Boom! It's the same bat-day, different bat-channel, half an hour later! Possibly the previous upload, and its abrupt ending, was the result of someone figuring out just in time that they'd set the VCR to the wrong channel and switching it from 2 to 1 sharpish so as to catch the intended programme, As Time Goes By. Perhaps not. Perhaps they had two VCRs and were watching ITV that evening. Further acknowledgement to Sam Briggs on sax and Rhys Marshall on drums.

ANYWAY we're coming out of that very selfly samed episode of As Time Goes By that was advertised slidewise on BBC2 in the previous video. This is the start of the fourth series; by the time it ends in two months, the Dench and Palmer characters will have got married, three years being more than enough time for any will-they-won't-they vacillating when it's clear from the first yottasecond that they will. The show was marginally less saccharine than this glimpse of the closing credits makes it seem. Marginally.

By contrast, here's something gaudy and coated not just in cheese, but the kind of cheese that comes in a tube. That's Showbusiness is all but forgotten now, but it racked up eight series over six years. It was basically A Question of Showbiz, although by now they'd scrapped the notion of team captains (which was just as well, as one of them, Kenny Everett, had less than a month to live) and was hosted for all eight series by the late Mike Smith, seen here with a faintly desperate mid-nineties makeover of wispy beard and floppy hair, in what seems like such a transparent attempt to physically transform himself into his mentor Noel that it's hard not to feel for him, especially with the hindsight knowledge that this was basically the end of his prime-time career. Look at the sadness in his eyes in the closing freeze-frame. We didn't want you to be Noel, Smitty! We already had a Noel standing right next to you! The point of you was that you're not Noel! Shave your face, for the love of God!

Aha! That's what that was. Andy Cartledge reveals the answer: Westminster Abbey was opening up its walls for the first time in derpity doo in honour of Henry Purcell, who's 300. Here's some of his music for the coronation of Queen Mary II, who came free with William III. Actually it was the other way around, but it sounds snappier that way. That's over on BBC2 in ten hot minutes, after the Money Programme special about Alan Sugar finishes.

And in fifty minutes here on BBC1, a repeat of Only Fools and Horses, which the BBC liked to use to fill random half-hours throughout the nineties. At this point the show's status was uncertain. The final full series they ever made was now four years ago, and the last anyone had seen of it outside of repeats was the resolutely inconclusive (not to say mildly downbeat) ending to the amusing but entirely unnecessary 1993 Christmas special Fatal Extraction. The general sense was that the show was over, but no-one was really certain until the BBC finally commissioned the blockbuster trilogy over the following Christmas that finally tied the whole show together and brought the story to an end. And obviously once a story is over, most people stop telling it, but not a Corporation suffering major post-Birt burnout in both ratings and creativity, who almost tearfully hurled briefcases full of cash at a dubious John Sullivan for another blockbuster trilogy to tie it together and bring it to an end again. And then trickled them out over the course of three years because they were THAT low on inspiration. Those episodes, while watchable and funny in places, don't count.

Anyway. "Yesterday Never Comes" is on after Pie in the Sky, another 90s staple of post-Sunday dinner viewing. Nothing to do with the psychedelic nursery-rhyme jamboree conceived by Carole Ashcroft in a fever, this is one of those picturesque crime dramas that never went out of fashion. The late Richard Griffiths plays a fat bloke (as usual) who used to be a policeman and now runs a restaurant, but still solves crimes. In the fictional town of MIddleton in the fictional county of Westershire. And if that didn't give you enough idea of what to expect, here's the Radio Times synopsis for this very episode: "As two pensioners go on a fraud spree, the inclusion of Dundee marmalade in their trademark pudding motivates Henry to find them." Andy Cartledge delights in the opportunity to make food-related puns in his continuity announcement. Please enjoy the entire title sequence, which looks momentarily like Blackadder the Third in an unfunny parallel universe, but is inferior in many ways, not least its use of a video effect instead of incorporating real footage of Richard Griffiths exploring his symbolic library and incredibly impractical menu storage system.

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