Not that it stops me. Phrases like "ooh me back", "I remember when we used to get proper snow" and the like, are often heard on my surely too young lips.

I'm about to employ another phrase that I shouldn't,
by rights, be using. But they really don't make 'em like they used to.

I was only seven years old when Play for Today was taken off the air in 1984. You might think – given that my main preoccupations back then, like all seven year old boys, were building dens with my younger brother and my penknife – that I am unqualified to write about Play for Today (PFT). But it's precisely because I was a wee bairn when it was taken in an untimely fashion from the screens that I am well placed to comment on this national institution.

PFT was transmitted on BBC1 from 1970 to 1984. Its passing has long been mourned. Indeed, earlier this year Kevin Spacey – an American, of all people – was telling us that we ought to bring the show back.

Who is this American telling us how to run our television drama? We asked in that pompous way the British have, perfectly manifest in Michael Gove MP, who disagreed with Spacey and whose ability to irritate is directly linked to his ubiquity.

As such he has become recently very irritating (seriously, why exactly do I keep seeing the Shadow Secretary of State for Children on Newsnight Review? What's next, Germaine Greer advising on education policy?)

The point is that Spacey, seen as a curiosity when he first took over the Old Vic – and in plenty of quarters was not given the respect he has gone on to earn – has been a shot in the arm to British theatre, helping to reinvigorate it. Perhaps we should listen when he tells us we should not have discarded, and continue to ignore, the great British institution Play for Today.

It is staggering to imagine once upon a time there was a weekly new drama on the screens of British television.

The biggest weekly show we have these days is X Factor.

Saturday nights have been turned over to the talent show. The lives of ordinary men and women who dream of a better future are laid bare and shown to us – the viewing figures suggest about 12 million of us.

I tuned in to see what the fuss was about and it is fascinating. All human life is there.

The show is saturated in real drama played out among these vivid and fascinating characters.

You know where vivid and fascinating characters on television used to come from? The scripts of John Osborne, Dennis Potter, Alan Bleasdale and David Storey.

You know who used to direct the fascinating stories these people wrote? Ken Loach, Mike Newell, Alan Clarke, Michael Apted. Giants all and who all worked for Play For Today.

To return to my earlier theme, those really were the good old days.