their five year old daughter. Somehow, in-universe, capitalism survives intact despite this single-handed elimination of scarcity. There’s added poignancy in that the entire factory (except the women, who were Sheila Walker) was voiced by Roy Kinnear, who had died two years earlier.​

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After that, Bank Holiday movie time! Again! This is for all those people shut in on their own all afternoon on Bank Holiday Monday: an epic that eats up three hours in one fell stroke. Specifically, it’s Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, so at least it’s worth the time. It always gets me that Candice Bergen gets second billing, because both she and her character are more famous than anyone in the cast except Gandhi himself, when she doesn’t even show up until the last twenty minutes. Not her fault, of course.

 

Once that’s over and done with (he dies in the end), some Grandstand overspill, and eventually continuation. While horses and athletics are over on BBC1, the third test up to stumps comes to BBC2, and all things being equal the timing should line up so the evening’s action in the European Athletics Championships. That year’s meet was in Split, then in Yugoslavia, a mere six months before unimaginable horror broke out in the region, that city included. Good timing. This was a good period for British Athletics; both of the guys mentioned in the listing - Tom McKean and Steve Backley - got Gold; Linford Christie and John Regis got a Gold and a Bronze each; and there was shiny yellow for Kriss Akabusi, Roger Black, Colin Jackson and the men’s 400m relay team (including Regis and Black again). Alright, so it was mostly a good period for the British Men, but we had Yvonne Murray and Sally Gunnell as well; the former got a gold, and both lady relay teams got bronze.

 

So that swallows up the early evening, after which, some wartime nostalgia for the increasingly aging. The Blitz was just weeks shy of having started 50 years ago at this point. For perspective, 50 years from typing this, Sailing by Rod Stewart was at number two in the charts. The people who lived through the war had mostly left middle age and many were starting to verge on elderly. So there was a lot, and I mean a lot of World War Two nostalgia around in the nineties, particularly the first half leading to the 50th anniversary of VE day. It’s not a coincidence that Goodnight Sweetheart was one of the most popular sitcoms of the 90s, or even that it existed at all. For all that preamble, though, this is actually Now That The War Is Over, a series of documentaries covering, essentially, the Attlee years - post-war recovery and austerity. Today’s episode is about going back to school after the war, and the new tripartite education the Labour Government introduced. Originally made in 1985 and being repeated here because it’s late August, pretty much the deadest zone for original programming of the year. There’s winter season, spring season, early summer (which is more a sort of low-key second wave of spring) and autumn season. (And Christmas, of course.) And in between the last two lie the summer holidays, where most people are off sunning themselves rather than watching television and the schedules fill with repeats and random movies until the new season arrives right before it grinds to a complete halt.

 

And here’s another random movie! Central Park, by no-nonsense here’s-the-subject director Frederick Wiseman, one of those documentarians like Ken Burns whose films are always straightforwardly named after their subject. Except Titicut Follies, I suppose. This is presumably less harrowing than that, being a just-shy-of-two-hour natural history of one of the most famous green spaces in the world. Having said that, it does also include the muggers and rapists who haunt the place, and indeed it’s interesting timing in general, with two of the Central Park Five already convicted and the other three awaiting trial amidst hysterical shrieking about “wolfpacks” and “wilding”, which more or less didn’t exist.

 

That takes us all the way to ten past eleven and fifty minutes of highlights from this year’s Notting Hill Carnival. Elaborate costumes, flamboyant dancing, coppers lurking darkly in the background, and music from Caron Wheeler, Arrow (the Monserrattian soca musician, not the hair metal band - he was the one who did “Hot Hot Hot”. Never occurred to you that anyone in particular did that song, did it? Well, it was him) and Aswad, who later christen the beginning of the traditional riot by being thrown through the window of Currys.

 

That brings us to midnight and effectively closedown. The Open University gets the next twenty-five minutes with more from the humanities faculty - a new museum in South Kensington. Don’t know which that is. The big three - Natural History, Science and V&A - have all been there since the 19th Century.

 

Anyway, after that, strangely tucked away as almost a secret bonus feature, highlights of the day’s play in the Third Test. Maybe back then they couldn’t put the highlights together any quicker than that? It’ll be on again tomorrow morning, anyway, in the same slot it was today, and for all intents and purposes that’s its real slot. Again: it was a draw.