Original subtitles

people of the swinging 60s, who sang all

you need is love and grew up believing

the world would be a better place, full

of free love, free drugs and free sex?

Well, they turned into the most discontented generation

in history.

Disillusioned, exasperated, irritated, downright bloody grumpy.

All these trendy Wendy's destroying education, I just,

I want to kill them.

It's the cult of the moral.

Politician after politician gets up and talks a

load of crap.

Burglars rights are seriously advanced as a concept.

Every day swearing is marvellous.

Venal, disgusting, revolting.

All you've got left in life is to

hate Manchester United, because they're not going to

win anything.

I'm very, very much in favour of feminists,

especially the ones with really big tits, you

know.

The drug-induced dreams of our grumpy old

men have all turned to dust.

And since it can't possibly be our fault,

we have to work out who on earth

to blame.

So we blame bloody women.

We blame our kids.

We blame politicians.

We blame the royal family.

And of course, we blame the telly.

And I blame the whole kind of, I

blame everybody in fact, except me.

So where did it all start to go

wrong?

As young Brits in the 60s and 70s,

we thought we had it all.

Great clothes, great music and great sex.

The trouble was that the same freedom that

meant that women could have sex with us

also gave them freedom from some of the

other shackles of the past.

Such as looking after us.

For centuries, thousands of years, we got away

without doing the washing up, without being attentive

good dads and crapping bed.

I must go and get the boys supper

on.

We were marvellous at that for thousands of

years.

And now, all of a sudden, we're expected

to look, you know, wipe bottoms and be

there at the school and cook dinner and

do all these things.

We're not used to it.

And we should try, we men.

But it's hard because we've had millions of

years of being the boss and doing nothing.

I don't understand women.

I love them dearly.

I do.

I actually, I adore women.

Probably that's my problem.

I love women's company.

I love being with women.

I love, I'm an old-fashioned type of

romantic.

I like going out for dinner, doing the

things I like, going on trips.

I don't understand them.

Virtually every single woman I've been out with

makes an issue of how much sport I

watch.

And there's always this thing about, oh, you're

not watching sport again, are you?

Oh, no, oh, God, it's not football again.

Like, I'm doing something, you know, you'd think

like I was, like, sticking a skewer through

my head or something.

And not content with undermining the way we're

used to doing things, modern women make it

all worse by being so much more emotionally

well-balanced than we are.

I mean, you talk, you look at watch

women talking, they're straight into sort of emotions

and sort of, like, illnesses and sex and

all that stuff.

And men just don't talk like that.

You've got to find something to talk about,

to have any sort of sense of, you

know, unless you're completely plastered.

Women are all sitting around at weddings talking

about, oh, doesn't she look lovely, or it

won't last, or he's having an affair, blah,

blah, blah.

It's all about people, relationships, blokes.

So which way did you come then?

Well, I came on the B106.

Oh, you come that way, did you?

Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah, well, I come on the motorway, which

is quicker, but it's actually longer.

Oh, right, yeah.

What are you driving nowadays?

You know, I've got a Vectra outside.

And while we were talking about the inside

leg measurement of the overhead camshaft, women were

talking about sweeping away the shackles of the

past.

Women's lib.

We didn't mind them burning their bras.

Indeed, that had a welcome upside.

It's just that we felt our sensitive areas

might be next on the arson list.

Judy goes ballistic if I don't open the

car door for her.

I have a colleague who's recently left us,

a woman, who several times after we'd had

a meeting, we'd cross the corridor for lunch,

and she'd be in front of me, and

I'd open the door for her, and she'd

bristle.

This is an intelligent, professional, likeable, humorous woman,

but she got very cross, and a lot

of anger had been building up inside her.

And she said, well, it's because it's patronising.

I said, I don't mean it to be.

She said, well, ah, ah, no, you don't.

That's what's called unconscious sexism.

I think men are very confused about what

a man should be, because there was that

awful sort of time, Willy's in Knoth's period,

in the sort of 70s and 80s, where

men were sort of, you know, going to

men's groups and feeling really guilty about the

fact that they were born into the wrong

sex.

And then there was the backlash and the

sort of new laddism, where it seemed to

be fine to be into pornography and into

being loutish.

You know, it's like feminism never happened.

It's like going back in time.

It's all gone end of the pier.

And the blokes are all a bit, want

their dinner on the table.

And it's all a bit like, you know,

where are you?

Where were you?

Come on, here you are.

You think, hang on, what is that?

Where have you seen?

Did you watch a movie or something?

After millions of years of striving to be

the alpha male, for the breadwinner who came

home and wanted his tea on the table,

it was all very difficult.

One way of coping, our grumpy old men

were told, was to get in touch with

their feminine sides.

And to be fair, some of them tried.

You know, I had this theory that I

was a bit of a new man.

And my theory was that you could measure

how much of a new man you are

by how far you let a girl or

a woman go past you in the street,

walking the other way, that you quite fancy,

before you turn round and have a look

at her bottom.

And I reckon I'm about five yarder.

Which is pretty good going, actually.

Don't get much more new than that.

Is this phrase just gay enough, which is

ridiculous, really, because it's nothing to do with

being gay, but, you know, a guy might

oil his motorbike, come up, have a shower,

make passionate love to his girl, and then

whizz up over that beautiful spaghetti carbonara for

both of them.

Classic instance is David Beckham, the time when

Ferguson kept him on the substitute's bench.

He then came onto the pitch and scored

an absolutely brilliant and absolutely essential goal while

wearing an Alice band.

I thought, times have very changed.

You know, Tom Finney, eat your heart out.

It seems to me that there is a

viable model of masculinity there to be reassumed,

and it's to do with the concept of

honour.

Terribly unfashionable.

It's to do with keeping your promises.

It's to do with comporting yourself.

It's to do with not exploiting people sexually.

It's to do, dare I say it, with

exercising restraint and fidelity in certain contexts.

And we've kind of forgotten about that stuff.

So, to be what was called a new

man, we had to adjust all our natural

behaviour to accommodate the new demands of women.

We were just getting used to that when,

somewhere along the line, we found ourselves doing

the same for the kids.

There seems to have been some sort of

trick played on my generation, whereby, when we

were children, we had to do everything that

the grown-ups were doing, so that when

my parents went to the pub, I'd be

sitting in the car fighting with my brother,

emptying the reservoir on the windscreen washers and

reading the AA Road Manual for 1966.

Now that I've grown up, I spend my

time sitting on miniature trains and riding round

Chessington World of Adventures, doing exactly what my

children want to be doing, and I'm not

quite sure where the contract was altered.

I really do want a reversal back to

my youth, when my old man pitched up

once in my school career.

I didn't feel that I was being abandoned.

I didn't want him near the school.

I didn't want my teachers talking to him,

you know.

He showed up once when I was, I

think, at the black-and-white minstrels.

There I was in, like, you know, black

tie going, you know, whatever I was doing,

you know.

Now, for 20 years, I've been showing up

at these woeful assemblies where the children chirp

with their dreadful spare-me-child choruses.

Let's not pretend anything.

School plays are universally and uniformly shite.

And, you know, if you don't have your

camera to film your loved one, you know,

the children feel somehow put out.

There's a scrum at the front, and there

is a scrum of parents jostling and standing

up to hear drivel.

It has to be said, you know, drivel.

I know they're trying to make the children

and the parents feel involved.

Go away.

Leave us alone.

We're adults.

They're children.

My mother always said, interesting and amusing woman

and very popular, but not particularly maternal.

And she always used to say that she

never really understood what we were for.

And, I mean, I don't understand what our

children are for, but, you know, we get

on well enough that they can call me

a dozy prick and stuff like this.

If I'd wanted to call my dad something

like that, I'd have had to get in

the car, drive into Wales, think it, and

then come back again, you know?

I mean, I wouldn't have dared say anything

like that.

And while you and your brother were sent

to the school down the road, made to

wear your tie and cap, bullied by the

lower sixth and told to be grateful, today

it's all so much more complicated.

Everywhere we look, hyper-parented little Damions and

Chloes, nothing's too good for them, all dressed

up, overindulged and overconfident little tykes who need

a good slapping.

I am getting increasingly grumpy about snobby people

not admitting they're snobs.

They say things like, little Timothy, my little

Timothy, he's very bright, you know, so we

think we're going to have to send him

private.

And it's like, well, so my kid's really

stupid, is he?

That's why I'm going state.

My little Jonathan's particularly stupid, so we're going

for the state sector.

And they'll say things like, oh, we would

have loved to gone to the local primary,

but we just couldn't get in.

We couldn't get in.

And it's like, right, so you wrote one

letter and didn't hear and didn't follow up

with a phone call.

So they'll spend £10,000 sending their kid

off to some expensive...

driving them in the 4x4 halfway across London

to go to some expensive ghetto where all

the children are exactly like them.

We spent 50,000 years climbing out of

the swamps and we get out and we

produce children who are absolutely useless.

Absolutely...

I can't...

You know, they get to teenagers and they...

You know, I mean, they go washing up

in a cafe or something and they complain

the work's too hard.

Absolutely wankers.

Which is more or less what their parents

thought about the layabouts who grew up to

be today's grumpies, who then went off to

university to do what you're supposed to do

at university, take mind-expanding drugs and talk

till four in the morning about the meaning

of life and plan tomorrow's demo against American

imperialism.

But that's not good enough for the kids

of today, is it?

Oh, no.

All they care about is passing their exams

and repaying the student loan so they can

get on the housing ladder.

What students are absolutely preoccupied by is the

fact that they have to take out massive

bank loans in order to get themselves through

college and I think that does put off

people from entering higher education from less economically

privileged backgrounds.

And there's many no bones about it, but

I do think that higher education should be

a time when you do sit around having

a lot of sex and doing recreational drugs,

learning a bit, and being radical.

Yeah, that's what it's about.

The students should be an absolute hotbed of

radicalism and they certainly aren't.

They're a rather cold, limp, icky duvet of

subscribing to the kind of careerist policies that

our current government enshrine just as well as

Thatcher did.

Young people, as we were then, looked outwards

and really thought that we could change the

world.

We wrote personally to the White House and

to the President and we got replies.

We thought we were talking sense, really, when

we knocked on the door of Number 10

to hand in yet another petition, but all

that's gone.

The only thing that really fires up students

today is their own affairs.

They're not really interested in the world, they're

interested in their world.

But can we really blame them?

Look at the drivel they had to listen

to when they were growing up.

Political correctness.

All that rubbish from Brussels.

All those new rights that we'd done without

for thousands of years and were suddenly inalienable.

A new TV station for the Welsh.

All those pointy-faced local councillors policing everything

around us.

More and more bloody nonsense.

Little men and little women in council offices

working out new ways in which we can

offend each other.

Leftovers of the loony left.

Councillors are nothing more than sort of local

busybodies.

You know, they would be the neighbour from

hell complaining, only they've elevated us to a

sort of politics.

They're the lowest rung of the party political

ladder.

They're the loudmouths and the activists who think

they're creating world revolution by stopping a hot

cross bun or by flying the EU flag

only and not the Union Jack or the

Jacks, which drives the local people mad.

They're just doing it to be provocative, like

your neighbour would, by snipping the ear off

your topiary hedge, rabbit or something, you know.

Everyday swearing is f***ing marvellous.

I think there should be more swearing all

the time, frankly.

You know, a well-timed swear word is

a terrific thing and it doesn't mean that

you lack vocabulary.

What I mean, when you lack a vocabulary,

when you go, do you know what I

mean?

The thing is, at the end of the

day, basically, like literally, do you know what

I mean?

That's bad language, in my opinion, not bollocks

to you, you twat.

The women love it, you know, and I'd

much rather have a 90% female audience

because you get better laughs and you can

be much ruder.

And then there's our middle-class paranoia about

our kids.

Today, we're so obsessed with hygiene that all

our kids have allergies.

So obsessed with their safety that they have

to go to school in an armoured car.

And now there's the greatest evil of them

all, the internet.

Now, these are fully-dressed children, being children,

playing Mary, Joseph and the donkey.

You know, what is going on there?

By extension, since paedophiles know about looking at

children, we should ban children from the streets

or they should go around in burqas like

women under the Taliban.

If I was to send my children up

to Clapham Common now, I bet you I'd

be more worried about some mad paedophile taking

them away than I would be about them

not looking properly when they went across a

zebra and being knocked down.

And that's a far more likely scenario.

Yes, political correctness is something that...

I mean, you're talking to the man who

had a hit record in 1988 with a

group called Maurice Mulder and Major, a song

called Stutter Rap.

You know, it's high.

You know, rapping, it's my bread and butter,

but it's hard to rap when you're born

with a...

So, you know, I've not always been Mr.

Political Correct, politically correct.

And so sick was everyone of the loony

left that they bounced all the way over

to the loony right.

During the lifetime of the next Conservative government,

we shall replace the present system of rates...

A chance to sort out the unions and

the lefties and the immigrants and the scroungers,

who would have believed that the guys who

sang Ain't Gonna Work on Maggie's Farm No

More would end up electing her.

There'd been a moment on television when she

was being filmed patronising the people who lived

in a council house somewhere.

And as she came out, some cameraman had

shouted something like, are you going to be

the first woman prime minister?

Mrs. Thatcher.

And she came over and she bent down

to the camera and in that most patronising

voice said, not only am I going to

be the first woman prime minister, I'm going

to be the first prime minister with a

science degree.

And then she looked straight into the camera

and she said, got that.

What I must point out to you in

all modesty is that it would be the

first person in number 10 Downing Street to

have a science degree.

Got it?

And I just thought nobody in this country

is going to do anything that would enable

her to become prime minister.

And then of course I was driving home

a few days later, listening to the results

coming in and I actually thought for the

first time, I feel like a stranger in

my own country.

Because she was like Manchester United, you know

what I mean?

In that you could, it's quite clearly the

right thing to do was to hate her

unswervingly and it meant that your life was

based on a negative.

As I'm afraid being a Liverpool supporter these

days is, all you've got left in life

is to hate Manchester United because Liverpool aren't

going to win anything.

Things, to coin a phrase, could only get

better.

No more broken promises.

I say to the Tories, enough is enough.

When the results of the first Blair election

were coming through, and you know there was

a kind of public expression of tentative joy,

but I felt, within weeks really, and certainly

fear now, incredibly betrayed.

And I wouldn't know, if there was a

general election next week, I actually wouldn't know

who to vote for.

With Blair and all his trendy-wendys destroying

education, I want to kill them.

I just want to kill them.

And every time he opens the Des O

'Connor bloody polytechnic of shoplifting and calls it

a university, I just want to blow his

head off.

Ever since he became leader of the Labour

Party, he's really wound me up intolerably with

his kind of intense sincerity.

When I saw him walking around in black

Levi's, I burnt mine.

That was the point at which I wanted

to disassociate myself lock, stock and barrel from

my own generation.

He's the air guitarist of political rhetoric, with

his fender strap fiddling away in front of

the mirror.

And he's a perfect example of the kind

of banalization of our culture.

I do not see Tony picking up a

book.

I think Tony's big on PlayStation.

I think he's big on the MP3.

I think he's got piercings, and I think

we should see them.

I think he's got piercings of mass destruction

hidden about his body.

Well, politicians, they're so bland, they're all the

same, aren't they?

There used to be a time when I

was a child, there was the Labour Party

and the Conservative Party, and the Liberal Party,

as it was then.

One had an idea of what they stood

for.

But now the Labour Party is the same

as the Conservative Party.

The Conservative Party is more left-wing than

Labour, or doesn't know what it is.

There's no left anymore.

It is my generation of grumpy old men

who are to blame, because for years we

have been complaining about politicians who have other

jobs, politicians who line their pockets, politicians who

have one foot in private industry or agriculture,

and only part-time as Members of Parliament,

constituency MPs.

We've complained about that breed for so long

that we've actually killed them.

They've gone.

We now have full-time politicians, and they're

much, much worse than the ones that were

lining their pockets in the city, in agriculture

or in industry.

But while politicians came and politicians went, the

one thing we could rely on absolutely was

our beloved royal family.

The envy of the world, the apogee of

good manners and good taste.

Today, our grumpies look at the Windsors and

squirm with embarrassment at their irredeemable middle-class

naffness.

That might be just about acceptable if only

they kept their views to themselves.

We should respect our past and understand our

past and understand how we've got to where

we are.

But there is a sense in which the

royal family keeps us looking backwards rather than

forwards.

You know, you can see that in Charles's

taste in architecture.

I use the word taste loosely.

He has no taste in architecture whatsoever.

No problem with that, except that he has

a huge amount to say and a huge

amount of influence, and he has stopped some

absolutely stunning projects in London.

One of the greatest architects who ever lived

wanted to do a building in London.

Somebody wanted to pay for it, but Charles

didn't like it because it wasn't Doric pillars

and neoclassical.

It didn't look like Buckingham Palace, you know.

It's a scandal how many great schemes have

been stopped by him, you know.

So, not many of our grumpies are big

on patriotism or waving the Union Jack.

Not given to running around boasting about what

a great nation we are.

Except, of course, when we come under attack

from our other deep-seated and long-term

irritant, Johnny Forerunner.

I had this conversation with a French girl

recently, and she said that the reason the

French didn't like the Americans was that because

before America was the major world power, it

was the French.

And there was a sort of brief pause

while I picked myself up off the floor,

and I said, look, I really don't care

about which country was more powerful than another,

but it was Britain, okay?

It was Britain, so don't say it was

France because it's Britain.

And she said, oh, no, no, no.

France had this empire across the whole of

North Africa.

Okay, well, A, empires are not something to

be particularly proud of, but our empire was

much bigger than your empire.

Your empire was all desert.

I mean, now you're India, Canada, Australia, Hong

Kong, I mean, on the British empire, the

sun never set and sort of, you know,

Union Jack tattoos were springing back out of

my arms whilst Land of Hope and Glory

was sort of playing in the background.

So, 35 years after androgynous hippies sang tunefully

about the dawning of the age of Aquarius,

when the moon was in the seventh house

and Jupiter aligned with Mars, the news is

full of wars in far-off places.

We hate the prime minister.

We hate his recent predecessors.

And we'll no doubt hate whoever is coming

next.

The NHS is on the critical list.

Public transport is off the rails.

It's all gone to hell.

Our kids don't seem to know.

And if they do, don't seem to care.

And whenever we turn on the telly, we

see this.

Who goes, you decide, to vote Alex Cole?

I'm gonna die!

Just this sort of incessant, you know, ratings

sort of nerves all the time.

So, somebody gets loads of ratings because they

get a load of complete bozos in a

sort of house and watch them trying to

sort of tear each other apart.

And everybody jumps on the bandwagon.

And of course, there are, as I like

to call them, the Camden Adenoidals sitting around,

you know, planning this really good culture.

And we've got a ratings group and a

focus group.

We've all come together.

And what would be a really, really good

thing to have on television, right, is get

people who can't cut up their own food

wandering around in sort of a laboratory rat

thing that's really, really funny.

We can laugh because it's postmodern, it'll mean.

It's really, really funny that they're all completely

backward and stupid and end up hating each

other because we get them drunk as well,

right?

We do it for weeks on end.

And people who've been to university and have

a good education, they're gonna say it's really

good television because, you know, it's really, really

good.

I get invited to do the silliest things.

I mean, in the past couple of weeks,

I was asked to take part in a

programme in which I had to go to

some kind of classes to learn how to

move and as far as possible think like

a woman and then go into some public

situation, a job or something like that for

a couple of days and pass myself off

as a woman.

And, you know, I have enough difficulty passing

myself off as a bloke, really.

So the idea of voluntarily doing something like

this, but obviously there'd be people who'd be

desperate to do it.

That to me is the death of civilisation.

I think there is now no culture in

Britain.

And people watch it and people talk about

it and even intelligent journalists say, I'm hooked

on, what a sad, sad, pathetic, puny life

you must have, you know, writing the Daily

Telegraph.

I'm hooked, you know, Will Tuffers, Snog, Linda.

I'm appalled.

We don't live in a society where culture

has declined or anything like that.

We live in a decadent society, pure and

simple.

You know, reality television is the circus.

It's the circus maximus of our culture and

it's even more torture in a way than

feeding Christians to the lions.

It's the cult of the moron, you know.

And I don't know, you know, I suppose

it's fascinating, but I don't know why it's

fascinating to watch.

And like, you're looking at the person who

helped to invent the format.

I mean, you know, me and my partners

had own Survivor, which is the first of

these.

The people who create television haven't got time

to move outside of TV, go to the

theatre, go to the galleries, absorb the culture

that's the living, breathing, organic culture that's outside

the media.

The media is a spiv media.

Television is a spiv media.

It feeds off everything else.

Yes, it's exactly what our dad said.

It's probably what their dad said.

And saddest of all, in 25 years from

now, it's what our kids will say as

well.

Maybe it's something about the human condition.

Things apparently can only ever get worse.

I absolutely think that the country is deteriorating.

I think the young are filthy mouthed, irresponsible.

As a race, we should be ashamed of

ourselves.

Culturally speaking, everything's gone to the dogs.

Who do you think wrote that?

It was written in 1600 by a monk.

So, like, what's changed?

And apparently what people have nostalgia for is

always 50 years ago.

Are you turning over?

So, there you are.

You'd always thought that they were just harmless,

practically invisible middle-aged geezers, bulging over their

belts and kidding themselves they can still fit

into their Levi's, experimenting with the latest haircut,

and usually finally adopting it just as it's

going out of fashion.

Apparently amiable old gits, just going quietly on

their way to the grave.

But now you know.

Beneath those apparently quiescent exteriors, they are gently

simmering.

Angry?

No, not quite.

Fed up?

No, not exactly.

Grumpy?

Yes, that's it.

A generation of grumpy old men.

Grumpy to find that somewhere over the rainbow

the dreams they dared to dream really did

not come true.

Nothing to be done for them.

And maybe their only redeeming feature is that

they have the good grace to know that

in the end, all they are is a

pain in the arse.

People that are close to me say, you

know, you're a pain in the arse, actually.

Just get a load of oldish gits and

get them to ramble on.

Constant grumping on about this, that and the

other.

Nothing is better than it was in their

youth.

Everything was better in the 50s, the 60s

and 70s.

Well, I was there in the 50s, 60s

and 70s and it wasn't.

So one of the worst features of modern

times is modern grumpy old men.

I'd like to do away with them too.

Call that an excuse for a television bringer

and expect people to sit at home and

watch it.

I withdraw everything.

Everything I've said is rubbish.

The one thing I hate particularly in the

world is grumpy old men and their bloody

pointless whining.

You know, I just shut up and get

ready for the coffin.

We hope you've enjoyed the series final of

Grumpy Old Men.

Make sure you're with us next Tuesday for

coverage of the Federal Budget.