Is there a major sitcom less loved than No Place Like Home? A fine cast farcing away like mad, but never really making much of a cultural impression beyond the sherry in the greenhouse and the falling sampler. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...

When did "Rombouts Coffee" gain a definite article? Makes it sound like a particularly dull episode of Rock Follies.

The titles of sporting memoirs are normally the epitome of humourless, self-important cliche, but the odd one bucks the trend.

Monday.

In a world where it seems every children's programme of the twentieth century has been celebrated to hell and back, the BBC's semi-dramatised historical invention series Eureka! never quite seems to get its due. For me at the age of eleven, it was perfection. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...

I never got the New Order comparison either. But then the music press always had a tendency to cram in a reference to whoever was flavour of the month, no matter how oblique.

Use Your Head - Tony Buzan explains memory techniques and his patent Mind Map process in a singularly intense Sunday morning self-improvement series disconcertingly reminiscent of Monty Python's deja vu sketch. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...

This week Listing Dangerously visits 1985 to mull over the comic timing of falling objects, watch Sylvester McCoy get off his tits on coke, mourn the death of Michael Praed during peak rate hours, and celebrate the non-rocket-pointing achievements of James Burke. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...

This is terrific. I'd never heard that John Taylor quote before. The nerve of the man!

I'm always surprised that nobody (as far as I know) has ever knocked up an online pop cultural slide rule, where you enter a film/programme/record and it spits back a bunch of stuff as far in the past from X as X is from the present day. The information's pretty much all online these days.

Today's three-way earworm: the chorus of Eddie Grant's I Don't Wanna Dance, the final minute of Come On Eileen, and On Some Faraway Beach by Brian Eno. All fading in and out over each other. To be fair, it's not completely unpleasant.

Gangsters is one of those programmes that's been so heavily dissected I thought there was nothing more anyone could usefully say about it, but the WoT boys prove me wrong. Have to take a mark off for that anachronistic Um Bongo reference though.

I know most "differences" between The Generations are cobblers, but I can't get my head around how The Kids are perfectly happy to bung up random pictures of old pop cultural stuff willy nilly. I'm always thinking "yes, but that's that *from*?" Like Liz Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

A sad comedown for Sweden's foremost neoclassical metal guitar soloist.

The best media April Fool jokes are the ones that get inadvertently poleaxed by real events.

Songs You Don't Expect To Hear Blasting Out the Back of a Toyota Yaris Travelling Down the Roman Road at 11 On a Monday Night #1: Pregnant For the Last Time by Morrissey.

Interesting to see the Radio Times trying to revive that brief fad in the late eighties of magazines running their mastheads up the left hand side of the front cover.

This might be the most astonishing mess of an article I've ever read on a major news site. www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...

I feel oddly reassured by the way ALCS still refers so confidently to "Photocopying".

I know TV's obsessed with drama "ripped from the headlines" but I wish they'd cast their net wider. Where's the absurdist two-hander where characters representing the inflation rate and the base rate hang about in an abstract wilderness waiting for the governor of the Bank of England to turn up?

No Mama No - the first appearance of the c-word in a TV drama. The level of media outrage at this and subsequent uses would vary wildly, depending on the surrounding programme's profile, pre-publicity, and any windows in the diaries of certain Tory MPs. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...

Why have so many good aspects of late 20th century pop culture been hounded to extinction, but we still have to put up with press releases about not-going-to-happen cinema reboots of seventies children's programmes?

Quite phenomenal stuff here. youtu.be/ldxFjLJ3rVY?...

Dick Barton: Special Agent - a roistering reboot of the postwar radio adventure serial with the memorable theme tune, made with little concession to postmodern irony and a budget of roughly four pounds. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...

Monday.

The Serpent Son - an ambitious adaptation of Aeschylus which was slagged off at the time for just about everything it did, but especially the expressionist costumes by Blake's 7 wardrobe artist Barbara Kidd. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...

Harry Worth, a comedian who spent two decades in the TV comedy A-list, whose entire career, if it's remembered at all, has been reduced to that one shop window gag. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...

It's no "fremony in the library".

The c-word on primetime ITV! Russell Harty outed on air! Ancient Greeks in sci-fi bondage! Educational cartoons from the people who brought you Fritz the Cat! There's no end to the debauchery in the latest Year of Listing Dangerously! open.substack.com/pub/historyo...

What's the bitchiest putdown of a famous writer by another famous writer? I'll never forget Robert Graves on Dylan Thomas: "a demagogic Welsh masturbator who didn't pay his bills."

This morning's unsolicited mash-up: Walking in the Rain by Oran "Juice" Jones and the theme from Shortland Street.

In April 1992, Robert Altman's The Player was released, garnering lavish praise for its opening scene, a complicated ensemble tracking shot. In April 1990, Coronation Street was doing stuff like this, and nobody batted an eyelid.

I don't go in for looksmaxxing but I'm partial to a bit of Ernestmaxxin.

I see The Gaffer's been round.

Any writers currently feeling less than productive can thank themselves they're not in the shoes of pulp author Alfred J Burks, who at his peak in the 1930s set himself a target to write 18,000 words a day. A day.

Nice to know there's a corner of east London that will forever be New Jersey.

I can testify that "just before going to bed" is the absolute worst time to discover that you can sing the bit from WB Yeats's The Second Coming that goes "Things fall apart/The centre cannot hold" to the tune of the chorus of The Bucket of Water Song.

Richard Stilgoe's Finders Keepers theme. He'd been listening to Cabaret Voltaire, hadn't he? youtu.be/Ue_eNN28Zhw?...

That brief period in the late seventies when Radio 4 experimented with audio idents.

1977: Brian Walden makes his debut on Weekend World. The jokes start almost immediately.

This is about having it off in corsets, right?

The downside of watching The Old Top of the Pops last thing at night is you wake up with The Sodding Postman Song blundering through your head.

As someone who never caught the Oxide Ghosts film on tour, I'm enjoying the outtakes now going up on Michael Cummings YouTube channel, especially the revelation that the original Cake prop was repurposed from a 1995 edition of Smith & Jones.

The Golden Shot pioneers interactive television with the high tech Golden Suitcase. I've never found confirmation one way or the other on this, but - this is a load of made-up publicity bollocks that couldn't possibly have really worked, isn't it?

Everyone's mocking the extraordinary whiteness of that Top 50 Most-Streamed '80s Songs list, but is there an explanation for that? Who compiled it?

These days the phrase "lost media" can refer to something as tepid as an edition of Gat Fresh that doesn't happen to be on YouTube at the moment. For the strong stuff, you need to track down the descendants of Jack Paar's binman.

I'm so old now that celebrity editions of game shows just look like ordinary editions with particularly self-regarding contestants who are all as thick as mince.

Documentary maker Tony Palmer was a devoted chronicler of sixties rock. The seventies stuff he wasn't quite so keen on.

Americans are trying to invent logical explanations for Python jokes again.

Brr. I still can't hear the word "rhubarb" without seeing an image of *that* introductory skit.