A TV channel I had never heard of before (Yesterday) started showing the old TV programme Colditz a couple of weeks ago.  I can remember loving that programme in the 70s, reading the Pat Reid books that tied in with it, and playing the board game in the dorm at school – up in Trinity dorm on the 1st floor of a 19th-Century building that we could easily imagine to be Colditz.  All I can remember of the board game is that it was bloody complicated but had loads of bits to it, which was a major selling point to pre-teen boys at that time.

Colditz has not been repeated to my knowledge for a very long time and I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen it since the early 70s, but now it is being shown every weeknight on cable.  Being unwilling or unable to guarantee watching at least an hour of TV every day I have been recording it on the V+ box and realised the other day that they are starting to stack up and that if I didn’t start watching them I could well run out of recording space, so I started watching this week, and what a treat it is.At the risk of sounding like a miserable old git, they really did make good TV drama in those days.  Just like with 70s cinema, the TV shows were allowed time to develop a story and were given as much time as the story needed. I have only watched the first three episodes and it was only in the last couple of minutes of episode three that the action moved to Colditz castle, which was only mentioned right at the very end of episodes one and two.  Amazing that a series about Colditz, and called Colditz can only mention it briefly twice in three hours before showing a single scene set there.

I was a bit worried that it might not live up to my memories, but if anything it is even better than I remember as I can now appreciate the craft behind it as well as the storylines.

What stunned me was when I started to think about the timescales.  Because WWII was over before I was born, and my parents were only young children during the war it always felt a bit like ancient history.  Of course, at the time this show was first broadcast the time elapsed since the events in it were more then three times my age.  With the perspective of age I am starting to appreciate that at that time the end of the war was only 27 years before, which is the amount of time between now and Yes’s 90125 album or that byelection where Simon Hughes beat Peter Tatchell, which doesn’t seem that long ago.

Very much looking forward to the next 25 hours of Colditz.  Should keep me going for the rest of the year.