Just like Dr Who, nostalgia must look to the future as much the past

Creature’s Dan Cullen-Shute channels the power of nostalgia through the lens of Doctor Who. It’ll make sense. We promise.

If you’re anything like me – and, let’s face it, you’re reading an article in the Drum, so you’re probably at least a *bit* like me – you’ll remember a time when all the ads were brilliant, and so were the programs that surrounded them. None of this modern nonsense, with all of its things, and bits, and occasional bobs, but proper advertising: advertising that made you laugh/cry/feel/reach for your wallet/vote for Tony Blair/never buy a potato again* (*delete as appropriate, depending on age, attitudinal segmentation, and sociodemographic leanings).

Ads were ads, and the telly was king.

When people who worked in advertising walked into a room, everyone stopped, applauded, asked them if they knew Howard from Halifax, and handed them an absolutely massive pile of Ferrero Rocher because ad-people were great, ads were great, and when great people were making great things people wanted to spoil them just how those great adverts told them to.

The weird thing, though, is that when I talk to people about that golden age of advertising – and that golden age of being a Bloody Advertising Legend TM – the people who were there seem to remember it slightly differently.

They say silly things like, ‘Yeah, but there was an awful lot of crap, too,’ and, ‘for every John Webster ‘Salmon,’ there were at least twenty 90-second infomercials of Michael Aspel trying to bribe you with a pen’, and ‘tell you what, though, if you think we’re struggling to deal with systemic inequality of class/race/gender/sexuality now, try being a woman who hadn’t been in the army trying to get a job at JWT in the 90s’.

Silly things that just don’t fit with the rose-tinted, halcyon days image I have when I look back at a time I wasn’t there for and have literally no direct experience of.

But that’s nostalgia for you.

And you don’t need to be a super forecaster with a Dominic Cummings super-brain to know that nostalgia is a big thing right now. Tennant’s back – and *fabulous* as the Doctor. The Beckham, Robbie Williams, and everyone else who did anything in the 90s documentaries on Netflix. Five hours of the brilliant, mesmeric Caroline Aherne on BBC2 on Christmas Day. Boris Johnson is reliving his Covid let-it-rip glory days. The Tory party generally gives it strong Winter Of Discontent vibes. (Just a little bit of politics. Indulge me.)

Razor-sharp satire aside that it’s a current obsession is hardly surprising: I mean, of course, we’re downing pints of nostalgia – when the right-now is as viscerally, deeply upsetting as so much of the right-now regularly is right now, then who wouldn’t want to escape to a better place? To a better time? To a time when we all felt a bit warmer, safer, and less like fraught marbles being devoured by the ever-hungrier hippos of global geopolitics? And to a place where the most significant thing we had to worry about was whether Robbie really hated Gary (he did) or whether it was all just for show (it wasn’t).

The challenge, of course, is that it’s really easy to do nostalgia badly, which is why it gets such a bad rap. And sometimes advertising can be good at doing the right thing badly – but this time round, I’m hopeful. Let’s wield our nostalgia blades wisely, finding the heart of why something was special, elevating it, not just parroting it. Old-fashioned stuff isn’t inherently good – but stuff rooted in (sorry) authentic, classic stories, heritage and tradition can be sodding brilliant. In lesser hands, Tennant coming back to the Tardis could have been a disaster: a self-indulgent ham of a narrative arc; but in Russell T Davies’s hands, we’ve seen nostalgia regenerated and evolved, and we have the same face, telling us new, modern, and utterly beautiful stories, and it’s glorious.

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So in 2024, when you come across the word nostalgia in a creative brief, let’s remember that nostalgia doesn’t have to be – to butcher a phrase – the last refuge of Nigel Farage in the jungle; it can also be a two-hearted alien showing the world that sometimes love really is love, and that we’re all the better for it. Next year, let’s all strive to be a little bit more Russell T.