This week I'll be mostly pressing pause

I'm ... pressing ... play.

"Come in, sit down and shut up" was what my Grandad used to say. We'd go round on a Saturday evening and Kojak would be on the telly, or Hawaii Five-O, or whatever. This was before the days of video recorders; VHS and Betamax were just a twinkle in the eye of some electronics engineers. So when it was on, it was on. If you were watching the telly, you would come in, sit down and shut up.

A decade later we had video. Of course you still had all that mucking about with setting the timer and making sure you wound the tape back to the right place, and remembering to switch the thing off - because it would only record if it was off - doh! And then when it was recording you couldn't watch anything else. So videos were really for taping things that you were going to miss while you were out; You could go down to Hammersmith Palais on a Saturday night, nip over to Leicester Square for the midnight showing of RoboCop, come back on the N279 from Trafalgar Square, get home at 3am, watch a bit of Night Network, and still be able to rewind the tape and catch up with Ben Elton and Harry Enfield on Saturday Live before going to bed.