I MENTIONED my aversion to cheap television last week. Was it any better years ago, I wonder? Had distance leant enchantment?

In those times I recall my father’s choice of TV programme dictated our viewing. Coronation Street was on every Monday and Wednesday evening while we sat at the table and ate our dinner, but I lost enthusiasm for the programme when Dennis Tanner left the series.

On other nights it was Emergency Ward 10, again while having dinner.

My father loved No Hiding Place with Chief Superintendant Lockhart played by Raymond Francis who I dubbed the most wooden actor on the box in 1963. So I watched him acting with all the conviction of a 1960s forerunner of Kiera Knightley, but I was enthusiastic about Hancock, Wagon Train and Naked City.

Earlier, I had enjoyed The Army Game, Quatermass, Little Red Monkey and a whole host of quality drama and comedy productions such as Abigail’s Party. Do we get that quality now?

Perhaps we do in some cases but so much seems to revolve around members of the general public making a fool of themselves, or pubescent boys being voted into the pop stratosphere by pre-pubescent girls and all rated as peak-time viewing.

Looking back, it is a pity video recorders were not invented some 30 or 40 years earlier, because the BBC, failing to appreciate the value of archiving material, has very little to show of such children’s classics as The Appleyards or adults programmes such as the Plane Makers, The Groves etc.

Of course such videoed reflections would not stand the test of time, just as when I see the lone clip of Annette Mills with Muffin the Mule on the piano-top, I find it hard to believe we used to rush home from school in order to see the mule and Peregrine the Penguin.

Or that as a toddler I would sit transfixed at Rag, Tag and Bobtail, waiting for the moment when they were all asked to go back in their burrow, only for Bobtail to dally, prompting the voice over to admonish: “Now COME ALONG Bobtail.” And I would giggle at the antics of this mischievous piece of material every time.

As I mentioned my father would receive the Radio and TV Times and look through it over the breakfast table and mark down what we were watching. When he left for work, I would look at the magazine and my mother and I would try and fashion an appeal in favour of another programme in place of the one with the large pencilled cross by the side of it.

We seldom succeeded and if it involved someone singing, we would have no chance.

Long before Sunday Night at the London Palladium, the BBC would feature a variety programme called Music Hall one Saturday night and Cafe Continental, which was compered by the delectable Helen Cordet in a long evening gown. I say delectable but my enthusiasm was directed at the quality of her face, and it was not until much later that I learnt to appreciate other facets or assets.

She must have been getting on because a decade later I was humming to I’m Just A Baby by her daughter, Louise Cordet.

There was Wells Fargo, Cheyenne, Rawhide, Bonanza and many Westerns in those days and we would leave the pub early to dash back to watch Maverick. There was also The Avengers which was on at dinner-time so it became part of the Saturday scene, but I was never much smitten with that genre which included the Man from Uncle and The Saint. Z Cars was more my mark.

As I grew older, I tended to watch fewer programmes, but I could not afford to go out every night.

The programme Until Death d o Us Part was one of my favourites, largely because Alf was a more transparent bigot than my father. In fact my father was just like him but could not stand to see a programme full of “working class people”.

Eventually I moved out and had a house of my own, so I was able to make my own pencil marks.

The Prisoner and the Forsyte Saga were popular, along with Danger Man and the like. I seem to recall watching Compact for a spell but generally I have been very much a part-time television enthusiast.

When putting together a list of television trends for the book Watford in the Sixties and Seventies, I noted that most of the popular series I did not watch more than a couple of times. I recall going to work in the late 60s and 70s and being told about programmes.

“What do you do if you don’t watch these programmes,” I was asked?

I read a lot and/or played music and spent a fair amount of time playing with my B & O reel-to-reel.

Of course, back in my childhood, there were nights, before the arrival of ITV, when an entire programme lacked a single pencil mark on the Radio and TV Times and so the television would be turned off.

That habit has stayed with me. The television is turned on when we want to watch something. Most of the day it is off, and many evenings are spent watching cd box sets.

OK, I admit, in some cases they are TV programmes we have missed, which is an irony in itself.