Saturday's Kids

Preparing the Night Mail, scardy, 2002

I always wonder who's up at 6am watching cartoons and then I remember I used to get up every Saturday morning in the mid 90s to watch Live & Kicking. L&K was on from 9am to noon but I was always afraid I'd sleep in and miss it - the tagline being "Miss it, miss out".

I'd wake up in the dark and drag my duvet into the living room. I was often up far too early, sometimes BBC1 would still be off-air and there'd be static. At some point the test card would kick in with a piercing tone before transiting to Pages From Ceefax. The music played over PFC is often described as terrible, but I love it. As a preteen exposed to manufactured pop, this poor man's jazz/funk/easy-listening was amazing. PFC was probably also my exposure to the wider world: I remember reading about an IRA bomb one morning as the news pages scrolled.

It was always difficult to stay awake when programming didn't start for another 2 hours, and my determination not to sleep through L&K often meant falling asleep at my grandparents' in the afternoon. Once Zoë Ball and Jamie Theakston left L&K in 1999, I briefly switched to the ascendant rival SMTV Live on ITV, only getting up at 10am to see the new-fangled Pokémon. By this point I was about 13 and getting up at all on a Saturday was difficult.

So here I am ten years later working for Royal Mail, waking up at 0545 on Saturdays, no less. I ripped some music from ceefax off YouTube to begin my Saturday deliveries. Extreme irony and nostalgia factors.

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