This morning, I found myself watching an old BBC discussion on YouTube about dangerous youth culture.

The panel worried that young people no longer respected authority. They talked about changing morals, new music, changing fashions and whether society was beginning to lose its way.

It all sounded remarkably familiar.

The only difference?

This debate was not taking place in 2026.

It was 1966.

Reading through the comments beneath the video, many people were amused by how modern the discussion sounded. Sixty years later we are still having almost exactly the same conversation.

That got me thinking about Back to the Future.

At the start of the film, Lorraine McFly looks at Marty’s girlfriend Jennifer and complains about teenagers these days. In Lorraine’s mind, young people have become bolder, more reckless, and less respectable than they were in her own youth.

Then Marty travels back to 1955.

Within hours he discovers that his own mother is doing things she would never admit to her children.

That is the joke.

Lorraine is not deliberately rewriting history.

She is remembering it.

Another film came to mind too. In Peggy Sue Got Married, Peggy is given the chance to revisit her teenage years. She does not discover a simpler, more innocent world. She discovers that the adults she once thought had all the answers were improvising, her classmates were not the people memory had turned them into, and growing up was every bit as confusing as she had forgotten.

Perhaps that is what memory does.

It edits.

It softens.

It quietly files away the awkward bits until we are convinced that our generation was somehow different.

What struck me most about that BBC discussion was not simply what was being said, but when it was being said.

1966 was a remarkable moment.

Britain was changing. Youth culture was becoming more visible than ever. Rock music was redefining popular culture. Society was questioning authority.

Hollywood was changing too.

For decades, the Motion Picture Production Code had encouraged films that presented a reassuring moral order. Crime rarely paid. Heroes were heroes. Villains were villains. Many of the darker realities of life were softened or left off screen.

Yet outside the cinema people had lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis. Families were watching the Vietnam War unfold on television. The Civil Rights Movement was challenging long-held assumptions. The world was becoming more complicated than many films allowed it to be.

So, when films like Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate arrived, many older critics saw them as proof that society was becoming more violent, more cynical, and morally adrift.

Many younger audiences simply saw films that finally felt honest.

The interesting part is not deciding who was right.

It is recognising that every generation believes it is seeing a uniquely dramatic cultural shift.

Sometimes those shifts really are significant.

But our reactions to them often follow surprisingly familiar patterns.

Every generation looks at new technology and worries it will ruin attention spans.

Every generation looks at new music and wonders whether standards have collapsed.

Every generation looks at young people and asks, “What happened?”

Then, almost without noticing, those same young people grow older and begin asking exactly the same questions about the generation behind them.

William Goldman famously said of Hollywood:

“Nobody knows anything.”

Watching that BBC programme, I found myself wondering whether there is a companion thought.

Nobody remembers anything either.

Not because we are dishonest.

Because we are human.

We do not remember the past exactly as it happened.

We remember it as it makes sense to us now.

And perhaps that is why a debate from 1966 can feel as though it was broadcast yesterday.