Recycled Bowler

Guardian, 18 August 1998
Just let it go
by Linda Grant

Grant notes that The Avengers is to be resurrected as a movie, bemoaning that everything is a cover, these days - there is no original material. 'When you make movies out of forgettable sixties TV series like The Flintstones you know that you're a civilisation that has gone up an alley into a cultural dead-end'. Nostalgia is an illusion that things used to be better. In the 50s people yearned for the 30s as a time of greater social order. 'What they really meant was the middle classes could still find a parlour maid and live in a low-wage economy, it was still socially acceptable to be anti-semitic and any halfwit from an extremely minor public school could get a job administering the colonies'. The image utilises an identical bowler hat to one actually used in a similar image I provided for the same column 6 months earlier.