Duck, you sucker

You have to be careful watching television later in the evening: the programmes start running into one another and you lose track, even without channel-hopping, of where one stops and other one begins. On General Election night in 1997 the last programme before the coverage started on BBC1 was Blackadder, the episode in which Baldrick stands for Parliament to frustrate the plans of Pitt The Younger. A few minutes later and the BBC were announcing that exit polls suggested there was going to be the largest majority since the General Election of 1812 - or something to that effect - and I had a momentary problem as my brain found itself unable to work out whether the previous programme had actually finished yet.

I had a similar problem last night, having lain in bed watching Jonathan Ross on Film 2005 before turning over to BBC2, who were hosting News 24 for the rest of the night. There was something about British soldiers dressing up as Arabs which I was sure I remembered from Lawrence Of Arabia and I started wondering if it was an hommage, in much the same way as, when one gets older, one listens to a new generation of pop groups and hears not the bands themselves, not the songs themselves, so much as the bands and songs that have influenced them.

I was still musing on this question, half-asleep, when they started talking about a prison rescue in which a wall of the jail had apparently been demolished "accidentally", in itself a hard thing to get your head around when you're close to sleep, since it is surely rather harder to do such a thing accidentally than it is deliberately. No matter. I was still trying to work out whether this was from Blazing Saddles or Support Your Local Sheriff! when I nodded off.

Somebody at the BBC must have nodded off too, since when I woke up and turned on BBC Breakfast they'd forgotten about the Iraqi casualties that they'd mentioned the night before - and indeed the comments ("barbaric aggression") of the governor of Basra. But it mattered little. Sleep had settled my mind and I'd realised the chaps had been restaging the scene from A Fistful Of Dynamite in which James Coburn helps Rod Steiger release his comrades from jail, and the latter's gang, on horses, pull down the side of the jail with ropes.