Every time this bus stops in traffic, the hydraulics start randomly going up and down. Can't tell if this is a fault or the drivers been converting it into a very tame low rider.

Tony Benn was involved in all sorts of weird mini-programmes in the early years of ITV, but this is my favourite: can you guess what someone looks like from their voice? Why are we doing this? Why not? (Note also the involvement of Michael "Pipkins" Jeans.)

Loleatta Holloway's going to come up with all the policies in secret while he just stands there looking glamorous and taking all the credit.

1982: the BBC broadcasts a programme called The Apprentice, featuring an embalmed corpse.

"It's been a very stop start game..."

I miss the days when Alan Hansen would draw big, thick, clumsy lines over freeze frames of replays with a clunky light pen. These perfectly perspective-tracked arrows do nothing for me.

Thomas Tuchel is a weird mash-up of Joe Melia and Whispering Bob Harris.

Enjoying the way everyone's unashamedly calling the French manager "D Chomps".

Every moment of optimism gets instantly crushed by ITV reminding you the England captain needs his phone to tell him to put the chicken on before the sausages.

The opening theme from Panorama is to current affairs as the closing theme from The Two Ronnies is to show business.

Very late to this, but it is of course great. And a nice antidote to most online coverage of TV animation, which tends to be a bit hopeless. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HLS...

Well, this is all very nice, but I can't help wondering: who's generating the electricity that's powering all the stadium lights right now?

CRIBBINS

"Sorloth Chance" sounds like a character in an HP Lovecraft sitcom played by Simon Callow.

Can you have an epic ode? I've got a troubling image of Cyril Fletcher in a toga.

Looking at the pitchside hoardings, it's remarkable how the American advertisers (Aramco, Powerade, Verizon, Lays, Home Depot etc.) all have logos that would be more at home in 1979. I keep expecting to see an ad for Joshua Astley's Champion Pasties.

Shepherding the ball out of play. I reckon I'd be good at that.

I'm going to go with this one. Yes, it's the best thing in the film. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ido...

"You can only come if you've got Walkers." "What are 'Walkers'?" "Crisps." "Crisps?" "Yes, very greasy, rather unpleasant crisps which only achieved national prominence because rival manufacturers' factories kept mysteriously burning down." "Oh."

New children's laureate announced.

What The Apprentice looked like in 1981.

"I wonder what Erving Goffman would have made of our constant use of the word 'performative'?"

Christ, Wogan had some mad guest lists.

How about a positive thread of ways in which TV is actually better these days. In the nineties you couldn't move for media pundits telling you that pretentious Guinness ad with the Moby Dick poem was some kind of masterpiece. Nobody has so much as mentioned it in passing since about 2004.

The Crystal Cube: ex-Footlighters Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson perform an uneven parody of contemporary pop science shoes like Where There's Life and A Question of Sex, which, perhaps not coincidentally, tended to be presented by other ex-Footlighters. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...

I seem to have wandered into an early eighties sci-fi musical TV special. Hope it's one of Mike Batt's.

The 1983 series of Ultra Quiz. TVS buy up the notorious Japanese endurance game show, strip out the sadism and replace it with dull pub quiz questions. Nobody cares. Someone gets on the phone to David Frost. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...

On TV this week in 1983: Tom Baker has a lotta bottle; Ken Campbell can no longer work under these conditions; Patrick Stewart subjects Kenneth Branagh to psychoanalysis; and Saturday night ITV reaches new depths of crass stupidity. Followed by double maths. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...

The BBC could steal a march on that pompous-looking Christopher Nolan film by putting this up on the IPlayer.

I always think prog rock LPs would be less daunting to the average pundit if they didn't have such long and elaborate tittles.

The gen Z version of "backrooms" is nowhere near as scary as the original backroom. The one containing the "boys" who'd "been busy" editing a "hilarious" compilation of snooker tournament clips played endlessly backwards and forwards to the soundtrack of The Entertainer. Nightmare fuel.

Could someone be an absolute darling and pop The Norman Conquests onto the ITVX player? Thanks awfully.

It's a YoLD bonus mini-edition covering those ten weeks in 1976 everyone's been banging on about this week. What were we watching? Drama in which nothing happens, cartoons in which everything happens, monumentally inane competitions and a touch of rabies. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...

Big fan of Lord Dubs. Especially his work with Augustus Pablo.

Two Weeks in August is a truly baffling programme. Like Benidorm rewritten by Michael J Bird.

"Secombe's on Highway/I wanna watch it/All night long"

When people talk about old TV shows that are CHILLINGLY PRESCIENT and SPEAK TO OUR TROUBLED TIMES they a) are being twats, and b) never mention Cloppa Castle. Two rival factions (called the Bygones and Hasbeens, wink wink) endlessly fighting over oil reserves, all manipulated by a scheming tech bro.

Might go off and watch 45 minutes' worth of Cloppa Castle.

On the last leg of a journey they started a long time ago, The arc of a love affair, Rainbows in the high desert air, Mountain passes slipping into stones, Carns and Jones.

I'm sure Carns and Jones was a mid-level midlands department store in the 1970s. "Carns and Jones! Broad Street, Birmingham; Victoria Road, Stafford; Bridge Street, Shrewsbury; and now at the Kingfisher Shopping Centre, Redditch!"

"Cock-in-hand to the EMF."

"Wowcher edgelord" is my new favourite putdown.

Rewatching A Very Peculiar Practice does, oddly, give me the desire to do a mini-marathon of all those late '60s picaresque social satires. (Or Menippean satires, for those currently sitting their Eng Lit A-levels.) Yes, even the really silly ones. Which is most of them.

Sod Peter Brook, Joan Kemp-Welch's 1964 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (it's on YouTube) is the only one you need.

It's never too early in the evening for a picture of Pat Phoenix on a tiny motorbike.

Finally rewatched all of A Very Peculiar Practice. Took me a while to get through season two, which has its moments, but feels somehow unnecessary. A bit like making a sequel to The Magic Christian or Dr Strangelove. The point's been made.

Enjoying the way all these internal party comms refer to Burnham as "AB", giving the momentary impression that Alan Bradley is angling for PM.

RALSTON

I'd improve social media with a system of random spot-checks on accounts posting memes, requiring them to provide a 300-word précis on the meme's origin, context and social significance.