The wonder of Jon Pertwee and his frilly shirt

 When a friend asked if I wanted anything for Christmas I took a deep breath and replied: ‘Well, maybe I finally need to watch this.’ I handed him a video cassette retrieved from my sister’s attic and he took it to a place that digitises such things.

On Christmas Day I nervously plugged in the memory stick. There we were: Carmel and I, aged about seven and nine, bathed in late-1960s sunshine in the garden of our mock-Tudor house in Woodmansterne Road, Carshalton Beeches, Surrey. (I emphasise ‘Surrey’, because in those days Carshaltonions were in Margo Leadbetter-style denial over new local government boundaries that landed them in – shudder – south London.)

My father, who rented a cine camera for the occasion, would have described this footage as Carmel and Damian ‘having fun working in the garden’. It’s propaganda, in other words. There I am, digging at a flowerbed with the fake enthusiasm of a Soviet peasant. Was he holding a gun to my head? Gardening was always torture for me, not just because I was the laziest boy in Carshalton Beeches, but also because it meant spending time with my father. Our relationship was already toxic and stayed that way until a heart attack brought the ordeal to an end 15 years later. It was an ordeal for him as well, poor man: we couldn’t stand each other.

There was no soundtrack to the cine film, but my memory supplied one: the Blue Peter hornpipe. We were a Blue Peter family, in the bullseye of the programme’s target demographic at a time when it coloured the lives of children to an extent that seems inconceivable today. Our Carshalton years coincided with the Holy Trinity of BP presenters: Valerie Singleton, who looked like a sexy schoolmistress with a no-nonsense glint in her eye; Peter Purves, handsome and groovy; John Noakes, a cheeky Yorkshireman who was fearless while scaling Nelson’s Column but, like Val and Pete, nervous in the studio because autocues were banned and every word of banter was awkwardly scripted.