It’s one of those moments that pretty much everyone prepares for mentally, possibly years or even decades in advance, yet hits you unexpectedly when it actually happens. Last week, that moment happened to me. My mum died.

Obviously, there’s no ‘best case scenario’ for such a life event. Even your mother gallantly sacrificing herself by coaxing a demented robot Hitler into a spacecraft’s air lock to thwart an Earth-destuction plot would hit you like a bastard. But in the case of me and my family, we pretty much knew that moment was coming for some time, even if we all hoped we were massively mistaken. That doesn’t make it any easier (no robot Hitlers were involved, either. Unless they were some bloody convincing disguises).

At the time of writing this, I don’t even think I’ve fully processed it yet. It’s something that keeps barging into my mind, a gut-kicking suffix to thoughts like “must give Mum a ring to tell her about… oh”. Something where little parcels of sadness occur via nondescript events, like how phoning the dentist pushes my last call to mum a notch down my phone’s ‘recently dialled numbers’ list. And, to keep this on topic for the blog, seeing stuff on telly I know she would’ve loved. BBC Two’s recent retrospective of Barry Humphries’ appearances on the Beeb is precisely the sort of thing I would’ve phoned her to make her aware of. That’s because one trait I was lucky enough to inherit from Mum was a general sense of taste when it comes to Things On The Telly.

Usually the de facto rule when it comes to a parent recommending a piece of popular culture to you is that it’s immediately befouled forever. Well, I can’t like *that* anymore. Tsk. But, my dear old mum was frequently right on the money when it came to films and TV that I might like. Which, considering she was more then forty years my senior and therefore from a generation very different to my own (plus, I was annoyingly keen to avoid liking things that would be obvious, because I’m annoying), is quite a feat.

For most of my childhood, my parents ran a working men’s club¹ in a small village a few miles south of Wrexham. For the most parts, one parent would keep things ticking over behind the bar, while the other would be keeping me company in the adjoining house. On busier nights both would be required to operate the pumps, meaning that I was afforded free rein when it came to choosing my evening’s televiewing. They clearly understood that I was sensible enough to pick things at least semi-suitable for myself, and that I was thoughtful enough to cope with what I was watching. Apart from the time at the age of ten when I watched Threads on my own, but anyway.

It’s likely this played into my favour at school. As a largely quiet and introspective child, my knowledge of the previous night’s Absolutely, Blackeyes or, um, Life After George provided me with a veneer of respectability in the eyes of my peers. Having that cultural currency seemed to help me skitter up at least a couple of rungs on the social ladder, meaning I eventually escaped school with only a mild sense of depression and self-loathing. Success!

Here, I’ve picked out a handful of programmes recommended by my dear old Mum. Suffice to say, along with the following there were attempts (as any good parent would make) to get me to watch suitably improving fare like The Railway Children, but I’d say that if any children of the 1980s willingly dashed home to watch The Railway Children, I’ve certainly never met them. Instead, these are a few of the much better things Mum recommended to me.

Bedazzled (Channel Four, 23:15 Sat 5 Jan 1991)

Now, it’s quite likely I’d never have stumbled over this myself, following as it did a four-and-three-quarter hour broadcast of Richard Wagner’s operatic epic Der Ring des Nibelungen: Siegfried². Thanks to the recommendation of Mum, I stayed up way too late watching what would become one of my favourite ever films, with short order chef Dudley Moore lured into an eternal/infernal contract with the devil himself (aka George Spiggott, aka Peter Cook). To think, had I been born a decade later I might have been raised on the Liz Hurley remake. Brr.

Blackadder II (BBC1, 21:30 Thu 9 Jan 1986)

While my mum definitely had a penchant for historical drama series, I’d later find it a little surprising that she’d been so taken with the original The Black Adder that she’d enthusiastically recommend I stay up late to see the first episode of the sequel going out on original broadcast (Jim Broadbent voice: “What was she like?”). Especially so given that (at the time) it felt much more of an alternative outsider offering than the cosy TV classic it would later become, and I was only 11 years old at the time (and it was a school night). You already know that this was definitely the correct decision on her part.

Duel (BBC2, 20:30 Mon 14 Sep 1992)

Not the first film you’d associate Steven Spielberg with – not least as it was made for TV rather than cinema – but this lo-fi affair is every bit as gripping as his later work. And that was definitely the case for my parents when this was first broadcast on BBC2 in October 1975, when their ramshackle rental set decided to go ‘ping’ and suddenly compress the picture into a postage stamp-sized square in the centre of the screen thirty minutes from the end. Undeterred, my Mum and Dad were so determined to see what would happen to Dennis Weaver’s traumatised traveller, they watched the remaining half-hour perched inches from the screen.

Luckily for me, technology had progressed enough by 1992 that I was able to watch the entire thriller without any such concern. And make no mistake, it’s a great film, and one all the better for going into it knowing nothing other than “watch this, you’ll love it”.

The end of analogue television from the Winter Hill transmitter (BBC1, ITV, C4 & Five, Wed 2 Dec 2009)

If ever proof were needed that The Way I Am is down to genetics rather than any learned behaviour, during a phone call from my mum on 3 December 2009, my mum mentioned having stayed up late to see if they’d do anything interesting to mark the shutting down of the local analogue transmitter mast. They didn’t, it just crashed to static in the middle of overnight News 24 coverage. In a perfectly-timed piece of parent-child synchronicity, just days earlier I’d spent an evening writing a lengthy blog post on the exact same topic³ when it had happened to BBC2 the previous month.

Hancock’s Half Hour (BBC1, 19:15 Sun 23 Feb 1986)

Like many kids of my particular vintage, Old Comedy⁴ was a large part of my television landscape. I was just old enough to experience (and adore) the tail end of Morecambe and Wise’s Thames years, so was delighted when repeats of their BBC shows began in the mid-1980s. Similarly so with repeats of Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, Porridge and Dad’s Army. However, perhaps still desperately trying to recover from the expense of setting up colour TV in the first place, any archive programming in black and white was usually the sole preserve of the schedule’s fringes. The likes of The Phil Silvers Show or Leon Erroll would be tucked away in at Too Late O’Clock or Way Too Early O’Clock in the morning, meaning that aside from slapstick compilations of Harold Lloyd or old films (both usually restricted to the niche confines of BBC2), the sensible viewing hours were populated entirely by colour programming.

That changed in 1986, with BBC1’s first primetime foray into black and white archive programming for a number of years, and the last time the channel would ever do so. Following on from a well received Omnibus special on the work of Tony Hancock the previous year, and bolstered by BBC Enterprises’ desire to sell VHS cassettes of Hancock’s Half Hour, the lad himself made a triumphant return to Sunday evenings, with the The Blood Donor (pedant mode: ‘Hancock’ rather than ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’ by that stage, of course) attracting over 15 million viewers. One of whom was me, following an assurance from Mum that I’d love it. Catchphrase on ITV didn’t stand a chance, and a lifelong obsession with events at 23 Railway Cuttings had begun.

People Just Do Nothing (BBC Three, 00:00 Wed 24 Jun 2015)

Even in their later years, the viewing habits of my parents would often surprise me, whether it was Dad using catchphrases from Lee & Herring’s Festival of Fun in everyday conversation (not Fist of Fun, the Just For Laughs coverage they did for Paramount that about 376 people watched), or Mum suddenly displaying a hitherto unannounced knowledge of Hammer Horror films during a BBC2 season of them in the late 1980s.

A peak example of this came as my wife went into both the early stages of labour and hospital with our first child in 2015. The hospital selfishly not wanting me cluttering up their prenatal ward overnight, I left at midnight but needed to get back there as soon as I could the following morning. Living a 45-minute drive from the hospital, I needed to find somewhere closer to crash out for a few hours, and luckily my parents lived just a few miles from there. On arriving at their house shortly past midnight, they were both still awake (they were never morning people), and enjoying the latest antics from the Kurupt FM massive. Because of course they were.

Russell Coight’s All Aussie Adventures (DVD, 2002)

Perhaps helped by a large portion of our wider family (plus my eldest sister) having emigrated to the antipodes, Australian programmes were something that was always given a fair go in our house. There were the obvious ones (you didn’t need an affinity with Australasia to enjoy soaps like Neighbours or Prisoner Cell Block H, after all), ones that were checked out but not really stuck with (The Flying Doctor – bit boring, Let The Blood Run Free – too pleased with itself) and… oh, that was about all that was on offer. And so, following a visit to my Melbourne-based sister in the early 2000s, my parents brought home a (thankfully region zero) DVD detailing the exploits of a survival and wildlife expert whose haplessness is matched only by his tenacity. It’s a premise – main character shows off a survival tip which subsequently goes wrong – that shouldn’t really work beyond a series of sketches in theory, yet comedian and actor Glenn Robbins gives such a winsome performance as Russell Coight that each half-hour coasts by breezily.

Mark up another triumphant recommendation by Mum. (She also made a point of recommending The Micallef P(r)ogram(me) to me, but I was already aware of that one. Good eye, though.)

In summary: Miss you, Mum. Whether it’s about enjoyment of television or just my general outlook on life, you helped me become the person I am (all the good bits, anyway), and you’ll always have a place of the hearts of people lucky enough to have known you.

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Footnotes

¹One that would go on to see its name adopted by a moderately successful local indie band.

²Ah, old Channel Four. I might not have watched things like that, but by Darwin’s soupy beard television was a lot more interesting that things like that could dominate an entire Saturday night schedule on a main channel.

³Yes, I do really regret those references to Stuart Hall.

⁴In these instances, ‘Old Comedy’ being stuff from about fifteen years earlier. So, the same as a kid from 2023 watching The Peter Serafinowicz Show.