That anachronistic set design serves a plot purpose, though, when Mom sends over her undead darkness monster.
Yet this flawed, anachronistic set-up cannot be changed without the say-so of the very nations who would stand to lose most from any genuine reform.
So Barnard wrote a script inspired by Wilde's fairytale about a giant who won't let children play in his idyllic garden, and gave it an anachronistic setting, among a gang of boys who collect scrap metal in Bradford.
Stirring principles, to be sure, but like many landmark cases, Gibbons involved what seemed a quaintly anachronistic set of facts by late 20th-century standards, namely, the proposition that steamboats and ferries are economically vital.
It is polite, formal and at times anachronistic, linguistically setting apart a man who frequently struggles to sell himself to the American electorate.
The Hallmark show, enacted on an anachronistic studio set that looked like a deliberate throwback to the good old days of 1992, was equally desperate.
Then what is it about "Hallelujah, Baby!", circa 2004, that makes it feel stolidly grounded in a bland and anachronistic 1967 mind-set?
He has an ingenious suggestion for the Trusteeship Council, that most anachronistic of UN bodies, set up to handle decolonisation.
Even in this anachronistic (albeit surreally grand) setting, the 34-year-old easily conjured another ecstatic solo from his tenor saxophone.
But we do know that when the director of a 1990s production of Shakespeare's play, who had cast a black actress in the role of Cleopatra, talked about emphasising her "earthiness" and "the kind of non-European regality which allows someone to sit on the floor", she was imposing yet another set of anachronistic preconceptions on to the image of the Hellenistic queen.
