Just received this is my inbox and I had to share with you! So so true on many points and Im sure Michael wont mind me sharing his nostagia with you. It made me smile! I love getting his newsletters!
On the plus side to me giving you this little gem here’s a link to his fabby site A Quarter of.. Im sure it will bring back lots of fun childhood memories for you too! Go on treat yourself you know you want too lol
Anyway back to the post…..here’s his little rant 
……..
Hi
I’m suddenly an aficionado on CBeebies, courtesy of our 20 month old little girl. When I was young there were only 3 television channels (yes, to all you youngies out there, THREE!) and children’s TV had its own proper slot on both BBC1 and ITV between about 4pm and 5.40pm – none of this dedicated channel malarkey in those days!.
Television Back Then
The BBC schedule, from memory, always started with Play School, meandered through Jackanory (I always found that a bit boring), Blue Peter on Mondays and Thursdays (Valerie Singleton, Peter Purves and John Noakes… none of these modern, young and trendy impostors thanks very much… or the ITV copycats at Magpie) and ending up with the Magic Roundabout (followed in later years by classics such as Ivor The Engine, Noah and Nelly and Barbapapa).
We didn’t venture over to ITV very often because, and again this will be hard to comprehend for many people, we didn’t have remote controls in those days so we actually had to GET UP OFF OUR LITTLE BOTTIES and turn the television over by pressing the huge clunky buttons on the top of the set. And BBC had the best programmes anyway, so a combination of physical and mental inertia means that BBC tended to dominate the schedules in our household.
Anyway, back to Cbeebies. They have an autumn song on there which they play over and over and which goes on about this being the season of mellow fruitfulness and stuff like that. It’s all soft focus lens shots, yellows, goldens and browns, picking apples and enjoying the fruits of the harvest.
Bah humbug, that’s what I say (practising for the festive season already!). As I look out of the window it’s pelting it down, it’s flipping freezing… and the only colours I can see are grey and very grim grey. I’m not sure if its getting dark already (its half three in the afternoon) or if it just hasn’t ever got light today.
Let’s see those cheery CBeebies folk make a song about that. It’s horrible, horrible, horrible… and we didn’t have a summer worth talking about round here either… so this is just the rotten icing on the flipping grotty cake.
I feel slightly purged now… only slightly mind you.
Love it! Thank you Michael :0) Now go check out A Quarter of…yourselves guys!
