Watching With Mother

Like all the most articulate and well-informed discussions on sensitive and delicate topics, this one started in the pub.

But the spectacle of half-a-dozen middle-aged blokes arguing about who watched what with mother and when was, I can assure you, not an edifying one.

Now as I remember it – although I have been wrong before, once, in 1979 – the sequence was: Mondays – Picture Book; Tuesdays – Andy Pandy; Wednesdays – The Flower Pot Men; Thursdays – The Woodentops; Fridays – Rag, Tag and Bobtail.

This, however, was not quite how some others saw it, with Picture Book on Mondays just about the only point on which everyone agreed – which, of course, means it is probably wrong.

But I can tell you that it is rather difficult to take someone’s point of view seriously when they are expressing it while doing a Spotty Dog impersonation, accompanied by background “Flobba-dobble-ops,” “Arf-arf-arfs” and the occasional “Weeeeeeed” (as you can see, the verbal standards of children’s TV hasn’t changed much in the best part of 50 years).

Must have been a bit of a hoot for the rest of the pub punters, though, ’cos the landlord has booked us for the next two Saturday nights in place of the karaoke.

He’s calling it Live Male Menopause-aoke.