Just think: In the author's teenage years he could never imagine he'd be ruminating about his halcyon days via a cable television show. Meta:
However it turns out over here, the show has forced this writer into an unpleasant position. Where formerly he simply regarded the decade of his teenage years with unmixed loathing, he has been forced to reconsider—apart from the fact that Middle Age does tend to bathe one’s happy adolescence in a golden glow. The truth is, that while, as a society, we were decaying, we had not gone as far as we have: the secondary stage of a disfiguring disease always compares well with the open sores and noxious abscesses of the tertiary. It is not too surprising that the English Gene Hunt has become something of a guilty pleasure among the more outwardly forward thinking of the British literati.