I imagine one day in the not-so-distant future sitting with my grandchildren on my knee and telling them wild fairy tales so unbelievable that the stories boggle their little brains.

“Did you know, my lovelies, that TV was once basically free?” I’ll say.

They’ll stare up at me, spellbound, perhaps fearing grandpa has finally gone gaga. How could that be, they’ll puzzle to themselves, because mum and dad have 172 subscriptions to 172 different Californian streaming services, yet still can’t decide what to watch after we eat our lukewarm bowls of Soylent Green for dinner.

“Yes,” I’ll say. “It’s true. Back before London became a desert – before China took over the Moon – we paid £100 a year and that allowed us to watch this thing called “the BBC”. It was the envy of the world. You could watch the smartest people on Earth tell you about anything you could think of, and it would make you clever and well-informed. “Well-informed”, my darlings, was something folk once wanted to be. But it died out along with reading – and voting.”

Little Neilly and Nelly might start to think it’s time to call on grandpa’s robot carer at this point, but I’d valiantly continue. “And you could watch these other channels – called ITV, Channel Four and Channel Five – and you didn’t have to pay anything. Not a penny. You just watched some adverts and got it all for nothing. So for £100 a year – the cost of just one tub of Lurpak – plus some commercials, you got all the telly your little hearts could ever desire. And we owned it all – Britain owned it all. We had what was known as “our own culture”. Culture was a thing that existed before you were born, sweethearts.”

The definition of this Age of Stupid: Musk as the world's first trillionaire

Welcome to Scotland in 2026 - where Blackshirts parade on our city streets

Reform is stinking up Holyrood and the other parties are applying the air freshener

How dare the middle classes sneer at families who are going........

© Herald Scotland