At dinner at a pleasant French restaurant last night, we discovered that we all had, by some coincidence, watched Tony Blackburn’s 1970s video selections on TMF (free-to-air digital music channel) at the weekend.

This led to the curious suggestion that 70s popsters Baccara – of Yes Sir, I Can Boogie fame – might actually be the Cheeky Girls back in time. (Or mad, or in a coma.)

Thanks to YouTube, you can decide for yourself:

I was watching Newsnight tonight – unusual for me, but it was on after The Apprentice – You’re Fired!. I noticed Liberal Democrat Shadow Environment Secretary Chris Huhne quote the phrase “After you, Alphonse” in the context of the developed world not being prepared to tackle climate change until the developing world takes action.

Naturally, my immediate reaction was to get Googling to find out who Alphonse was. Here’s the answer:

Alphonse and Gaston were comic strip characters created by the American cartoonist Frederick Burr Opper (1857-1937). The popular strip ran from 1902-1920’s and featured Alphonse and Gaston, two inordinately polite Frenchmen. Their signature phrase was “After you, my dear Gaston” and “After you, my dear Alphonse.” The two soon became synonymous with exaggerated politeness or deference.

More on Opper at Wikipedia.

Thanks to the marvellous BBC programme catalogue prototype, you can – assuming you’re, er, not too old – see what was on TV on the day you were born, and even, if you know your time of birth, at the very moment you entered the world.

My mum was missing out on Sunday Worship: I, Where Are We Now? on BBC1 and an Open University programme on BBC2.

The link you need is in the format http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/on_this_day/yyyy/mm/dd where yyyy is the full year, mm is the month in two digits (e.g., 04 for April), and dd for the day.

From this we can see that the newly-thirtysomething Stephen Tall has the privilege of being born on the day the fourth episode of the fantastic Doctor Who story The Talons of Weng-Chiang first aired, while today’s birthday boy Duncan had the pleasure of a budget reply party political broadcast from the SDP/Liberal Alliance featuring Roy Jenkins.

Only one of these TV programmes featured a giant rat. I leave you to guess which 🙂

If so, please feel free to vist Bonhams and buy me some of these rather cool costumes from Doctor Who and the James Bond and Carry On films. (Via.)