‘The sun always shines on TV,’ went the lyrics of a pop song forty years ago.

The words seemed close enough to the mark. On the handful of television channels we had in those years, the programmes seemed mostly from worlds filled with excitement and interest. Of course, there was Coronation Street and Brookside, but even those worlds were exotic compared with life in a small village.

Television was never about dull things, the soaps were filled with family dramas and unexpected events, plots never featured hours spent doing …

New television channels seem to appear each time the list is scrolled. Talking Pictures, inevitably it would be old, but at least it might offer a change from the dross of game shows and reality TV.

A 1964 police series called Gideon’s Way was an artefact of a bygone age. The villain was played by George Cole, a troubled incendiarist who was leaving a trail of destruction around a grey post-war London.

It was followed by The Playboys, a 1992 film set in a border county of Ireland in …

Waking at six o’clock this morning, it was still dark.

Lying six degrees west of Greenwich, Dublin has a sunrise that is twenty-five minutes later. Dublin once had its own local time, and I understood that this ended for the convenience of the railways. Only this evening did I discover that it was part of British government legislation in the summer of 1916, when the government was trying to draw Ireland more tightly into the union.

The House of Commons in London was presented with a clause to standardize time:…