FEW positives came from the last rainy weekend, except a debunking of the myth that TV - and everything else - is not as good as it used to be.
Most of us enjoy harping on about the days in which we could play football on the streets without fear of being kidnapped by the weird bloke with a ginger beard and a Creedence Clearwater Revival T-shirt who tried to join in, but was probably just some harmless old hippy rather than a suspected paedophile, as he no doubt would be today.
Football was cheap to watch, the players were just like you, pop music was good and television, though a bit short on the channel count, was quality.
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Except it wasn't. None of it was. I know this because I've just spent two days watching retro TV.
England was coated in yellow (come on, you've seen Life On Mars), even international football was like watching a Sunday league team with a hangover, music only seemed good because it was relatively new - much of it was of the hippy Bad Moon Rising ilk - and TV was generally rubbish.
For want of anything good to watch on TV last weekend and the fact that the terrible weather had put us off going out, for some reason we ended up watching late-'80s/early-'90s comedy-drama Boon, starring Michael Elphick.
I had some vague recollection that Boon was quite good. It was awful. The set was like a Crossroads reject, to describe the acting as wooden would be an insult to trees, and Elphick - apparently something of a heartthrob - who had in this week's episode been employed to stake out some animal rights activists who had nicked a lion, looked like a porky, be-jumpered, affable granddad.
The activists wore bandanas and lived in a squat, and, of course, everything turned out all right in the end, with the obviously doped-up circus lion not even managing a roar in protest at its kidnapping.
Another repeated programme was Bullseye, on which a couple of tight-fisted below pub-standard darters decided to take the money - a couple of hundred quid - rather than risk losing it in pursuit of the star prize. Mind you, that couple of hundred quid, split between two, would enable them to replace their even-bad-by-darts-players' standards wardrobes, and the star prize was usually a gazebo or a speed boat anyway, which hardly fitted most people's lifestyles.
Football was rarely on TV in the days of Boon and Bullseye, though live entertainment, unfortunately was, with Jimmy Tarbuck ushering a procession of singers, dancers, magicians and comics on and off the Palladium stage, and The Comedians pedalling a steady stream of "I wouldn't say my mother-in-law's fat, but . . ." and "An Englishman, Irishman and a Scotsman walked into a bar . . ." style of jokes.
It was an era in which wearing a wacky bow-tie or a crazy jumper was enough to earn you the title "weatherman" or gain you a place in Countdown's Dictionary Dell. Actually, that still applies.
On the plus side, snooker and darts players could drink and smoke on TV with viewers credited with enough intelligence to not believe that sinking 20 pints and puffing on 40 cigarettes a day would guarantee them a 147 break. And the fact that TV was so poor meant you would actually go out and find something to do.
Next time it rains I think I'll just read a good book.
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