Has there ever been a device more calculated to break the best of intentions and lead you down byways and sidetracks than the internet? I honestly intended to spend a couple of hours last night improving the links section of the website (which currently stands at a rather paltry three and if you have any suggestions for sites to add please contact me ). However, what actually happened was that I took a tour down childhood memories and, so that the time might not have been completely wasted, I provide as a public service announcement and for the purposes of fortysomething nostalgic wallowing the following:

Belle and Sebastien (the opening titles and end music, plus a clip)

White Horses (that wonderfully evocative tune and a long clip)

The Flashing Blade (guns, swords, sieges: surely one of the most unlikely children's programmes ever)

Champion the Wonder Horse (I always thought Rebel did almost all the work and got hardly any of the credit)

Tales of the Riverbank (Hammy the Hamster and the incomparable Johnny Morris)

Thus a few minutes on You Tube stretched into a couple of hours. But apart from the flood of reminiscences, it's fascinating to see the difference between the children's programmes of forty years ago and those of today. To take Belle and Sebastien as an example: in the clip we see Grandfather and Marina waiting for Sebastien's return. It's late, they're worried, but it's all conveyed in one long continuous take as the camera pans from Grandfather smoking his pipe to Marina knitting to the clock on the wall chiming, then back to Marina and, following her anxious gaze, the camera finally returns to Grandfather. Today, such a scene would have been accomplished with much intercutting and editing tricks. I sometimes wonder how much our frenetic lives now are a result of the change in media styles with which we are faced, or whether the change of media styles  is a consequence of the increased pace of life. More likely the two affect each other, feeding back a constant spiral of activity.

Reading the comments posted after these clips, I was also struck by how these programmes represent a shared memory for people of my generation. Will this still be true of children today, with the vastly greater choice of media available to them? Thirty or forty years ago, with only two or three TV channels, literally half the nation might settle down to watch a programme. Today, even successful shows like Eastenders attract only eight or nine million viewers. Still, I'm not so sure that this fragmentation is necessarily a bad thing. It's only in retrospect that one can see how much an 'official' media culture had saturated the country and living today amid the de-Christianised wreckage that culture has brought into being, maybe it is a good thing that we can easily find refuge from the official narrative of our age and its mediacracies.

But in the meantime, I hope you enjoy these memories of a black-and-white time.