Dear LPG, 

The long summer holiday is finally over for another year, and I am sure that many a person reading this will be asking what the school summer holidays have to do with us pensioners anyway. 

For those ’hands-on’ grandparents who took on the custodial duties that helped our not now so little ones keep their little ones busy, while their Mummies and Daddies were hard at work during the school holidays, I have a memory or two to offer.

After a weekly routine where the really young ones would run me ragged in the park each morning before I got them home again, they more or less amuse themselves with their tablets, and all those dedicated children’s television channels which filled them full of Paw Patrol and Pepper Pig.  As a hands-on grandparent, I am sorry to relate that I know a worrying amount about those two characters not to mention many more.

We got into a conversation about all those children’s television characters, and I found myself mentioning my childhood favourites.  When I tried to explain ‘watch with Mother’ to my three-year-old and six-year-old grandchildren, their reaction was a bit of a snigger.   They decided that Andy Pandy and the Flowerpot Men must be very old fashioned but we oldies, with the help of You Tube, can do so much more than just talk about such things these days.  

I found it on my mobile phone and showed my grandchildren a quick clip of the children’s television that I, and I suspect many other LPG readers, used to look at when we were about three years old and I could not believe that, in spite of all the technical visual and sound effects they are used to these days, my three-year-old made me turn Bill and Ben back on when I stopped the episode after a couple of minutes and the six-year-old was transfixed too (although after watching the whole 15 minutes, he said that he did not really care for it). I was surprised because even though the programmes were still in black and white they were fascinated.

I looked online and found out that the first introduction of all those Watch with Mother characters happened about 70 years ago and we children were thought worthy of less than one hour of dedicated television a day in those days.  

Now I find it sobering to think that, with all the channels dedicated to all day television for the little ones in our lives, the less than an hour per day that we oldies used to see (if our parents let us) still transfixes the children of today, if only for a little while.   

HG, Charlton

HG has found a few 70-year-old memories for those old enough to remember… 

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