"Jolly Silver Haired White Telethon Man In A Suit"

TV Watching Mark Cousins critically deconstructing the promo for Video Killed The Radio Star on The Story of Film: An Odyssey this morning ("the screens") I was reminded of this similar but unrelated investigation on BrokenTV from a couple of weeks ago surveying a YouTube user channel surfing at the end of the 1980s:

"Onto the ninth second of the video, and the viewer finds themself confronted with another rich-looking white man in a suit, but this time a person who is somewhat less jolly, and is speaking in a language we can only correctly categorise as “foreign”, before another final fleeting glimpse of Jolly Silver Haired White Telethon Man In A Suit. Perhaps this is there in order to reinforce the view that the 1990s are lurking, and a deregulated Europe that promised to be simultaneously confusing, frightening, bewildering and brilliant was then just a few years away. It took ITV’s brilliant comedy drama series Root Into Europe about eight weeks to make the same point, but ever the auteur, ClassicGarth wraps it all up within five seconds of footage."

Connecting the two isn't an attempt to nullify Cousins' achievement, which has been to place western and world cinema on equal footing albeit within a Kenneth Clarke like "personal view" framework leaving various cinema greats without a mention or represented by their very earliest work.  It's just a while since I've seen Top Gun talked about with the same (apparent) seriousness as Distant Voice, Still Lives.