Watch With Mother

I was traumatised at a very early age by the funeral of Winston Churchill. I was 2-and-a-bit at the time, and I remember sitting in the living room at home waiting for the children's programmes to come on, but instead there was this s-l-o-w procession and solemn commentary that went on for hours. It was all in black and white, too, but that would be because we had a black and white telly.

I made a note to my future self: state funerals: not good television. Unfortunately, the career as Controller of BBC1 never materialised.

That sort of thing, the state funeral, the wedding, the Big Event, it always strikes me that the people who are really interested will go there and stand in the rain watching the horseys go by; therefore the rest of us shouldn't be subjected to it. But what do I know, as I so frequently ask?

Apollo launches, as Simon mentions below, now they were good telly. Apart from the delays, which even so added to the tension. There was even great telly in the whole business about the Dark Side of the Moon and Being Out of Radio Contact (the Floyd got an album title out of it); and of course, the primitive re-entry procedure was marvellous. Long, long hours, spent watching helicopters hover over burnt-looking capsules.

The astronauts were always put into Quarantine afterwards, in case they'd bought back some horrible space-borne virus that would spread like wildfire with no cure and kill us all, apart from the one or two people with natural immunity, who would be burned at the stake as alien interlopers.

There was a thing on the radio yesterday about the possible return of nuclear power. A lot of the history of it in this country is fairly recent. It was only during the reign of Thatch that the nails started to go into the coffin. But like Count Dracula, nuclear power isn't really dead unless you hammer a stake through its heart. Its return may be prompted by the, you know, oil running out. That kind of thing.

There was some bitter old geezer being interviewed. He was saying how the power station at Sellafield (which I still think of as Windscale) has run without a problem since it was commissioned. As he said those words, I said out loud, "But what about the fire?"

This geezer was especially bitter about Tony Benn, who had a Road to Damascus experience and turned from a Nuclear Booster into a Nuclear Hater. Benn said something like, "I once said it was cheap, clean and safe. Well it's not cheap, it's not clean, and it's not safe." He recounted how he was once embarrassed at an international meeting of energy ministers when the Japanese delegate said, with some sympathy, "How is everything at Windscale?"

"Fine," said Benn.
"You've not had any problems since the fire?"
"Fire?"

In other words, they tried to keep it secret even from the government minister in charge (it was Labour after all). And some of them are still in denial about it, all these years later.

Harold Wilson, who was prime ministrone in 1965, the year of Churchill's funeral, was of course famously impeded by the Security Services, who saw a Labour government as a threat to national security. It's a laughable idea now, isn't it, but you can't help thinking that the same groups, over and over, seek to do damage to a Labour government in power. Viz:

• The Farmers (if it's not fox huntng, it's the price of subsidised agricultural diesel; if it's not that it's just all the bloody Brian Aldridges whinging about tax or somesuch)


• The right-wing unions. Like the firemen, top civil servants, head teachers, police officers, lorry drivers


• The security services


• Toffs and ultra right wing political groups

Tony Blair must be absolutely steaming by now at the right-royal stitch up he received from the security boffins over Iraq. "Oh, it's only Labour, they'll believe anything, because being in power scares them stupid." I wonder if it'll all come out in his memoirs - or if they'll secretly slip him the Alzheimer's Pill before he can write them?

If you grew up in the 60s, it was all about that. Interminable state funerals; rocket launches; endless war; and money being poured into huge projects like Concorde, nuclear power, and the railways (instead of spending a lot less on a readily available off-the-shelf solution from another country that had already spent all that money). And it all came to a head in 1969 with a "man on the moon" in the Arizona desert and the Windscale festival of Peace and Love, at which Bob Dylan performed "Blowing in the Wind" to an audience of radioactive dolphins in the Irish Sea.