During my three years studying Fine Art, I only owned one paint brush, and I don’t actually remember using it for anything to do with my studies. I left that very fancy institution with no actual tangible ‘art’ skills, but I did leave with an ability to talk at great length about the concept of time.
I was on the 4D pathway, so we all spent a lot of time talking about time. These days though, my ideas about time only really come up when I’m thinking about Emmerdale. Although, in fairness, I do spend a lot of time thinking about Emmerdale.
In many ways, Emmerdale is a place that exists outside of time. Watching episodes from the nineties, it does not feel like the nineties. Aside from that ugly leather jacket that Biff wore, everyone dresses like they’re from further back in time. But not from a period you could ever quite put your finger on. The same goes for most of the decor. Maybe it’s just that farming feels like an old-time-y thing, or that the cast as a whole was generally a lot older than it is today. And then the Spice Girls start playing in the background, or a young Robert Sugden gets a GameBoy for Christmas. And suddenly, very clearly, we’re in the nineties. I wasn’t alive for nearly any of the nineties but The Spice Girls and GameBoys feel like two of the most quintessential nineties things imaginable.
I do wonder if, 30 years in the future, Emmerdale from the 2020s will feel more concrete in its connection to time. Perhaps the way bisexual characters are handled will feel starkly dated. Perhaps it will feel once again like a time beyond time, until you reach episodes from mid-2020 and suddenly everyone is wearing face masks and washing their hands.
I could say something here about that guy who theorised that culture ended in the nineties. My art school friend Cool Tom raved about him but the video he sent me was very boring so I didn’t watch much of it.
One of the concepts of time that I always found more interesting, was the idea that time is a place. That we can visualise time almost like a map, where everything is happening at once, and we’re just moving through it. This way, things aren’t past or present or future, they’re just different directions.
And I guess this also feeds into the idea of time being cyclical. My grandma lives in Wilmslow, so I’ve been there many times. Every time I go, it’s exactly the same, but it’s also a bit different. She moved to a bungalow when stairs started getting difficult and she moved into a care home when her dementia kicked in. It’s always the same but it’s always a bit different.
Kerry, in the present, running away from her troubles with a job on a cruise ship is a perfect example of both Emmerdale and time being cyclical. Bernice did exactly the same in the early noughties. Plus they both had a new daughter. Granted, Chloe is an adult daughter, but still new to Kerry and new to us as viewers. Just as Gabby was when she was born.
And speaking of Bernice and Gabby, it was surreal to be watching reruns of early naughties Emmerdale when Gabby was born at the same time as watching Gabby bring Thomas into the world. You could say that that’s just the circle of life. I think it’s another example of Emmerdale, and time, being particularly cyclical.
The recent storm for the 50th anniversary unsurprisingly put me in mind of the plane crash in 1993. When Liv got trapped under that caravan, all I could think about was Chris Tate, nearly 30 years earlier getting his legs trapped. I really thought we were gonna have another wheelchair-using character. I really thought it was gonna be slightly more accurate representation than Chris ever was. (Although I will save my broader thoughts about Emmerdale and disability for another time).
It’s said that there are only really seven different stories, so I suppose in more than fifty years and nearly 10,000 episodes, there’s going to be a little bit of repetition. And with ITV3 airing old episodes, with YouTube re-uploads, with DVDs on eBay, nearly every single episode, every single storyline, is available to us all at once.
Whether or not you believe that all of time is happening simultaneously, you cannot deny that all of Emmerdale is happening simultaneously.
I like the naration
Where do you come from
Can we subscribe to each other