In all seriousness Maxil you can hate the political turmoil of a decade, and still love the art and music, which I do for the 80s and pretty much every decade LOL.
Personally I agree and disagree to some extent with Uncle Deadly. I think that yes the 80s did mark a decline in politics as it's when Thatcher was in power and the country has never really recovered from that. Leaving aside the devastation her tenure itself did. Thatcher also birthed New Labour. (She even referred to that as her proudest accomplishment.)
However I don't think that the 80s was when entertainment was dumbed down in the UK at least.
I think that was the 90s. As much as I like the 90s. (I'm a 90s baby after all.) The 90s was the era of panel shows, reality tv, when sci fi and imaginative fiction was all but gone on British tv. It was also when the press I think lost anyone challenging them.
As I have mentioned many times, back in the 60s, 70s and yes the 80s, comedians used to at least be genuinely anti establishment. Peter Cook, Bill Hicks, Lenny Bruce and Rik Mayall went after the phoney left, the tory government, Apartheid (when it was not trendy to do so) organised religion etc,
However in the 90s you started to get the likes of Paul Merton, Jimmy Carr who as I have pointed out only went after media approved targets. Bill Hicks big target was the injustice in Wako. Frankie Boyle's was Kerry Katona. That says it all.
I'd also like to add that the 90s was when identity politics started to creep its way into the media. We got things like the Blair Babes, about how marvellous it was that we had women in the cabinet, even though they were f*cking war mongers!
Also bare in mind this quote from Rik Mayall near the end of the 90s.
Obviously he is exaggerating to some extent, but you can see how deeply rooted this crap is in the BBC.
Now you can argue that the seeds of a lot of this crap in the 90s were sown in the 80s, but again you could see the same for the 80s in regards to the 70s as Thatcher got in in the 70s.
For me all decades have their ups and downs re entertainment.
For instance the 90s may have been a wasteland in Britain, but it was a golden age in America. You had classic genre series, comedies and cartoons. Apart from Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes, no animated series from before the 90s can come close to matching that decade's cartoons. (Even then Tom and Jerry were comedies. In terms of adventure cartoons, NOTHING pre 90s is as strong.) Compare Spider-Man 1984 to the 94 series, or Superfriends to Batman. It's quite a remarkable jump in quality in every way, animation, voice acting, story telling.
Meanwhile the 90s had far more classic American genre series than say the 70s, or the 80s, or to be honest even the 60s. Love them or hate them, Buffy, Xena, Charmed, Hercules, Babyon 5, The X-Files, Star Trek sequels all made a bigger impact than most 80s genre series.
Similarly Seinfeld, Friends, Frasier, the Simpsons all were among the best, if not THE best American comedy series.
