You know how the Americans love any drama that confirms their nostalgia for a non-existent Britain, where our clocks are stopped at a permanent tea-time, our crinolines tucked up in a Cambridge punt, gliding towards a wedding?

Well, this week they awarded an International Emmy for best drama to the BBC One series, The Street, and that is because it also fulfils Stateside period fantasies. Not that it has a parasol in sight: it features contemporary and unrelentingly grim tales of life from a gritty road in a town somwhere Manchesterish.

But oh, how dated it is: in The Streetthe North of England is forever stuck in 1971. In some ways, this works well: the acting is brilliant, the gloomy milieu perfectly rendered, it’s got a bit of the kitchen-sink intensity of a Cathy Come Back in Anger to Have a Taste of Honey.

Yet it’s also just as archaic as Hugh Grant in an embroidered waistcoat. Take last night’s episode, in which rough, tough demolition man Charlie discovered he was gay. Minutes after this he had his first gay sex, hours later his first full-blown gay love affair, the next night he was dancing in a gay nightclub, where he was brutally gay-bashed. In the days that followed his children were targeted by antigay bullies, and a vicious police officer publicly disgraced him and had him banned from his local gym. Oh, and then his wife left him.

Poor Charlie: for the sake of cramming it all into an hour of drama he had to suffer a few lifetimes’ of gay discrimination in one week. His near-suicidal downward spiral means this episode of The Street will be used as correctional material for wayward youths in extreme-right Christian colleges across America. The clear message: the “right” thing to do, boys, is to lie to your wife.

Here’s where the writer Jimmy McGovern stretched credibility, for me at least. I’m sure life for gay men was pretty tough in the 1970s – this was, after all, an era before we all came to know and love the sexy “construction worker” dancer in The Village People.

But 30 years on, post Queer as Folk, is homophobia really so bad, even, God forbid, in the North? Maybe I’ve just been hanging around too many metropolitan nightclubs, sprayed by baby oil from writhing men while on my way to the bar. Maybe I’ve just been to too many Gay Pride marches, dressed in nothing more than an ostrich feather. But it’s my belief that being gay is a little more fun than Charlie made it look. OK, so fun is not quite the word for someone in Charlie’s predicament: but wouldn’t the police have more restraint, wouldn’t the public at large would be more blasé? I hope so.

Luckily there were some – I think intentional – comedy moments. It was great to see building sites, the last citadel of macho wolf-whistling he-men, revealed to be seething with guy-on-guy romance and tender parting glances. I enjoyed it when Charlie and his boyfriend had to shout so that their sensitive agonising about whether “he liked himself” could be heard above the clanging machinery. And was it my imagination, or did the camera linger on the shot of the digger drilling into concrete just a little too lovingly?

If, after all that, anyone is still feeling nostalgic for the 1970s, the best cure is to watch Brucie’s Generation Game: Now and Then on UKTV Gold.Whoever came up with this concept surely was fired from some CIA rendition unit for extreme brutality.

If we have misremembered The Generation Game as a funny, kitsch classic, the figure of Bruce Forsyth, now aged 147, paraded in front of a studio audience, put paid to that.

In recreating “favourite” scenes from the orginal show, his arthritic grip on the male contestant was still sadistic, his drooping eyes on females still horribly lecherous. His previous female “assistants” are now of course too old for him – they were wheeled out too, looking about 32. He asked one of them if it was jolly fun being groped on stage, she was forced to agree, yet her contemptuous face told a different story.

Of course Brucie has now employed a new, younger model, about a tenth of his age. Within a few minutes he had touched her inappropriately and given her a new nickname: “Fanny”. Thank God we live “now” and not “then”.

Out of the box

–– For light relief last night, you could have turned to a film about a mentally disabled man whose mother had died, only for him to try to conceal her decomposing body so that he would not be taken into care. The Spastic King (Channel 4) was soulful, original, and genuinely funny – due to an decision to have the central character portrayed as a sarcastic, sexist sort of Frank Skinner of special needs. But the bit where he cradles his mother’s blackened hand in his, alone in the dark of their empty house – even I didn’t laugh at that.

–– Whenever an article comes up on a news website about continuing job cuts at the BBC, a whole slew of BBC insiders post comments underneath. Many, interestingly, confess that the cuts are long overdue, giving insider denunciations of wasters and skivers. Even more telling: that they have the time in their working day for long posts on news websites.

helen.rumbelow@thetimes.co.uk

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