from David Stubbs [Mr Agreeable]:

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE FUTURE?

So what happened? It’s the 21st Century already. We’ve docked in the future. And it’s not what we were promised. We were given to believe that life would be a little more space-age than this – from the Paris Universal exposition of 1900 and its rolling pavements, to the prototype robots patented at numerous American trade fairs over the decades, to the jet packs showcased in Thunderball, to the hovercars and intergalactic travel confidently foreseen in the likes of Flash Gordon and Space 1999. As Seinfeld’s George Costanza, that squat little mass of human frustration, put it, “we could be zipping about all over the place!”

Instead, we’ve been denied. Denied also domestic robots, all-silver jumpsuits, timeshares on the moon, cryonics, capsule-sized three-course meals and 3-D chess and strangely superfluous glass helmets. Were the comic strip writers lying to us? Or was there a lack of will on the part of the scientific establishment to put the fine ideas mooted above into practice? Did they think it would just, like, happen and get lazy?

As well as being denied, however, we’ve also been spared a great many things – at least, for the time being. Spared the radioactive landscapes following the nuclear holocausts which erudite political commentators mournfully assured us were absolutely inevitable by the Eighties or Nineties. Spared the ice age faithfully promised by scientist Steven Schneider back in the Seventies. Spared the global famines predicted by that most spectacularly off-the-mark of Jeremiahs Paul Ehrlich. Spared also the drying up of the world’s gas and petroleum supplies, which the Club of Rome projected would occur by 1993. Orwell’s 1984 proved not to be a horrific vision of things to come but a futurist relic now almost completely strip-mined for ideas for second-rate TV shows, from Room 101 to Big Brother. (Wonder, incidentally, how many copies of 1984 were sold in 1985?) And, while the present incumbent of the White House might suggest otherwise, Homer Simpson’s primary fear of the future – that apes would be our masters – hasn’t materialised either.

Instead, what have we got? Grass. Fishmongers. Paul McCartney. Seaside towns. Astronauts dying, forgotten, of old age. Bob Monkhouse still on television. Prince Phillip. Repeats of Hi-De-Hi and The Good Life. Banjos. Powdered custard. It’ll Be All Right On The Night 38. It’s the future all right but it feels more like the present. Could be worse but could be better.

And dirt. Still with the dirt, a component the futurists of the last century, from fantasists to town planners always imagined would somehow be magicked away, like the stain-resistant fabric devised by Alec Guinness’s boffin in the Ealing comedy The Man In The White Suit. They assumed that at some point a clean break would literally be made between now and Years To Come, that absolute hygiene would be a given, that the gleaming, curvaceous, chrome-plated new world would bear absolutely no traces of the old world, or of waste products. It’s a fallacy perpetuated in the flyless trousers of the Star Trek crew to the idyllic blueprints of Sixties towerblocks with their whitewashed and convenient underpasses. Neither factored piss into their equations.

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