It’s not shoulder pads and bad hair that dates your favourite TV shows… it’s technology.

You used to be able to tell how old a TV show or movie was by the fashion worn by the actors on screen. An overly shoulder-padded suit or big hair quickly gave away a mid ‘80s TV show with much giggling and mirth. Now, it’s not just fashion that necessarily dates your favourite TV show or movie, it’s technology.

Our CEO, Sol Trujillo, often observes that people leave home with three things: their keys, their wallet and their mobile. That’s certainly true today but what better way to observe the evolution of technology and how it has become part of our own lives, than to go back in time on screen.

I am firmly a child of Generation X. When I was growing up, the telephone company just did plain old telephones and telephones weren’t important until you became a teenager. Then it became a necessary social lifeline but beyond that, I doubt I would have even used the phone that much up until about the age of 10.

Not so for today’s Millennial children. I have two of them and if ever there was a reminder about the importance of the ‘plain old telephone’ it was reinforced by my kids.

We recently acquired the first series of The Brady Bunch on DVD (thanks, Grandma!). In one of the first episodes, made in 1969, the Brady’s fixed line rang. It was the standard North American long ringtone.

The first thing my 6 year old son said was “someone’s mobile is ringing”. I had to explain that that sound was actually how the phone sounds in North America. Second quaint observation was that the Brady kids all had to stand by the phone in the TV room to take the call. Alternatively, they could also go to Mike’s ‘den’ and take a call. They didn’t have a “walk around” phone with a speakerphone like we did at home.

Third quaint observation by my 6 year old son was, when Carol needed to contact Mike or Alice and they weren’t at home, “why doesn’t she just call them on their mobile?” he asked. I had to explain that there were no such things as mobile phones at the time the Brady Bunch was made and there were no such things as mobiles when Mummy was growing up. That elicited a look of both horror mixed with dismay.

From my son’s perspective, imagine a world where you couldn’t just call up someone when you were out, you couldn’t make a video call using a Next G handset or major horror (especially when you are 6 and bored while out with Mummy), not being able to watch FOXTEL on Mummy’s Next G handset? Don’t all parents have FOXTEL on their phones?

Since the revelations of The Brady Bunch, I have been taking a keener interest in the on-screen technology habits of some of my favourite TV shows and what I have found is that in most cases they mirror, if not lag, our own take-up of technology.

To take a recent example, in the early series of Sex and The City, Carrie and her friends didn’t have mobile phones. Back in 1998, mobiles were not something they left home with. If you watch those earlier episodes, they made calls from payphones. There were no SMS dilemmas for them and life revolved around getting home and listening to the message machine while taking off their impossibly high heels.

As the show progressed, we observed Carrie eventually getting a mobile (or ‘cell’) phone, and then the rest of the gang slowly began to get them as well. The final episode of the show ends with Carrie taking a call on her cell phone from Mr Big.

Now, in their recent movie, all four of the main characters have funky new handsets and are completely mobile/ tech savvy. Interestingly, Miranda also asks whether a place they visit has WiFi so they are completely up there when it comes to representing technology in 2008.

However, being a Gen Xer and not particularly tech-savvy, Carrie rejects an iPhone when it is handed to her during a crisis moment when she has to make an urgent call to Mr Big and says something like “I can’t use this” and is handed a more “standard” phone.

I am sure that in time, Sex and The City will also be judged and appear dated because of the clothes worn by the characters in the show but if you look around, you will begin to see that shoulder pads and bad pastel colours will not be the only things to date your favourite TV shows.