British TV dystopias

[kindkit]

I'm intrigued by the fact that series with the premise "in the future, our country is a quasi-fascist dystopia" are common enough on British TV, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, that you could call them a sub-genre. (I've just started watching one such show, The Guardians, which so far is excellent.) By contrast, I can't think of single example of this premise on US television, from that period or in fact ever.

Cultural difference? Or am I just not remembering US examples?

Comments

[kangeiko]

well... I guess you could argue that the UK was a bit closer to experiencing these dystopias, and people were therefore thinking about it a bit more. You have the very real impact of WWII - not just the impact on the populace, but the exposure of what had been going on 'just down the road' - and then you had the aftermath, which, unlike the US, was not a boom. The austerity years then followed for a very long time, and a whole generation grew up with that. Then there were the 70s, and things really did seem like they were falling apart - massive unemployment, strikes, power cuts, riots, etc - stretching into the 80s. So there was only a brief flicker of optimism vs many many years of things being rather grim. That is bound to have an impact. And I do think that the literature and TV of the era is emlblematic of that - a gradual surrender to totalitarianism, starvation and shortages, complex and remote wars, etc. Where as at the same time the US was generating its own nightmare TV and literature, focused on the fear of the loss of national identity, e.g. MASH (& there are others, I'm just not up on my 70s US tv). Susan Faludi's Stripped: The Betrayal of the Modern Man talks about the fears and nightmares of the US psyche at that time.

So (tl;dr), I don't think that American didn't produce its own dystopian visions; I just think that they were very different from the UK ones.

[kindkit]

I'm aware of the social context, but it's not like the US didn't have plenty of its own ugliness. We had a much harsher and more thought-policing Red Scare than the UK did, we had racist laws and brutal violence against the African American civil rights movement, and we had inglorious wars in Korea and Vietnam. Yes, we did have dystopian visions, but they tended to be of the "Commies and/or aliens take over and try to destroy our sacred perfect American Way of Life" variety. What interests me is the self-criticism of the British dystopias, the way they raise the spectre of an internal slide towards totalitarianism, for which I don't think there's much US equivalent.

[kangeiko]

I see your point... But the UK has had a history of worry over a slow slide towards totalitarianism - Mosley and his fascists were loathed, and the links to the aristocracy and the Tories do still make people wary of how nasty those in power can be. I agree, there isn't as much of a focus on nationhood, but the shows you're talking about would have been made by people raised in an empire, not a nation, so their perspective would have been different. That would also have tied in to the whole anxiety and crisis of selfhood, the worry of what England is/would be without an empire. I agree that the US had the Communist scares, but that is a fear of being infiltrated, a fifth columnist, rather than an anxiety over a complete loss of identity. I'm phrasing this badly. :/