There used to be only three channels on the television when I was growing up, BBC one and two and itv. We had a Pye tv which needed to be switched on an hour before watching to warm up. No remote control and instead it had clunky push buttons across the front. it was heavy and very very big with a teak wooden casing and a dark green thick glass screen. When we turned it off it took a while for the picture to completely disappear, slowly decreasing until it was a tiny white dot in the centre of the green opaqueness. Me and my sister were not allowed to touch it, or anything electrical in the house, except light switches.

We all had to agree on what would be watched and mum had a strict 9pm watershed rule which meant we had to be in bed, just in case; as she would say; “sex reared its ugly head”. We mostly watched at the weekend, Starsky and Hutch, Match of the Day, Dick Emery and The Pink Panther are only a few of the many favourites. Me and Jayne loved the adverts too, especially at Christmas when it was all about toys, which looked so much better than in real life. Things which flew, moved, talked, only to find on Christmas day that our imagination was more effective than AA batteries required.

At the end of the scheduled programmes there was a programme called Postscript, if you were watching it then it was around midnight, and viewing was coming to an end. It was a religious programme which would leave you with a thought for the day before going to bed, a bit like the sleep-inducing assemblies at school. This would be followed by the well-known BBC logo graphic of the world turning on the world, the animated turning globe, black and white, whilst the announcer said goodnight in the Queens English. The very last thing before turning off the Tv would be the national anthem. This seems such a weird thing to do, I don’t know when it was decided to stop this. My dad grew up on a remote farm in Cornwall in a tiny village. His family were the only people who had a television in the vicinity and the neighbours would come to watch occasionally. Ethel Bennet, an elderly lady would stand up straight in the front room of my grandparents’ house whilst the national anthem played, much to everyone’s stifled amusement.