Perspective

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I have just spent the night watching live general election coverage. From 1974.

It seems the UK's most boring channel - BBC Parliament, which shows parliamentary debates and enquiries in real time - has decided to broadcast even when the MPs have gone home, digging deep into the BBC's extensive archive of long past political coverage.

And it was good stuff too. The great historian AJP Taylor wheeled on to be asked dumb questions only a clairvoyant could answer. The old Liberal party favourite Cyrill Smith - now chiefly remembered as "that enormous fat man" - being grumpy and telling the interviewer "I love you but I'm not going to answer that question".

Iain Paisley barking intractable prejudice like an Irish dalek - which, come to think of it, is exactly what he's still doing today. Some loon with impossibly neat slicked and parted hair aligning himself with the infamous racist Enoch Powell. And the latest (datedest) high-tech graphics flashing annoyingly at us.

Yeah, some things don't change at all.

Oh, and there were occasional interruptions to report on something obscure happening in America. Not many details but apparently something called "The Watergate Enquiry".

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