Has anyone been lucky enough to find a second-hand book with one of these plates in it?

Sudden, unbidden memory of a line from an ancient fly-on-the-wall documentary: "There's a pizza and whoopee event, that sounds fun." Sadly I can remember no more. Anyone?

I might just leave the whole of modern popular culture to carry on without me.

Once more, the nation becomes one vast Benny Hill Show break bumper.

Would you do Dougall? TV's sexiest newsreaders, 1960.

You've got to give a little love, Take a little love, Be prepared to forsake a little love, So low in price we are, So near, so Spar.

That girl bands documentary is great fun (apart from the bits that are horribly bleak), but we really need to call time on opening programmes with footage of interview subjects finding their marks, adjusting their seats and farting about with the clapperboard.

Fancy Wanders - Gurney Slade co-writer Sid Green orchestrates a slight return of the original mould-breaking surreal sitcom two decades later, with Dave King and Joe "the Fresh Prince butler" Marcell, bewildering a new generation just after Play Your Cards Right. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...

Any TV producers keen to spearhead the new wave of ultra-cheap drama could do worse than look at afternoon Nyree Dawn Porter terminal illness saga For Maddie with Love. Not in writing terms - it's cliche central - but for its threadbare but effective visuals. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...

Get It Together - a pop music showcase out of time, still hanging on in the post-punk early eighties by combining musical guests like Modern Romance and U2 with seventies Basil Brush stooge Roy North and fifties puppet owl Ollie Beak. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...

45 years ago this week Tom Baker was in a swamp, Nyree Dawn Porter was in a void, Dennis Potter was in Eastbourne, Brigit Forsyth was in a swimsuit adorned with saucepans, and Peter Purves was in Newcastle commentating on fireworks. All this and Ollie Beak too! open.substack.com/pub/historyo...

The absolute filth ATV were transmitting in the name of variety back in 1969.

Separated at birth: The Wednesday Play theme tune and the chorus of Hersham Boys by Sham 69.

Still reeling from the suggestion on University Challenge that Judi Dench played Iris in Taxi Driver. "You never spend time with me any more, Sport. We might as well play bridge with our maiden aunts."

Glamour n. an attractive or exciting quality that makes certain people or things seem appealing. - "the glamour of Milan"

Just about to settle down in front of Spike Lee's underrated 1990 film about a jazz trumpeter.

I normally roll my eyes at TV companies bigging up their awards success in press advertisements, but I'll make an exception for this.

Contrary to popular belief, when Boy George sang "Every day is like survival", he didn't mean they all began with the Anglia knight and were narrated by Andrew Sachs.

"They'll walk along an empty street For fully half a minute, Their front legs bend the wrong way round, It's fucking creepy, innit?" CHORUS

If your fourteenth-favourite early nineties sketch show did a skit parodying a "typical" seventies sitcom, it couldn't hope to look even half as over the top as Yus, My Dear, which was real. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...

The Crezz - Thames's expensive and doomed attempt to create a middle class soap, covering the doings of the residents of a Kensington crescent who all have frightfully fancy interior design. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...

Week 53: Pauline Quirke stacks beans, Joss Ackland attacks squatters with an axe, Arthur Mullard removes his trousers, Gemma Jones hosts some randy Liberals and Max Bygraves remembers last week. It has to be 1976. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...

Might spend tomorrow going through the Yellow Pages and phoning up bookshops to ask if they've got a copy of this.

1938 was a very grim year indeed. MacFisheries were ready for it.

"It's made of people, our Maurice!"

If Celebrity The Traitors was made in 1978 it would involve Frank Muir, Roy Kinnear and Angharad Rees in boiler suits sitting round a big beige hexagonal table in TC7, and would be all over in 27 minutes.

"Over 1,000,000 sold!" Well done everyone.

Smurf n. A Small blue rubber homunculus found in petrol stations, holding its nose while claiming to be from Catford.

Time for a glass of Wincarnis to ease my "brain fag".

I know that "I've never seen popular thing" is just a bit of fun, but is there any piece of pop culture from the last fifty years that a majority of people in the country have seen? I think even the notorious 1977 Morecambe & Wise Christmas show reached just a shade under half the population.

I'm not saying East End gentrification has reached grotesque new levels but the local Sunday food fair now features a booze stall titled "the finest wines available to humanity".

Listening to Poptones by PiL I gaze out of the window, and the first thing I see is a thirtysomething bloke over the road wearing a PiL t-shirt. Wonder what that would get you down Paddy Power.

Some twelve year old lads ran past me in the street earlier chanting "Nimon! Nimon! Nimon!" Now, this is refering to either a West Ham midfielder or a Pokémon, isn't it? I don't want to contemplate the alternative.

Sudden unbidden memory of Tiswas doing a My Fair Lady pastiche. John Gorman sang "I've Thrown a Custard in Her Face". You can probably guess the rest.

Friday.

Ooh, an article claiming The Simpsons isn't very good these days.

"Who was Billy Butler's co-host on Radio Merseyside's Hold Your Plums?" "Er... Mike Woodin?"

Coincidentally Inman's other ITV sitcom, Take a Letter Mr Jones, also has a title sequence that turns out to be the only point of interest in the whole series.

A fantastic overview of a programme almost impossible to, well, overview. Delighted to see it touches on Fancy Wonders, bewildering childhood memories of which haunt me to this day.

That article about how "cultural snobbery" should "make a comeback". Like it's a lifestyle choice people can throw on for the autumn. Like there's no middle ground between Proust and The One Show. Like the way columnists think up articles to pitch is the natural state of humanity.

One of the most evocative of the old jingles for me is the evergreen Lee Longlands song. I particularly like the way it sounds as if the singers are constantly trying to stop a pub brawl from breaking out. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xZ_...

Well of course.

The Hack going for the Clarissa Explains It All end of Brechtianism.

"And I can almost smell/Your Purdey sheets..."

Jeff Wayne's Ansell's Bittermen Theme could have served as the sig tune to a Palladium-style variety show, espionage action thriller and regional news magazine all in one. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eYd...