Produced for screening on New Year's Day 1991, this is an immensely entertaining celebration of the best and the worst of British television. Michael Palin, Alan Bennett and Alison Steadman are among the presenters of a cornucopia of archive extracts, which include some of the most significant and some of the most absurd small-screen moments from the 1950s to the 1990s. The programme, which in its full version runs for three hours, is assembled in blocks with loosely defined things, Including First Nights and Wedding Nights. Included in the fast-moving (and for the British audience, immensely nostalgic) montage are not only selections from dramas, comedies and documentaries, but also sequences and commercials, which in retrospect are often more revealing about the times in which they were made than the programmes themselves. A compact and entirely painless way to experience the richness of British television history in 90 minutes.
John Wyver