a piece i’ve often wanted to write has been something about the switch from dourly puritan late-50s stasis (back-to-backs you will never escape) to slippy mid-60s mobility: this — possibly deluded — urgent new sense that you could get a beatle-shaped ticket to ride out of grim-up-north nowhere down into swinging bedsit london (a city which rarely features in the kitchen sink canon: up the junction? the ipcress file?), and, who knows? become whatever you wanted to be…! this 1969 series being a touchstone fragment of whatever you’d want to call the relevant realism, except i can remember nothing whatever of the actual programme, only the pentangle theme music…