TV review: Ten Most Annoying Things About 1999. 

What do I remember about 1999? Attending university, doing strange performance art videos involving light bulbs and bathtubs; working in my first job, scanning photographic film mailers; watching Manchester United do a smash and grab against Bayern Munich, which felt a bit like a surrogate England vs Germany match; not really seeing the solar eclipse in Devon; hearing 'My Name Is' on Radio 1 and thinking it was a novelty one-hit wonder; and future charity-shop filler The Man Who selling by the bucketload. 

Channel 5's Ten Most Annoying Things About 1999 also reminded me of Posh and Becks getting hitched (the point at which post-World Cup pariah Beckham became brand Beckham), the millennium bug panic, Pokémon, Kelly Brook hosting The Big Breakfast and cargo pants. The segment on mobile phones, and in particular the BBC’s prime-time show about the new ‘texting’ craze, made it feel like a different era. (And it reminded me that the first retrospective on this year, the BBC’s I Love 1999, was broadcast only two years after in 2001, when a similar nostalgia rush would have been near impossible.) 

What bugged me most about Ten Most Annoying Things About 1999 (aside from not mentioning the film release Ten Things I Hate About You that gave the series its name) was the occasional historical anachronism, something that’s afflicted previous retrospective programmes: the Beastie Boys’ ‘Intergalactic’ was from 1998, and the mentions of Burberry, chavs and Michael Carroll seemed some three years out of date, at least. Still, perhaps it’s churlish to moan about these things, as the format of this series is non-chronological, so the makers may be widening their scope. 

But that’s no excuse for the title card before the toys segment saying 1995. Perhaps narrator Robert Webb can comment on that if a series of Great Retrospective Documentary Mistakes gets commissioned.