We were already knee-deep in nostalgia. Coronavirus has just made it worse

Memory, according to the barrister representing “coughing major” Charles Ingram in ITV’s Who Wants to be a Millionaire dramatisation Quiz, is a funny thing. When you remember something, you think you’re reconstructing what it was like at the time. In fact, what you recall is your last recollection, filtered through the state you are now in.

Nostalgia is a funny thing. Quiz, a programme watched by almost 6 million people on its last night, told a story from the beginning of the century, from pre-Iraq New Labour, the time of Chris Tarrant and primetime TV shows, bootcut jeans and chintz sofas. On three nights last week, it encouraged its audience, housebound by the coronavirus lockdown, to sip on the crisp white wines of slick television executives, to recall a time before Google, when the biggest story in Britain was about an army major who may or may not have cheated his way to a million pounds.

Like video-conferencing services, hedge fund managers betting against the stock market and manufacturers of nuclear bunkers, nostalgia is enjoying a boom time. Our culture was already long in its grip – the coronavirus lockdown has only solidified its hold on us. Now very little new art or entertainment can be made. We can barely go outside. We can barely create new memories. Fear and anxiety stalk the land. Friends and family may already have fallen seriously ill. The economic outlook is bleak.

But we have our sofas and our laptops, our televisions and our streaming services. When times are tough, the desire to escape to a place of perceived peace becomes ever harder to deny – the warm bath of nostalgia is ready and waiting. The country is giving up, slipping into it, dozing in those waters for hours on end before climbing out to put on a soft, enveloping robe, also made of nostalgia. The fear of missing out has morphed into the remembrance of things past.

On Netflix, Friends has been doing a brisk trade in nostalgia for a while now. Rachel still has that haircut. Joey remains enamoured with sex and eating. Ross’s love of dinosaurs and divorce (and Rachel) endures. The Office is one of the streaming site’s most watched shows at the moment, now combining nostalgia for a time with nostalgia for a place (even if you once thought you hated it): the office, that thing you used to go to, before all this happened.

With fortuitous timing, earlier this year Channel 4 put all of Seinfeld on its website, so you can watch the 90s’ foremost show about nothing, in a world where you do nothing. The British broadcaster also has Frasier and Cheers at its disposal, with the latter’s theme tune already a masterpiece in nostalgia, evoking a warm glow in millions of people who’ve never set foot in the city of Boston, let alone a basement bar there. Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, and right now, that place is the past.

With no sport being played, classic games are replayed on television, radio, podcasts and even, somehow, in the form of live blogs. On the same day that the plan to sell Newcastle United to a consortium that includes Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman was being announced, a young lad’s recreation of a classic goal by Geordie legend Paul Gascoigne (albeit playing for Tottenham) was going viral on Twitter. In football-less Premier League, the present is an ever darker place, in which zero-hour contract king Mike Ashley can be found flogging a beloved north-eastern institution to a petro-state prince who even the CIA acknowledges has blood on his hands. Far happier, then, to return to seemingly more innocent times, with jumpers for goalposts and a vintage game crackling on the wireless.

Much of this nostalgia exists and is driven by social media. With more of us in front of our screens and on our devices, but with nothing much in the way of new content to share, Instagram and Facebook draw us further back, with reminders of where we were and what we were doing in previous years. Half the people I know on social media – myself included – suddenly find themselves posting photos of what they looked like aged 20. Instagram is wall-to-wall Throwback Thursdays and “simpler times”.

Politically, this pandemic represents an opportunity for both left and right – one that our culture’s addiction to nostalgia is tied up in. In the US, Donald Trump has been harnessing the past for years, most notably with his “Make America great again” slogan. The stuttering campaign of Joe Biden is fuelled by a centrist liberal nostalgia for the Obama years and Bill Clinton.

In the UK, we have had Brexit, with its imperial nostalgia, and Boris Johnson’s 2019 election campaign, with its promise to end politics and return us to a time – once again, imagined – when we didn’t have to worry about such things.

Nostalgia can be a powerful tool for such forces and in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, it can keep people distracted while power is solidified. For the left, the challenge is to harness what Walter Benjamin called “revolutionary nostalgia”, in which the traditions of oppressed peoples of the past are drawn upon to question the present. This means shaking people out of their nostalgia and bringing them into the here and now. It means, finally, proceeding as if, in the face of a climate crisis and a global pandemic, there is a just and good future to strive for. This isn’t easy.

One site for downloading 1990s computer games was upfront about the demand it was currently seeing: “Due to the Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19), we are under a heavy load of retrogamers wanting to travel back to those old and safe times,” a large sign on its homepage read.

One of those games, Civilisation II, tasks the player with building a civilisation from the dawn of time into the modern age. It ends in the year 2020.