…Stayed in bed this morning till about 8.45am.
Watched Roland Rat and got bored.
Climbed our tree this afternoon and hanged [sic] from a tough branch…
That’s the second entry in four days in which I mention I’m bored. I clearly wasn’t having a very stimulating Easter holiday.
I had also yet to grow out of my interest in Roland Rat Superstar, though I’m pretty sure this obsession was now (thankfully) in its twilight phase.
Nowadays I can’t remember what it’s like to get bored while having time off from something. The 10-year-old me didn’t know quite how lucky he was. Or how irritating.
But help was at hand. A thrillsome day out was in the pipeline. Tomorrow I would be off to see one of the jewels of the East Midlands.
This Roland Rat programming was, of course, Roland’s Easter Eggs-Stravaganza which, after his Yuletide Binge on Christmas Day, was the first thing he did for the Beeb, linking together the kids programmes every morning during the Easter holidays, which I think is where the whole BBC3 gag began. I well recall my mum telling me to turn it off because she could clearly see that I was bored witless and only watching it because Phil Schofield had told me to. And she was right, too, because the line-up of programmes he was introducing was rotten, with Lassie, Jackanory, Why Don’t You and Play School. We couldn’t bear Lassie or Jackanory, which seem utterly unsuitable for a supposedly anarchic strand like that, and we’d grown out of Play School, so it was slim pickings indeed.
I have the Radio Times from that week and the only good bit about this whole exercise is the fact it got a Grandstand-style panel, with the “Rat-Timetable” accompanied by the briliant disclaimer “(Subject to Roland’s watch)”.