40 YEARS AGO TODAY: we don't know what happened in the first of this series of No. 73 to require bandages and apologies to Timmy Mallett. Maybe it's all the crossing storylines, amongst which are Fine Young Cannibals, martial arts experts and an armadillo.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: two years before Dinnerladies, Maxine Peake has a job in a stationers on Hetty Wainthropp Investigates.

Points Of View today in 1990 primarily features Dave Allen swearing (at nearly 10.30pm), a major scandal at the time to questions-in-the-House level. Also, A Question Of Sport is a "shambles" and it's all Steve Davis' fault.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Andy Kershaw becomes the first person to accompany a western TV travel crew into North Korea for Channel 4's Travelog.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: the Micro Live team decamps to the NEC for the Which Computer? show to give out some awards, explain networking, comperes the Acorn fun run, helps Nick Wilton find a job and puts Sir Clive Sinclair and Alan Sugar on a Q&A panel.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Jools Holland talks to The Tube guest Sylvester Stallone [citation required]

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Breakfast Time turns three and "our keenest viewer" who's seen all 839 episodes to date comes in to help commemorate it.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: BBC2 goes behind the scenes of the Royal Opera House for a year. The House became a chattering classes cause celebre for the backroom acrimony, leading to it nearly going into receivership within two years.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Melchett makes his first appearance on the Blackadder timeline as Lord Chamberlain in Head, appointing Edmund as Lord High Executioner, a job we're led to assume doesn't last long given it mostly involves enforced impersonation.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: We contend that after an hour of flying and running around Surrey this is not the first thing Anneka Rice wanted.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: TV Eye asks a number of centenarians for the secret of their long life.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Michael Heseltine, who resigned from the cabinet a week earlier, is due to appear on Channel 4 News. And, very briefly, he does.

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: one of those Nationwide films that's both endearing and monumentally of-its-time unwise, as stuntman Ken Watts introduces his four year old son to the act.

This week's catch-up session: whydontyoutube.substack.com/p/the-why-do...

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: fourteen years after Peter Flannery was first approached by the BBC about adapting it, Our Friends In The North justifies having half the year's drama budget allocated to it. www.dailymotion.com/video/x8036og

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Terry Prachett's Johnny And The Bomb revives the Sunday afternoon young adult drama slot as bag lady Zoe Wanamaker inadvertently sends a gang of lads back to 1941.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: a teenager is caught in the orbit of local heavy Christopher Ellison in Children's BBC drama Running Scared. Note that the theme tune is Running Up That Hill. Yeah, Duffer Brothers, you think you're so smart.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Keith Barron visits a library to research a book about his and his friends' experiences (one being Russell Tovey) as wartime evacuees, staying with Rosemary Leach and Lesley Joseph, in Look And Read tale Spywatch.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: watch them on the video as Children's BBC sketch show Fast Forward gets a second series, Robert Harley joining a beadless Floella Benjamin, Nick Wilton, Joanna Monro and Andy Secombe.

100 YEARS AGO TODAY: Warren Mitchell is born. In 1968 he talked about how and why he became Alf Garnett.

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: up the B6551 to Mike Leigh's glorious second of six Plays For Today, top 50 on the BFI's all time programmes list, Nuts In May.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: set after the 1999 Soviet invasion of Britain, an unexpected diversion by the writers of Sorry!, George Cole stars in Comrade Dad. In the first episode the family take to the sparse black market, as overseen by Roger Lloyd Pack. www.youtube.com/watc...

#OnThisDay 13 January 1986 Who have the government recruited for their latest campaign to steer kids away from drugs? Why, of course, it's none other than Arthur Daley and his Minder Terry McCann.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: John Cleese gets the South Bank Show once-over.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: the third series of Spitting Image begins right in the wake of Heseltine's resignation but has other more pressing concerns, not least Philip Pope's We Are The World upending We're Scared Of Bob.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Charles Dance leads Screen Two mystery The McGuffin as a film critic who watches neighbours Mark Rylance and Ann Todd be apparently murdered. So, Rear Window with menaces. The support cast includes both Stephen Lewis and Jerry Stiller.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: see, the problem George Galloway has now is whatever and how forceful his rhetoric, people only have one thing in mind.

Today in 1972 the vehicle for viewers to complain about the BBC on the BBC was Talkback, and this week Michael Barratt invites the head of sport Bryan Cowgill to answer the criticisms of the public.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: for its first time out Catchphrase's concept has to be introduced in the title sequence before Roy Walker has even taken to the stage and Mr Chips doesn't have a name yet.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Windmill examines childhood and children's fascinations. The guest is that kids' perennial favourite Richard Stilgoe, sporting his fetching dark green Finders Keepers sweatshirt. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew05...

In this week's archive newsletter: Ade Edmondson on fire, Tony Booth on fire, Kermit meets Rustie Lee, Kate Bush's best wishes to Swindon, Adrian Juste back in anger, the start of breakfast television and Jack Nicholson takes a phone call. whydontyoutube.substack.com/p/the-why-do...

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Gaby Roslin leaves the Big Breakfast after three years to a song from Lily Savage. Richard Orford is in a bedroom in Northampton with Gaby's replacement Zoe Ball.

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: That's Life! has a new resident topical singer, Victoria Wood.

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Granada drama anthology Red Letter Day opens with Ready When You Are, Mr McGill, by Jack Rosenthal and directed by Mike Newell, on a film shoot where everything goes wrong just as a perennial extra gets a line of dialogue.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: little is both anticipated and feared like a sci-fi sitcom. Hyperdrive is set on the intergalactic British diplomatic interests promotions vessel HMS Camden Lock in 2151, led by Nick Frost with Kevin Eldon and Miranda Hart.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: making his second appearance on The Bill, it's another in our occasional series 'Some Pictures Of Danny Dyer In Which He Looks Slightly Different'

Ooh, a bit of National Theatre of Brent I've never seen before. With Bernard too! www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScH7...

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Copy Cats, the impressionist vehicle of, shall we say, uneven quality. Why in 1986 does Andrew O'Connor do, as far as we can tell, Rowan Atkinson's complaining audience member from Not The Nine?

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Jeremy Beadle's People Do The Funniest Things, a melange of bought-in hidden camera pranks, sweepings from the Norden office floor and the odd audience prank. Remarkably, this would be ITV's fourth most watched show of 1986.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: GMTV brings news of the Doctor Who movie, to which Eamonn and Anthea try without success to goad Sylvester McCoy.

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: George Burns and Walter Matthau, promoting The Sunshine Boys, continue that double act dynamic in the Parkinson guest chairs.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Jonathan Ross' Asian Invasion - that's the kind of thing we called programmes back then, but it's clearly a Ross passion project as he visits the people and places of modern Japanese cinema.

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: "A series of wallooming sketches are held together in pauntley fashion by two fugitives from TV in search of the perfect film commentary." Such is described Out Of The Trees, Graham Chapman's absurdist pilot written with Douglas Adams.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: we meet Lovejoy for the first time as he meets Eric and Lady Jane before embarking on an investigation that leads to his getting involved with an antique theft gang that leads to the death of Ronald Fraser and a bombing.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Marianne Faithfull returns to favourite haunt Jamaica for Channel 4's Travelog, takes a never identified but very recognisable Don Letts with her and befriends The Harder They Come's Carl Bradshaw.

Did You See...? visits the Spitting Image rooms and studios today in 1988, talking to all the usual - Fluck and Law, Lloyd, Perkins, Barrie, Nallon - when their Royal Family characterisation was still considered an outrage.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: modernist journalist and Sloane Ranger commentator in chief Peter York examines the modern state of opening titles for Did You See...?

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Russell Harty devotes the whole show to the newly released The Return Of The Pink Panther, talking to "a gentleman who gets in the way of things" Peter Sellers, interrupted by a surprise assailant.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Blackadder had earned a reputation for how much it cost against audience reaction. Enter Ben Elton, who retools Edmund as cunning master and Baldrick as imbecile. Bells borrows from Twelfth Night and brings the chaos of Lord Flashheart. www.dailymotion.com/...

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: DCI Sam Tyler is hit by a car and wakes up in 1973 as a Detective Inspector. In 2006 Life On Mars makes, for a certain strata of man, Gene Hunt a role model. Philip Glenister is still dining out on it to this day.