BEYOND THE LIMITS

“There is nothing wrong with your television set…”

One of the things that I’ve been doing with my evenings and whatever other moments of “free” time I have been getting lately is that I’ve been working my way through the box set of “The Outer Limits” which I found in an online “bargain bin” a few weeks ago. Forty-nine fifty minute episodes of post-McCarthyist, Cold War paranoia and all-round genius as broadcast on American television in the first half of the 1960s, and all for less than fifteen quid, well… it seemed like a bargain to me at the time.

I know that a lot of fans of more “modern” television might find such a thing laughable and a bit silly, but to me those old shows are really pure gold even if you do have to try and make allowances for the rather average looking rubber monsters.

I have, you might already know, spent a lot of my life as a television viewer ignoring such shortcomings, so that, at least, came as no difficulty to me, and there was an episode called “The Borderland” which just looked like a sixties version of J.J. Abrams “Fringe” to me, and opened up all sorts of possibilities for a “very special episode” that C.G.I. might offer…

After all, I do like a good anthology, and if the anthology also includes a lot that is analogy, then so much the better.

Once upon a long ago, during my brief sojourn into the world of academia, I managed to weave a whole thesis about how using fantasy, programme makers were able to sneak bigger “issues” out into the big wide world without the network controllers really noticing, so it’s not as if the topic is one with which I am unfamiliar.

I do sometimes think that I could write it far, far better nowadays, however, simply because I know more about the history and politics of the era I was writing about and have far more access to the actual programmes themselves, instead of just reading books about them as I did back in those days.

As an aside, I also like to think that I write better, too, but that’s not really for me to say…

Anyway, I’ve been slowly ploughing my way through those episodes whenever I’ve got the chance and I’ve sat through about a dozen so far. “The Zanti Misfits” have been and gone and a whole multiverse of new worlds still awaits me.

A couple of things have struck me though, and they’re mostly about something as banal and inconsequential as “fashion”, a topic that certainly failed to trouble me as that thesis was being written.

One episode started with what must have been, judging by the number of extras it would otherwise have required, some “stock footage” of “panic on the streets” and I was completely taken aback by how many hats that there were being worn by the average men in the streets.

And it wasn’t those baseball caps that you see so many of today on heads that should know better (or at the very least look in a mirror before heading out), but proper “trilby” style titfers. All of the gentlemen seemed to have one. In fact it was more unusual for someone not to be wearing one.

Then I started to wonder when exactly it was that men stopped wearing them, because it seems to have been a very sudden thing and it does rather look as if everyone pretty much came to this decision overnight.

“No more titfers, everyone…!”

“Okay then…” (Flings hat at hat rack in best “James Bond” style. Misses. Never wears it again.)

Strangely enough, if you watch “From Russia With Love”, old Jimmy Bond spends a lot of that film wearing hats, especially when he’s running about on that hilltop being harassed by a helicopter, but by the time of the next film “Goldfinger”, apart from the customary “hat stand” moment (and whatever happened to hat stands, too…?), and the scene on the golf course, by then they’ve pretty much vanished.

I wonder if that time is the moment when hats fell out of favour with the average gentleman…?

In fact, during all of the time Sean Connery played the part, he had a hat on in the opening “gun barrel” walk on, even when it wasn’t actually Mr Connery shooting the pistol but the stuntman Bob Simmons in the first three films.

But “The Outer Limits” also posed another fashion question that still needs answering. It has to do with women wearing dresses and heeled shoes. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of moments in this show (and indeed others from about that time) where it would have made perfect sense and been perfectly practical and logical choice for the woman in question to have put on a pair of trousers, but costume designers never, ever seem have considered that option in those days, and instead would make the young actresses clamber up mountains and through forests and whatever else the scriptwriters decided to put them through, in the most impractical outfits, almost as if it never crossed their minds that there was another option.

Was it simply the case that, in those days, women simply did not wear jeans or trousers at all and so putting them in such things would have been too radical? Well, that’s obviously not so. After all, Marilyn Monroe spends much of “The Misfits” in jeans, but maybe that was because her character was considered so very far “out there” that she could get away with it…? After all, if you see footage of “real” women from around that time in documentaries, they are almost always wearing dresses or skirts…

When did it happen then, that it became “acceptable” for “ordinary” women living their lives to start being seen out and about in trousers or jeans…? Again, did the world suddenly wake up one morning and decide that we were all fine with that…?

Before that, women wearing tousers, or men without hats, really would have seemed like something from… “The Outer Limits!”