When I was in my mid-teens, I watched a tv programme that presented a humorous view of suburban Britain, set around twenty-five years into the future. Two-and-half decades forward is an interesting time to speculate about, being close enough for most things to be roughly similar, but far enough ahead for some things to have changed significantly. I recall that in the tv show there were some jokes about the improved taste of instant food and the widespread use of robot teachers at school, but neither of the two young people who were the focus of the programme had a mobile phone, which is perhaps the most visible lifestyle change that – in fact – occurred between the years when I was fifteen and forty.
One scene that has stayed with me, was a shot of the two teenagers walking down a street that was littered with rubbish, the sky busy with helicopters from which bundles of coloured papers were being thrown to the people below. It was a time when bulk mail, as it was then called, had just started: in addition to letters, magazines, and the like, that were personally addressed to my parents – and, very occasionally, letters addressed to me – we would receive impersonal advertising material through our letterbox, usually promoting products for sale at a local store or supermarket. These were delivered to every house in the street, sometimes with the mail and sometimes separately, as part of a blanket advertising campaign. The tv show had imagined a vast increase in impersonal adverts, thrown directly into the streets from marketing vehicles in the air. The idea seemed ludicrous, but at the same time a little worrying: surely, we would never allow bulk mail drops on this scale, creating vast amounts of unread and unwanted street litter.
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