I stress that I did not watch my father and mother in action but one imagines that even contemplating the idea of such a spectacle is the most toe curlingly embarrassing act one can consider. That is until you listen to middle aged and elderly TV and radio news presenters pandering to fuckwit millennials as they try to play Daddy Cool.
Over on Channel 4 News old Jon Snow and his portly pal Krishnan are always talking about the exciting "Grime" scene. For those of you who are not as cool as Jon & the Boyz of the C4 possy, that is a form of popular music noted for being utterly crap which will be consigned to the dustbin of history by the summer of 2018. One imagines that back home Mr Snow, who is aged 69, probably plays some Stones ( as in Rolling not Roses) or maybe sings along to some Dylan. Krishnan - who is roughly my age - is surely a man who appreciates Guns n Roses or perhaps Blur. The idea that either of these two intelligent, if crushingly earnest and left wing , men actually like Grime is ludicrous. Yet on an almost weekly basis they play homeage to this rubbish.
Over on Radio 4's Today programme the BBC tried last week to get down with the yoof by running a feature on the closure of Fabric. This is a night club where folks keep dying after taking drugs. Having lived in London's central night club zone when I was a bit younger I can only imagine the horrors local residents put up with as young folk who are off their head on drugs rush around the streets at 4 AM vomiting, shouting, having sex with each other and engaging in acts of petty crime. But all that does not seem to matter it is the drug deaths that has finally goaded Islington Council into revoking the license. Good news all round.
"Oh no it is not" say loads of young folk who have only just stopped wetting their knickers and demanding the restoration of democracy by shooting all old people and then voting again on Brexit, and so now are on social media outraged at this latest national tragedy. The BBC Radio 4 team are all Daddy Cool and so interviewed a fellow called DJ Yoda who described this nightclub as "such an important part of British culture"..."an integral part of British culture".
Really? A nightclub 99% of the population has never heard of and who 99.9% of the population have never visited is right up there with Shakespeare, Lords Cricket Ground, We shall Fight Them on the Beaches, The Domesday Book and Magna Carta, a Chicken Tikka, and a list of hundreds of other things which nearly all of us in Briton are somehow aware of in a very real way.
DJ Yoda was talking obvious crap. But for the BBC to point this out would have been a) perceived by the BBC as being uncool in the eyes of the millennials to whom it panders daily and b) almost certainly a hate crime of some sort and c) an insult to all those hard working students who have just delivered another year of record A*s at A level.
There are some days when after a few minutes of listening to Radio 4 or watching Channel 4 you start to think about your parents as it is just that little bit less toe curlingly embarrassing.