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Food for thought
Oct. 14th, 2011 10:50 amAfter the Miami Vice film came out a few years ago, I bought myself the first series of the '80's original on DVD. I remembered loving it when I was younger; the impossibly glamourous lifestyles of Vice cops and their prey in the high-living world of 1980's excess were the unattainable height of cool back then. Watched now, it's intersting to note how much things have changed, especially with lifestyles and expectations - what was then the lifestyle aspired to by rich drug barons and pimps now seems quite a prosiac middle-class life. Luxury in 1984 involved an open top car like an MR2, a television in every room, and a fridge full of food. In fact, so much have our expectations of life changed in the last 30 years that some aspects of wealthy 80s life are unrecognisable to us now; one scene I remember watching featured a corrupt lawyer working at his garden table with what looked like an overly large and clunky laptop, and it took several minutes for me to realise that laptops hadn't been invented in 1984, and the object actually was a briefcase propped open in front of him. What I expect to see in certain contexts is now so powerful that my subconscious no longer even recognises a briefcase unless I actively think about it.
As for Miami Vice itself, it holds up fairly well, perhaps because the depictions of what was wealth in the 1980s are still recognisable to us as a lifestyle now. The scripting, which was at the time seen as hard and gritty, is fairly run-of-the-mill with shock episodes like the one where a female cop goes undercover as a prostitute and has to sleep with a criminal, or another where a villain gets murdered in cold blood no longer getting the reaction they might have had thirty years ago. It's difficult to get all worked up about them in the wake of shows like The Wire, but that doesn't make the unwatchable.
However, there was one part of the shows which it took me a while to understand, and that was one of the casting decisions. It's an ensemble show, and much of the regular casting is understandable - you've got the tough but fair police chief, the lead duo of wisecracking southern lover and street-smart tough guy (Crockatt and tubbs themselves), the impossibly beautiful lady cop who goes undercover as girlfriend/lover a lot, the wiry and tough but less beautiful other female cop who doesn't get to go undercover as much but has got it where it counts, the geeky tech guy, the snitch, and so on. However, there's one cop who appeared to serve no useful purpose. Just some bloke with a beard, he seems to wander round the department talking crap and getting stuff wrong. I couldn't understand what the heck he was there for until, about six or seven episodes in, I finally got it. You see, like the laptop/briefcase moment, my brain has so shifted its expectations from the 1980s to now that I couldn't see what he was until I really thought about it: he was the comedy fat guy.
Something I'd kinda thought about whilst watching the series was how thin everyone looked: to modern eyes they were skinny, wiry, almost. But then they were lean and possibly even muscular and, in comparison to them a man carrying even a tiny amount of extra weight could be cast in the role of entertaining wobblebottom and everyone would have known that without it having to be spelled out. To me, that's a major shift in society; that in the space of thirty years the role of someone cast to be immediately noticably overweight has gone from this:
To this:
That's a heck of a difference right there. I'd guesstimate there's 100-150 pounds in difference between Miami Vice and Lost and, given that a pound of human fat contains 5,000 calories and a grown man is advised to eat about 2,500 calories a day, I'd rather be shipwrecked on a desert island with Hurley than Stan Switek because if I knocked Hurley on the head his calorific content would keep me going for the best part of an entire year longer.
It's pretty clear why this has happened: the price of food calories have dropped remarkably since 1984. By way of example, in real terms, McDonalds prices have dropped 17% in thirty years whilst spending power has increased by an average of over 75% in the same period. Food staple costs have dropped even more: on average the cost per calorie of pasta and rice have more than halved in real terms in the last thirty years; recent increases due to the shift in land use for biofuels and increased population haven't come even close to offsetting this. As a result, recent reports indicate that 30% of the UK population is classed as obese, and even though BMI is a rubbish reporting mechanism it doesn't mean there's nothing in that figure.
Anyway, on the front page of the paper I picked up last night was a report that Health Secretary Andrew Lansley had suggested that people could do something to tackle the obesity epidemic by eating less. I never thought I'd live to see the day when suggesting that people could lose weight by eating less food would be front-page news, but there you go. What's even more surprising is that organisations with names like the League of the Adipose, Rotund and Dumpy have actually criticised him for suggesting that the cost to the NHS for treating obesity-related ailments might be reduced a tad by people eating less, branding his comments as 'unhelpful' and suggesting that more, not less should be spent by the NHS on things like gastric band operations.
Funny old world, eh?
As for Miami Vice itself, it holds up fairly well, perhaps because the depictions of what was wealth in the 1980s are still recognisable to us as a lifestyle now. The scripting, which was at the time seen as hard and gritty, is fairly run-of-the-mill with shock episodes like the one where a female cop goes undercover as a prostitute and has to sleep with a criminal, or another where a villain gets murdered in cold blood no longer getting the reaction they might have had thirty years ago. It's difficult to get all worked up about them in the wake of shows like The Wire, but that doesn't make the unwatchable.
However, there was one part of the shows which it took me a while to understand, and that was one of the casting decisions. It's an ensemble show, and much of the regular casting is understandable - you've got the tough but fair police chief, the lead duo of wisecracking southern lover and street-smart tough guy (Crockatt and tubbs themselves), the impossibly beautiful lady cop who goes undercover as girlfriend/lover a lot, the wiry and tough but less beautiful other female cop who doesn't get to go undercover as much but has got it where it counts, the geeky tech guy, the snitch, and so on. However, there's one cop who appeared to serve no useful purpose. Just some bloke with a beard, he seems to wander round the department talking crap and getting stuff wrong. I couldn't understand what the heck he was there for until, about six or seven episodes in, I finally got it. You see, like the laptop/briefcase moment, my brain has so shifted its expectations from the 1980s to now that I couldn't see what he was until I really thought about it: he was the comedy fat guy.
Something I'd kinda thought about whilst watching the series was how thin everyone looked: to modern eyes they were skinny, wiry, almost. But then they were lean and possibly even muscular and, in comparison to them a man carrying even a tiny amount of extra weight could be cast in the role of entertaining wobblebottom and everyone would have known that without it having to be spelled out. To me, that's a major shift in society; that in the space of thirty years the role of someone cast to be immediately noticably overweight has gone from this:
To this:
That's a heck of a difference right there. I'd guesstimate there's 100-150 pounds in difference between Miami Vice and Lost and, given that a pound of human fat contains 5,000 calories and a grown man is advised to eat about 2,500 calories a day, I'd rather be shipwrecked on a desert island with Hurley than Stan Switek because if I knocked Hurley on the head his calorific content would keep me going for the best part of an entire year longer.
It's pretty clear why this has happened: the price of food calories have dropped remarkably since 1984. By way of example, in real terms, McDonalds prices have dropped 17% in thirty years whilst spending power has increased by an average of over 75% in the same period. Food staple costs have dropped even more: on average the cost per calorie of pasta and rice have more than halved in real terms in the last thirty years; recent increases due to the shift in land use for biofuels and increased population haven't come even close to offsetting this. As a result, recent reports indicate that 30% of the UK population is classed as obese, and even though BMI is a rubbish reporting mechanism it doesn't mean there's nothing in that figure.
Anyway, on the front page of the paper I picked up last night was a report that Health Secretary Andrew Lansley had suggested that people could do something to tackle the obesity epidemic by eating less. I never thought I'd live to see the day when suggesting that people could lose weight by eating less food would be front-page news, but there you go. What's even more surprising is that organisations with names like the League of the Adipose, Rotund and Dumpy have actually criticised him for suggesting that the cost to the NHS for treating obesity-related ailments might be reduced a tad by people eating less, branding his comments as 'unhelpful' and suggesting that more, not less should be spent by the NHS on things like gastric band operations.
Funny old world, eh?
