“Blue is the colour...”

At the turn of this century, a marginally pre-fame Charlie Brooker published a website called “TVGoHome”. This consisted of parodies of television listings. It used, mostly if not exclusively, a design that resembled the layout of the Radio Times. One page of this masterpiece of the early internet age claimed that one Friday evening in the year 2000 Channel 5’s programming consisted of Con Air Twice. Yes, the 1998 film Con Air, featuring Nicolas Cage with amusing hair and an intended-to-be-amusing-but-not subplot with Steve Buscemi as a sex offender, but twice. Two screenings back to back.

I was thinking about this earlier this year, for the simple reason that, due to a technical hiccough, The Happiness Patrol was shown twice at BFI in the space of a couple of weeks. Me being me, I went to both of them - “The Happiness Patrol Twice”. Seeing a story twice in a month, and then again once the Blu-ray came out, is a lot, even for me.¹ Of course, that wasn’t true back in 1988 when this story was transmitted. Pre-teens have a lot of time on their hands, and usually limited interests. As a kid who didn’t really ever want to play outside, despising both physical exercise and the weather on this island², mine were probably more limited than most. So the Doctor Who stories I had on videotape were watched often.