Go to Bed, Spotty

The Fifteenth of June Two Thousand and Eleven. Wednesday.

I've sought advice from Shu-Shu, she being a marathon runner and all that, and apparently this is what is known as 'The Wall'.

My solemn promise to you, faithful viewer, is that there will be some sort of nonsense or other for you to digest every day come rain or shine. Current plans have it that I will have a one week break every six weeks. Let's see how that pans out.

In this world of rolling news and RSS feeds, digital channels out the wahoo and that there Twitter it behoves an old soul like myself to remember a gentler, quieter time when if there was nothing to say then everybody would shut up instead. Yes, this is all a bit self-reflexive - talking about not having anything to talk about (and then pointing out that that is what you're doing) - but I checked and you're allowed to do this whenever there's a red moon (just popped outside and it's too cloudy to see if it really is red, but everyone's been saying it is so that's good enough for me).

So tonight we're going to pad things out with a celebration of closedown - back in the day when people weren't afraid to admit they had nothing more to say. As Neil in The Young Ones (to this day, still my favourite TV comedy and thus my Eighth Telly Recommendation) once said, 'It's a sign. It means there's no more telly. It's time to go to bed'.

I grew up in Granadaland and so this is how the day used to end for those of us who lived on the banks of the Irwell. I hope you experience the same tears of nostalgia that I did upon hearing the swell of harp strings at the end of the Granada theme.

Times past, times we will never see again...

However, when we moved barely quarter of a mile up the road the signal from Winter Hill was blocked by the trees in the nearby park (I think) and so we had to retune our telly to pick up HTV Wales from the other direction. Swings and roundabouts, though. While keeping abreast of what was going down in Cardiff Town wasn't that useful it did mean that we got this rather stirring closedown music which evokes memories of a later, perhaps less innocent, time in my life.

(By the way, there's lot's of brilliant stuff like this at TV Ark, where you can easily lose an hour or two wandering through all sorts of long-forgotten gems)

Right, now it is time for bed. I'll leave you with this final closedown clock, which by a weird coincidence is showing the exact time I'm finishing typing this. Freaky.

Goodnight all.

More soonliest.