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Do you remember when...

As a (very effective) cure for insomnia, I've been watching a heap of old black and white movies made in the 1930s and 1940s as I lay in bed of an evening.

Forget sleeping pills, alcohol or other recreational drugs -- nine times out of ten these movies will get me off to sleep in under 10 minutes. It's a fantastic aid to coping with the sleep disruption that Parkinson's produces.

It's also a fascinating look back at the history of technology and society.

Things were so much different back then.

For a start, there were no mobile phones.

The reality of that era was that if you were alone... you were *really* alone.

If caught away from home when finding the need to get ahold of a friend or relative then the only real option was to find a payphone and use that. How many people, apart from us geriactric types, even remember what a payphone was and how the landscape was once littered with little red boxes containing such things?

An even bigger disappointment for anyone thrown back in time from today to a 1940s phone box would be the discovery that those payphones didn't to SMS messages, wifi, the internet or any of the things we're now almost totally reliant on.

What you do find back in those days is a heavy reliance on telegrams for the delivery of time-sensitive messages. They were effectively a hand-delivered form of text messaging, where abreviations abounded and vowels were dropped (just like txt-talk) so as to save money. That's because long-distance electronic communications was very expensive in those days.

These days of course, we think nothing of exchanging messages with people on the far side of the planet because if it's email or SMS then it costs us virtually nothing to do so and even voice calls are dirt-cheap.

Another thing I've noticed is that cars of that era were not particularly reliable. All too often part of the movie plot hinges around someone's car breaking down on remote road on a stormy night. Alternatively, when the hero is trying to escape the clutches of an evil henchman, his old American V8 simply refuses to start when the starter button is pressed.

It's worth mentioning also that there's not a seatbelt or airbag to be seen in these old cars. To be honest, I would not feel comfortable driving a car without the security of a seatbelt these days -- the feeling of vulnerability would be overwhelming.

Whenever someone pulled their car into a garage for petrol they'd also get the oil level checked because those old cars sure seemed to burn a lot of the amber fluid. These days I doubt that the average car owner even checks the oil level from one week to another because most of the time it's not even necessary.

In these old movies there are also no portable entertainment devices. No transistor radios, no portable music playback devices -- nothing.

This was the era of valves (vacuum tubes to use US-parlance) so the need for large and high voltage batteries effectively scuttled the concept of pocketable electronic devices.

Television?

Nope, it seems that the electronic home entertainment was provided solely by radio and what a huge industry broadcast radio was. In fact it was rivaled only by the movie industry which was just about to enter the Hollywood era.

What's also interesting to note is that many of these movies were the forerunners of what later became the TV series. There was a formula on which many films were based, usually detective murder-mysteries based on a character that appeared in an entire family of movies. I guess people would have to go to the local theatre to see their favourite detective in action and that must have been quite a good money-spinner for everyone in the entire chain of events -- from script-writers to projectionists.

These days, the public screening of movies seems a whole different kettle of fish. A lot of smaller towns (such as mine) don't even have movie theatres any longer and the arrival of cheap streaming services such as Netflix along with affordable big-screen TV sets means we're unlikely to see a renaissance of the movie theatre any time soon.

The final really obvious difference between now and then is the way people dress.

Today it's acceptable to wear jeans and a teeshirt almost everywhere. Whilst we do get dressed up for special occasions, the number of suits and ties you see in the street is almost zero but back in the 1940s, almost every adult male wore a suit and a tie, topped off with a hat. Even those involved in manual labour can be seen smartly dressed and wearing ties in many movies from this era.

I have to say we certainly looked like a tidy bunch of people back then; today, not so much.

There are only two problems with this strategy of watching old movies from the 1930s/40s as a soporiphic agent. Firstly, I've seen the first 10 to 15 minutes of scores of movies now but I have no idea how they ended. Second, very occasionally I come across a movie that's really good and actually draws me in to the extent that I end up watching the entire thing instead of drifting of to the land of morpheus.

Ah well, until I come up with a better solution, old movies on YouTube will remain my catalyst for sleep.

Carpe Diem folks!

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