The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 49

The Guardian Wednesday September 6 2000 15 Jonathan Romney Remembering the 70s A sitcom ahead of its time sitcoms that its characters would have watched. There's a huge difference between That 70s Show and those British 70s shows. In our own retro a strangely familiar America. That is because the programme's allusions are not really to the 70s at all, but to late-SOs reflections of the 70s. The show draws on ideas and images in the air today the retro repertoire of films such as The Ice Storm, Dazed and Confused, The Brady Bunch Movie.

That 70s Show is not much cop as a spoof of the 70s, but as a pastiche of our turn-of-the-century fantasies of the age, it's at least remarkably thorough. Still, I doubt I'll be reminiscing fondly about it in liO years' time. That 70s Show is on Channel 5 on Mondays at 7pm. includes Costume the cast of That 70s Show programmes, the past looks absolutely other, a tawdry world of brightly coloured nostalgic kitsch -Clangers dolls, CB radio, Sex Pistols singles. But That 70s Show suggests only costs 29.95, That at Shoom; however, Weatherall insists that Screamadelica is not his own creation.

"I like to think I lit the match," he says. "They had all the ingredients but didn't know how to put them together. But they had beautiful tunes. It was their record." Screamadelica brought him many things, but mostly the enormous pressure of following up one of the most influential albums of the 90s. "Tell me about it!" he suddenly erupts.

"How much pressure is that?" Weatherall veered away from rock bands and plunged into dance. "I now had more money," he says. "Also, I was now taking drugs. I had people putting a microphone in front of me. All the magazines I'd revered for years as a kid living in the suburbs wanted to know my opinion.

Add ecstasy, cocaine and acid, what you gonna get? A bit of a loose cannon." At the height of his mania, he was prone to leaping around in a greatcoat, wielding a cutlass. "You know you're in trouble when you're a DJ and you keep takingoff the record that's actually playing," he chuckles. However, somewhere in the fug, the young punk in Weatherall came back and told him that he was turning into one of the wankers. He walked away. The sojourn in Yorkshire achieved its purpose.

Now, clearer of head, Weatherall Ills rc-emcrged as one of the few truly important underground artists in Britain. The way Two Lone Swordsmen work (isolated from the mainstream, recording almost daily, selling singles by mail order) is rooted in punk and DIY. Indeed, Tiny Reminders, their darkly mischievous, refreshingly uncompromising album, was influenced by listening to Throbbing Gristle's live box set. "Not the whole tiling, obviously. That would be foolish." Weatherall is still massively influential.

A recent album he compiled of HOs industrial dance tunes, 9 O'clock Drop (Nuphonic), led to an surge of those sounds on the dancefloor. I le still does the odd carefully vetted remit, and has returned to sympathetic clubs, but views mainstream club culture from afar. He is mostly dryly funny hut still brims with punk-rock auger. He rants against dance contemporaries who sell their music to advertising agencies, and he admits to occasionally shouting at the television. But he prefers to vent his spleen in the studio hence Tiny Reminders' anti-adu rlising industry track Death to Culture Snitches.

Rut, importantly. Weatherall is comfortable with his status and himself. 'Our creativity is high What I in doing now won't make as big a cultural impression as Sercaniadelica. hut hopefully it'll have a similar impact on someone. Tiny ripples, hut they all get there in the end." Perhaps Weather-all's greatest achievement is that he hasn't lost his edge.

Neither Ills Morton, who gives me a tiny reminding nip as I leave. Tiny Reminders is out now on Warp Two Lone SworrJsmen play Brighton voiks fO 682828). toriiqht. Creation. Bristol (01 1 7-945 0959).

on Friday, and the Welsh Club. Cardiff (029 202321991. on Saturday Firsteps, a 1 4 day quick cabbage soup diet, really is a super way to lose lots of weight. That's because Firsteps a special blend of air dried fresh vegetables and herbs provides the recommended 5 portions of vegetables a day, is eaten in conjunction with many other foods and only takes minutes to prepare. Just enough time in fact to fill your kitchen with a mouth watering herby aroma.

he past is a foreign 1 1 country- they do things 1 1 differently there," to quote Bw a film that was famous in the 70s. I'm not sure about the 70s themselves, though: sometimes they seem like another planet. The decade certainly seems alien in the current crop of TV shows, such as BBCli's I I.ovc the 70s, in which talking heads tenderly recall our past passions. Can it be that we really sat glued to Starsky and Hutch, wore lip gloss, bought Brotherhood of Man records? Or rather, did we really enjoy these things for real, without ironic hindsight? The true cause of our nostalgia is that we perceive the 70s as the last period in Britain when it was possible to enjoy popular culture at first hand that is, without mediating layers of commentary. This was a last breather before the advent of the sort of style journalism that dissected and irouiscd pop culture.

Sometimes, however, the past seems less like another country than just two doors down the street -which is what makes Channel That 70s Show so perplexing. Created by Terry and Ronnie Turner, originators if Third Rock Rom the Sun, this retro sitcom keeps telling us that things are happening in another world. Yet everything looks familiar. Squint a little, and Kric and his teen buddies from Point Place, Wisconsin, could be modern high-schoolers. The real anachronistic skewiness is left to the parents.

Girl-next-door Donna's parents are period pieces: a Danny DcVito lone in a frizzy perm and a bona fide ex-Charlie's Angel (Tanya Roberts). But Kric's folks embody a stranger time slip: Dad is a stuffy authoritarian, Mom is protective and fussy, at one point suffering a paranoid vision of the kids going wild when left alone in the house (dressing as blaxploitation pimps and failing to use table mats). Otherwise, they seem like 70s parents only in the sense that they are really a hangover from study ")Os sitcom parents. And that is the joke they are an anachronism within an anachronism, straight out of Happy Days. I lappy Days was a 70s phenomenon pai excellence, in that nostalgia was a central obsession of the era.

we reinvent the 70s, that decade re-created other eras after its own image. To geUts period right, That 70s Show would have to refer to "Os revivalist rocker bands like Sha-Na-Na; Kile's gang would have to adulate the or decorate their rooms with 20s retro mirrors. That 70s Show is not particularly funny, but the ercakincss is part of the joke. If the show mostly (eels like a stiff, run-of-thc-iiiill sitcom, that is actually an ironic play on the A Firsteps diet pack postage, packaging on hnuu frn rnmhinp and a comprehensive guide FirtoncTM with other foods to maximise your weight loss. So if you'd like to lose a few pounds don't lose the number below.

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