things, but I didn't know

what they were talking about, and neither did

they, I guess.

And then, you know, you begin groping around,

but, like, you know, it's so odd.

With the Health and Efficiency, these sort of

sprig-whipped Scandinavians laughingly, you know, with beach

balls emerging from snow huts in Lapland was

my idea of sex.

Sort of things with nothing.

I sort of, what's the point?

How does that work?

And, like, I really did look at them.

They weren't sexy.

I mean, I had no idea of what

a girl's twat was.

I mean, seriously, no, no idea.

Couldn't imagine it.

I tried.

I had no knowledge or no way of

knowing what a girl's physiognomy was.

I mean, I remember thinking that, like, how

does it work?

So while our grumpy old men fought the

good fight for free love and free sex,

now they find that freedom is far too

good to be wasted on the young.

The fallout from it, though, has not been

a discovery of some kind of fantastic egalitarian

paradise of free love.

The fallout of it has been a kind

of grotesque prurience and an astonishing kind of

public pornography.

I mean, just to take one example, the

existence of a company that has as its

logo the word *** misspelled.

I cannot bear that campaign, seeing 15-year

-old girls with FC UK Me on them.

I just think it's appalling.

And recently a judge threw a juror out

of a courtroom because she was wearing an

FC UK T-shirt, and I've now reached

the age where I find myself agreeing with

a grumpy old judge.

And it's not just how other people dress.

Our grumpy old men don't know how to

dress themselves.

Their fathers had no such problems.

At the age of 21, they were men.

They started dressing like their own fathers and

did so until the day they died.

Nowadays, dressing like their fathers would be sad.

Trying to dress like their children would be

sadder still.

So they end up wearing Blue Harbour.

Now, just how sad is that?

I was photographed leaving my house the other

day on my bike.

I'll tell you what I was wearing.

I was wearing a very ordinary leather jacket,

straight-forward leather jacket from Gap.

A white T-shirt and a pair of

jeans and a pair of boots.

And I had a haversack over my shoulder.

And I saw this picture reproduced in the

London Evening Standard with the headline, Welcome to

the World of Mutton Men.

And these are men dressing younger than they

are.

What am I supposed to wear?

Am I supposed to go out in my

father's flat cap, you know, with a raincoat,

with a collar turned up and bicycle clips

on?

I did grow up in a very bad

trouser period.

I mean, let's face it, if you've seen

early pictures, I must...

I mean, it's like now trying to find

anybody who voted for Margaret Thatcher.

You can't find anybody who wore flares.

You know, they just...

Apparently they don't exist.

But people did, and they had flares with

bits put in, which were the saddest, perhaps,

trousers.

And they had loon pants, which were pretty

much styled like the current ones, where they

have to look as if they're just about

to fall down.

When I see young people wearing flares, I

feel like an elderly German must feel with

these neo-Nazis, you know, in East Germany.

I want to say to them, it is

not a joke.

We lived through this once.

Do not go there again.

We suffered for you.

Who would have thought the flare would come

back?

Who would have thought that would honestly happen?

For Christ's sake, the first time round, it

looked ridiculous.

But the flares of today, they're flarier than

ever.

I mean, if a high wind gets up

on the high street, you can see a

load of teenagers like tea clippers going off

down round the corner of M&S.

For me to be told I should be

throwing out a jumper that I only bought

five years ago, seems a complete waste of

money.

So I sort of inherited my parents' wartime

make-do-and-mend mentality.

So the idea that I stop wearing something

because it seems to be fashionable to have,

you know, buttons on that side or a

pocket on my left, you know...

I mean, this shirt's about four years old.

I'm not going to stop wearing it.

It's a perfectly serviceable shirt.

When our grumpy old men see these guys

walking down the street, they just want to

tap them on the shoulder and say, Look,

fellows, we need to let you into a

secret.

Hard, though, it must be to believe it

now, when you're as sure as you can

be that you look as cool as ice.

But in ten years' time or so, you're

going to look at pictures of yourself dressed

in that cutting-edge, groovy gear and think

to yourself, Why didn't anybody tell me that

I looked such a prat?

I know we did.

My first real fashion statement, tragic as it

was, was about 11 and there was a

singer called Donovan who was like a sort

of pale, pallid Bob Dylan and he wore,

and it was the first time I'd seen

it, jeans with a denim jacket and denim

shirt and denim cap.

Anyway, I pitched up at the Pavilion Cinema,

Dun Laoghaire, wearing this complete outfit like Donovan.

I looked a total wanker.

Ponytails.

Tar Hill.

Death penalty.

It has to be public and it has

to be a beheading.

Men over 30 with ponytails.

Absolutely right across the board.

You either cut off your ponytail or we

cut off your head.

You've got 24 hours to make up your

mind.

Otherwise, then it's straight to Tar Hill.

I was saying, Have you got any tops

without Gatbritton on them?

He said, No, no, no.

I said, Do I get a discount for

that then?

He said, What do you mean?

Well, because I'll be walking around with an

advert for your shop on it.

No, we don't.

I said, Well, have you got anything...

I said, Can you cut that off for

me?

The thing is, you get a bit older.

Your stomach starts to...

You go from 28, 32, waist, and it

starts to 33.

And by then, I'm going through this point

of button bursting.

Which I think you probably get past button

bursting.

And you say, What the hell?

You're a 34 or a 36.

Oh, God.

To be a true grumpy old man is

to have a secret life.

To retain an apparently calm exterior while secretly

fuming inside.

To gaze at the world with apparent equanimity,

but having a deep and burning desire to

reach for the flamethrower.

It's not just one thing.

It's every bloody thing, everywhere you look.

It's packaging you can't get into.

It's encountering rows of teenagers ranged across the

pavement asking if you can spare two minutes

for homeless people.

I hate tin rattlers.

I absolutely hate tin rattlers.

I would like to take the tins and

ram them up their rectums and let them

walk home so they can realise what a

pain up the arse they are.

It's more and more white lines and circles

and boxes and chevrons and stencils painted on

our once pretty streets.

It's one-way streets, always stopping you from

going the way you want to go.

It's more and wider bus lanes.

It's road signs telling you to beware of

deer.

When did you last see a deer on

a motorway and what are you supposed to

do if you do?

It's restaurants that include a service charge and

then leave a blank space for you to

add another one.

And it's the cult of celebrity.

All those pictures and columns and features and

TV programmes about people who are famous just

for being famous.

These days it's not necessary to split the

atom or discover penicillin or climb Everest.

You just have to live a life which

is the envy of people with squid for

brains or have married your grandfather.

Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones today won

a partial victory in their High Court battle

against...

Who is Catherine Zeta-Jones?

I want to be the last person in

Britain who neither knows nor cares who Catherine

Zeta-Jones is.

It's quite interesting that she was the first

person to take Iraq off the front pages

of the newspaper when her court case failed

or succeeded or whatever it did, and I

don't care what the court case was about

either, but that we should switch from Iraq

to Catherine Zeta-Jones just says something about

our obsession with non-entities.

If you don't know who's done what in

what soap opera or what reality show, you're

a bit of a nothing at dinner parties

and things, parties.

If you don't know who Les Dennis is,

it's some kind of crime, but I would

think that that would be a merciful relief

for anyone.

I have absolutely no interest in being a

celeb of any kind, unfortunately, to the extent

that I am.

I'm a sort of C-list celeb.

It's quite nice if people recognise you in

the tube.

It's always Nigerians that seem to recognise...

I must have a face that's especially recognisable

to Nigerians.

It's all being done.

Every direction they look, everything they hear, it's

all being done specifically to piss them off.

They're not paranoid, you understand, because paranoia is

an unjustified fear of persecution.

No, this is the real thing.

Estuary English has seized the day more and

more.

I hate a lot of the youth language

that creeps in, which sort of seems sloppy.

I'm a bit of a fascist.

I don't really mind inny or cool or

wicked, those sort of words, but there are

some of them I just can't bear.

Do you know what I mean?

Give us an example.

Do you know what I mean?

Language-like, debased-like?

I don't know.

I mean, at the end of the day,

are you saying that there's, like, an impoverishment

of our whatever?

Do you know what I mean?

I mean...

Language is the most incredibly important thing.

Our language is the most incredibly important thing

because it is our attempt and our enormous,

triumphant success at getting from what's in here

out there.

And people have gone to enormous lengths in

order to do that accurately.

I'm a digital linguist at university and I'm

a lover of the English language.

And what annoys me, the way young people

talk, the habit which I think comes from

Australia on American soaps, of what I call

the moronic interrogative.

Everything is a question.

So what do you do?

I'm going to uni?

And you think, why is she saying it

like that?

As if she's asking me, do you know

what a uni is?

What annoys me about that is it seems

to require that you say something, though it's

a question, though you're meant to respond.

But, in fact, it's just a...

I think it's an uncertain way of speaking,

as though you don't really know what the

hell you're talking about.

What irritates me is it makes the speaker

sound stupid and implies that the listener is

stupid as well.

Why is everything a question?

That'll be 50p?

You need to buy a newspaper.

What do you mean, is it 50p?

50p?

Is it 40p?

No, no.

Are you asking me...

That irritates me.

The way that people are using this upswing

is it's just fashionable.

It's not, are you with me any longer?

It's just a fashionable way of talking.

And I hate it.

I absolutely hate it.

I just want to hit people who do

that, and, of course, they get rather a

surprise.

I just wish somebody had the courage to

put the two Ts in bottle.

I mean, you do need a bit of

guts to put Ts in later.

Do you know what I mean?

You need some guts, man.

And it's rare, you know.

Hospital.

It's baby talk.

It's basically baby talk.

Gentlemen.

I do get irritated by misuse of apostrophes.

And I actually did take issue with London

Underground about this.

I wanted to know why there wasn't an

apostrophe in Barons Court Station, and yet there

was one at Earls Court Station.

So I got on the phone and said,

What's going on here?

You know, Earls Court's got an apostrophe.

Barons Court hasn't got one.

There were probably a lot of delays that

day as a result of that enquiry.

And I did write to Ken Livingstone, who,

to his credit, wrote back all the way

through the letter misusing apostrophes.

It must have taken him ages.

I was such an admirer of his as

a result of that.

And if you're left wondering how a grumpy

old man can possibly be bothered to waste

everyone's time making an issue out of a

missing apostrophe, then you've never received a text

message from Rory.

I never use abbreviations.

C-U-2-R-O.

All my text messages are punctuated correctly.

People hate getting text messages from me cos

they take out all the screen cos it's

like apostrophe, comma, capital letters in the right

place, no abbreviations, you know.

There's only one thing I really hate about

young people and their texting and their mobile

phone and all that, and it's that I'm

not one of them.

As a teenager, I anticipated no life at

all other than continuing to drink and chase

women and take drugs for the rest of

my life.

And in some ways, I've done at least

two of those.

Oh, bollocks.

Grumpy old men is a modern movement, a

hitherto silent minority who see the world they've

created and are appalled.

But now they are fighting back, no longer

suffering in silence.

This series of programmes is their manifesto.

Next week, the three Cs.

Cars, computers and cell phones.

I'd like to smash up modern technology.

I refuse to join this crazy race.

Do I really have to be on the

note?

Why must I be on the note?

I've got to back up my stuff.

We've got stacks of videos that we've never

seen cos we can't make the video player

play them.

People love their cars more than they love

human beings.

Nobody needs an off-road vehicle unless they're

off-road.

This is a man's world...

I turned into Les Dawson then, for a

moment.