A man walks into a pub. He orders two large pernods for him and his friend and gets change from a quid. He overhears two guys talking about property prices. “A four-bedroom house in Wimbledon must go for £27,000!” one of them says. Later the man has something to eat: eggs fried in a heap of butter and a cup of tea with three sugars. I know where I am now. I’m in the past. The simple, cheap, sugar-laden past. I love it.

This particular piece of the past is an episode of the TV series Public Eye first broadcast in ’73, hence the house prices and sugary tea. You may remember the show: it aired for ten years and followed a private detective called Frank Marker, lugubrious, inscrutable, always hungry, always skint. The episode with the tea and the house prices was part of the 72-73 series made by the Scottish producer and creator of Taggart, Robert Love, and it had the same magnetic, unsettling effect telly from the past always has. Were we like that? Why aren’t we like that now? And what will we be like in the years to come?

In case you want to catch it yourself, and I recommend it, Public Eye is currently running on Monday nights on Virgin channel 445, Freesat 306, Freeview 82 and Sky 328, or Talking Pictures as it’s known. The channel pretty much only shows TV and film made before the 90s and to the surprise of quite a lot of people, especially people in the TV industry, it’s become the biggest independent channel in the country, with over five million viewers a month. Monday is also its........

© Herald Scotland