I’ve been neglecting you, dear reader, not that you really care less, but it makes me feel kind of powerful to imagine that you’re waiting to hear that I saw a whole pineapple amidst a smashed up cake near Great Portland Street tube on Sunday afternoon. I went back there yesterday (not to see the pineapple, obviously, I have better things to do with my time, no, really) but it was still there. Chances are that if anyone fancies it, you could just go along there and pick it up for free.

I was supposed to start my daily blog for the Radio Times today, but they’re having trouble with their servers, apparently, and if there’s one thing that my idle musings on the state of satellite television requires, it’s untroubled servers. Anyway, to completely unprepare me for the task of unearthing oddities from the 6 billion channels that Rupert Murdoch is currently pumping into my living room, I sat down at 6am this morning and started watching an enormous collection of continuity announcements from the 1970s and 1980s that I downloaded a while ago. I’ve probably got about 18 hours worth, and although I find watching them delightful in the extreme, it can be gruelling. You spend long periods of time just watching stills like this…

…to the soundtrack of “Saturday Night Fever” – a tune that is singularly inappropriate for advising the viewer that a tedious Welsh schools programme about castles is on its way, with absolutely no dancing to speak of. Nearly all of the material is worth putting up on YouTube, really, but that would probably, uh, trouble their servers, so I’ve restricted myself to this wonderful sequence from Westward (the ITV region for Devon & Cornwall) from the 9th May 1977.

Now, I must say that I’d have had zero interest in visiting the Plymouth Silver Jubilee Military Tattoo, Age Of Steam at Crowlas, the West Country Wildlife Park, the Devon County Show or Wendron Forge – especially Wendron Forge, jesus – but this arouses such acute feelings of nostalgia. Bogus nostalgia, obviously, because I didn’t visit Devon or Cornwall until my mid 20s and can’t imagine what it might have been like on the 9th May 1977. But just nostalgia for, uh, when things used to be nice. I’d go as far as to say that viewing the 5 second clip about Wendron Forge has marked the end of my youth, and the beginning of my middle age. I will now start saying, at regular intervals, “ah, didn’t things used to be nice?” or “things aren’t as nice as they used to be, are they?” or “fancy a trip to Wendron Forge to see how the old miners worked in a Cornish tin mine?”

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I played the musical saw at a concert of light musical comedy last night (a phrase which totally backs up the last paragraph, I’d say) and although I have a supposed aversion to most combinations of comedy and music (long list of exceptions provided on request) it was a great evening. No joke comedy cover versions AT ALL. Martin’s got some cracking songs that would be great even without whimsical lyrics, and Isy is just very, very funny. As with the best comedy performers, I can’t remember a single thing she said that I laughed at, but I did laugh. So there you go. Out of my curmudgeonly youth, and leaping into the joyous, benevolent, non-judgemental arms of middle age. Uh… hurrah?