Pop culture round-up!
"Cool Britannia" refers to the '90s in Great Britain--not even the entire '90s but like just a chunk in the middle of the decade. They finally scraped off the grey crust of the Thatcher years and their pop culture briefly dominated a lot of the western world. I owned every album Oasis and Blur made in those years and my favorite show was Absolutely Fabulous, so it's always fun to re-visit that period.
Don't Look Back in Anger is an oral history, so you kind of need to already know something about the period. There isn't a lot of the kind of exposition you'd get in a more standard non-fiction work. The amount of interviews Rachel got is pretty staggering.
Also, god damn I still love Absolutely Fabulous. BritBox probably snatched it up, along with every other British TV show ever made. I should look into adding that to my rotation of streaming subscriptions, I'm sure there's plenty of stuff on it I would be overjoyed to see again.
Click to viewAs usual, Gran comes in at the end with the best line: "I see another pig-ugly MP has been caught making a fool of himself with some scrawny old hooker".
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I finished the newest version of Cold Case Files last night; although I didn't bother watching the final episode because it was about Susan Woods' murder in Stephenville, Texas and I just read The Texas Monthly article about that case.
I thought it was interesting they subtitled it DNA Speaks and used cases that were solved entirely through DNA and genetic genealogy. I wonder if that's an unspoken admission that a lot of the "evidence" used to "solve" some of the cases on the original show were methods that later turned out not to be all that accurate. Hair and fiber comparison, tool marks, cadaver dogs, bite marks, ballistics, blood spatter, even fingerprinting have all recently come under varying degrees of scrutiny and some admission that they weren't always as accurate as prosecutions alleged. (Bite marks aren't accurate at all, IMO.)
They also seem to be trying to course-correct some of the criticism that true crime as a genre has come under, that it ignores victims or doesn't treat them as people who mattered, including lots of interviews with loved ones. Of course, they also try to have it both ways. One of the episodes is about a woman who was a go-go dancer at a nightclub, and they had her family on to talk about her and some kind of cultural critic to talk about how her murder was treated very salaciously in the press with an air of "Well, that's what you get when you're a floozy". Which is all well and good, but then they kept showing a photo of her in her skimpy dance costume.
I wish all the cases hadn't been grisly sex crimes committed against women, but I guess those are probably the cases that usually get solved decades later with DNA.