Nostalgia Without Memory

I’ve recently been watching Jimmy McGovern’s Accused on Netflix. This drama from the early 2010s sees each episode focus on a trial, at court. The crimes committed in each episode vary, but the consistent theme of each challenges the viewer’s perception of morality, versus the law. It’s an excellent show and is a bit of a who’s who of British acting - Sean Bean, Olivia Colman, Stephen Graham, Sheridan Smith and Peter Capaldi all feature, to name but a handful of household names. But that’s not the focus of this post.

It dawned on me when watching Accused that Jimmy McGovern also wrote on the no longer with us Scouse soap, Brookside, which ran from 1982 to 2003. The latter part catching my attention - as in my mind, it had ended in the late 90s, or just on the turn of the millennium.

This got me thinking about our opinions of events. In this case, a tv show and perhaps how outdated and wrong we can be. How the mind plays tricks and how our memory isn’t as good as we probably think.

Sticking to the Brookside theme I began to realise I could remember little about it, so why was I so surprised that it ended so ‘late’? It was always on in our house growing up. I remember the opening credits, with shots of Liverpool and then drawing to a close (on the close, ironically) with a final dead shot of the Brookside cul-de-sac; one which reminds me of a street on the estate next to where I grew up.

I can recall some of the characters. Jimmy Corkhill, who seemed to be the local hard man and his daughter (can’t remember her name), played by Claire Sweeney. Simbad, a greying fat middle aged man. With the only other people I can recall being ‘Tinhead’, a young man who for what I recall got progressively more involved in crime - culminating in a shoot-out with a police helicopter at a petrol station and his girlfriend, whose character name I’ve also forgot, played by Jennifer Ellison.

That’s pretty much it… Something I apparently was present in viewing regularly up to the age of around 13.

If you’d have asked my opinion on Brookside before I was thrown into this self-imposed memory exercise, I’d have said it was a good, gritty show that had a more realistic edge than other soaps. But, the last few paragraphs prove I don’t really know anything about it, so how can I come to this conclusion?

Why are we so overconfident about things that we can’t actually remember? Is nostalgia simply misled feelings that we’ve mislabelled as facts? Does it even matter?

Maybe nostalgia isn’t about remembering correctly. Maybe it’s about remembering how something made you feel, even if the details have slipped away.