TV and radio

We were one of the last families we knew to get a television. My parents resisted buying one for a long time: there were five children by then, and so money was always tight. They eventually bought one and installed it in the dining room.

We watched the news (with Robert Dougall, Kenneth Kendall and Richard Baker), variety programmes (the Black and White Ministrel Show and Billy Cotton), and of course The Magic Roundabout and Blue Peter. My father used to rush back from work in London - he took two tube trains, then British Rail from Liverpool Street to Shenfield, then power-walked home from the station - in time to catch the Magic Roundabout at 17:45.

All in black and white to begin with - there was no colour TV in those days, and we didn't get a colour set for several years after colour broadcasts started.

The Black and White Ministrels consisted of a bunch of white men dressed up as black men, singing ditties to a bunch of white women dressed up as, well, white women. All very strange - I could never understand the point of it all. Only later did I realize that the show had come to be labelled as controversial and racist, and the BBC quietly shelved it. But not until 1978, when the variety genre was already passé.

The Billy Cotton show was anchored around the eponymous Mr Cotton, who conducted a Big Band. I remember being intrigued by the way that each group of musicians - the trumpets, trombones, and so on - stood up when they had something to play. For me, struggling to learn the piano while staying seated, this was a most impressive feat.

We were not allowed to watch the Morecambe and Wise comedy show for a long time. The first time we tuned in, a sketch showed Eric (Morecambe) and Ernie (Wise) getting into bed. Into a double bed, together. I was too young to realize the homosexual implications of this, but my mother wasn't. The TV was quickly turned off whenever the show came on, and we children had to watch it surreptitiously when our parents weren't looking. The double bed was a frequent fixture on the show, and there was never any suggestion of sex. I still don't know why the scriptwriters didn't specify twin beds.

On radio there was the lunchtime Listen with Mother - filled with kiddie stories and nursery rhymes, which followed The Archers - a soap opera about rural England that is still broadcast. It was something of a surprise when I learned later during my graduate studies that The Archers was in fact an educational programme aimed at farmers. I ended up in the same field - producing information materials for farmers in the developing world - and I still use The Archers as a model for how to go about producing entertaining yet educational programming.

Wilson and Heath

I suppose I should have been a lot more politically aware than I was when I was young. My parents were both members of the Young Conservatives before they married. So were my aunt and uncle. But I think the Young Conservatives were more of a middle-class dating service than a training ground for budding politicians or a springboard for grassroots involvement in the Party: neither my parents nor my aunt and uncle showed much interest in active politics after meeting their mates. Their further political involvement seemed to be confined to putting a cross against the Tory candidate on election day.

I vaguely remember Labour's election victory of 1964, when Harold Wilson replaced Alec Douglas-Home as prime minister. Wilson's face and pipe soon became familiar figures on our new black-and-white TV, which opened up a whole new world to us children. Familiar figures, but not loved: my parents grumbled about Wilson and muttered about the unions. Britain was the sick man of Europe, the country was going to the dogs, and there was one strike after another. Wilson's good points seemed to be his holidays in the Scilly Isles and his poet wife.

My parents saw Ted Heath in a more favourable light, but he permanently lost my father's favour when he took the UK into the European Community in 1973. I remember him chiefly for his orchestral conducting and yachting, and Mike Yarwood's Heath and Wilson comedy sketches. And his accession speech to the European Community, which he tried to give in French. His pronunciation was so bad that it made this schoolboy shrink in shame - couldn't his advisers at least have told him that in French you don't pronounce the final consonant of a word?