Russell Barnes

Jonathan Meades: Remember The Future (1997). The first documentary from his series Even Further Abroad, Meades asks about Britain and technological modernism and our national dread of awe. Big Tech was never going to fit into Little England he concludes, despite the postwar lurch towards the white heat of technology and a brief flirtation with architectural determinism. Instead "The shape of things to come is the shape of what's already been. We're invited to advance timorously into the past." What's old is new again and Meades's arguments about Nineties Britain are back in play: data centres and high speed rail, wind farms and modular nuclear reactors - is it really us? Is our suspicion of technological utopia a hangup, or a well honed defence against the petty tyrannies of planned progress? Or is it just an argument over taste? One person's national heritage is another person's Victorian monstrosity etc. We're headed into the future regardless, why argue about the brickwork there. Meades is acerbic as well as informed and thoughtful, and his documentaries should be Grade 2 listed: preserved for future generations to gawp at on school visits to the world of analogue television, where we thought 30 minutes of architecture on BBC2 before the snooker started was good for us.