Box of delights, fun and frights (From York Press)

Box of delights, fun and frights

9:25am Monday 30th August 2010 in

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THAT’S it then. We’ve seen the last of Last Of The Summer Wine, the old Bill has scarpered and Big Brother isn’t watching celebrity wannabes any more.

The demise of three TV series – all of them wildly different but each hugely popular – marks the end of a broadcasting era. Between them they’ve knocked up 74 years of telly watching, which is an awfully long time to be a couch potato.

At 37 years, Summer Wine is reputed to be the longest-running sitcom ever, which in TV terms makes it as wrinkled as Norah Batty’s stockings.

For 27 years the characters in The Bill have been racing round Sun Hill with their blues and twos and for some it’s most definitely not a fair cop in bringing the series to an end.

As for Big Brother, it first zoomed in on celebrity wannabes in the UK back in 2000 and at its peak drew millions of viewers. I found it about as exciting as watching porridge set but there you go, each to their own.

It sets you thinking though about TV programmes you’ve known and loved – or hated. My first television experience was sitting in front of a black and white screen engrossed in Watch With Mother and giving rapt attention to The Woodentops, Andy Pandy and those stupid Flowerpot Men, not to mention the even sillier Weed.

The second was Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, when all programming stopped and was replaced with exceedingly mournful music to mark his passing. Our next-door neighbours got burgled that night and the combination of both events made it one of the most chilling episodes in my childhood.

Things didn’t really improve the following year because Martha Longhurst dropped dead in the snug at the Rovers Return. That was a hiding behind the sofa job as was Doctor Who, which I avoided like the plague because it scared me so much. Still does.

But even spookier than that was waking up one summer night in 1969 and hearing aliens. From downstairs came lots of beeps and disembodied tinny voices, which convinced me that the Martians – or Doctor Who’s Tardis – had invaded my mum’s living room.

To cap it all she and my dad weren’t in bed and I was convinced they’d been abducted by said aliens and spirited off in a spaceship. It took me ages to do so, but eventually I crept downstairs and found them and my brother watching Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. Phew, that was all right then.

For years I’ve been the one who hides behind cushions, stuffs my head down jumper necks and clamps hands over ears when something remotely hinting at suspense comes on the telly. I’ve done it when detective Lewis is turning up clues in Oxford and even when Sun Hill’s finest have been criminal-catching on The Bill. Pathetic or what?

One time I was watching an old Bette Davis film with my parents one Saturday night. I must have been about 14 and Davis’s googly eyes were giving me the creeps.

I don’t know what film it was but she wasn’t playing a nice person, so I turned my back on the TV and covered my ears as the soundtrack rose to a crescendo – only to stare mesmerised at my mother’s glasses because every murderous action on screen was perfectly reflected in her lenses.

There was no way I was going into our darkened kitchen to make a cup of tea after that. Not to mention settling down to a good night’s sleep after that – if I recall I spent hours lying rigidly under the covers magnifying every creak of the stair into someone Coming to Get Me.

And don’t talk to me about Bates Motel in Hitchcock’s Pyscho – I still don’t like strange showers where the light is dimmed by heavy shower curtains….

Much better were the times we used to gather as a family and watch the likes of the Royal Variety Performance. Did you know that for three years in a row in the Sixties it topped the annual TV ratings? And that for seven years in a row across the Sixties and Seventies, the Miss World show was in the top three? Even the Eurovision Song Contest topped the ratings charts twice in succession in the Seventies, so it just goes to show that even then we were all easily pleased.

Much as we are now, with schedule-loaded reality TV shows that are so cheap to make I feel cheated out of what I’m charged for my licence fee.