Memory Lane

When I was a child colour television was a new and exciting development and daytime television had yet to be invented. It sounds rather quaint now, but we knew what we wanted to watch and we turned the television on five minutes or so before to 'warm up' and when the program was over we turned the television off and got on with other things. When I was small sitting down to see Watch With Mother was an important part of my day and among my favourites was Mary Mungo and Midge, a cartoon series about the adventures of a girl, a dog and a very badly behaved mouse who lived at the top of a tower block. When I was a little older another cartoon series captured my imagination, Captain Pugwash was the cowardly and greedy leader of a band of pirates and their comical exploits always made me smile. John Ryan, the cartoonist who created Mary Mungo and Midge and Captain Pugwash died last Friday, his work brought a lot of pleasure to generations of children. Television may have become much more sophisticated since then, but somewhere along the way it has lost the simple magic of those long gone days of Watch With Mother.