Vintage Item No.5 - Crossroads

Everyone who knows me knows that I really love really bad vintage tv. I make no apologies about it. There's something very touching and involving about particular soaps, dramas and comedies from the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. I especially love things that are acted out under brilliant lights inside poky studio sets, involving under-rehearsed actors battling their way through scripts that have been thrown together by someone right at the end of their tether. I like watching episodes of things where you can hear people tearing out their hair behind the scenes.

So... Crossroads.

I always loved it, going back as early as I can remember. Tea times with tea on a tray, mopping bean juice with white bread and watching these adults parading around in a Motel, having mystifyingly dramatic adult lives but behaving all the time with the same earnest, semi-improvised gusto of kids in the playground. I remember very clearly things like David Hunter's crazy-eyed wife shooting him in his office while a party goes on in the next room. How he lay on the sheepskin rug oozing bright pink blood until Meg came and found him, executing a marvellous double take in her party frock. I remember daft Benny in his Badly-Drawn Boy hat, falling in love with the gypsy girl who taught him to write. And how she was run over and killed on the day of their wedding - leading Benny to do some kind of heartbroken monologue over an orchestral track... which ended up in the pop charts, as if that was any consolation to him. And, of course, the day that Meg - zoned out on tranquilisers on Guy Fawkes' Night 1981 - set fire to her own motel, faked her death and skipped off to the QE2 for a cruise from which she never returned.

For me, this was adult life. This is how grown-up people carried on. If you were classy you lived in houses like Jill's - Chimneys, it was called, and you had a cosy country kitchen with a welsh dresser and earthenware mugs and a troublesome ex-husband like bleary-eyed Stan who could turn up drunk at any moment and threaten to steal your toddler Sarah Jane away. If you were a busy business woman you would march around your motel with a clipboard having terse words with the temperamental chef and the shiftless receptionist... and maybe you'd have your head turned by a suave fella in a nylon suit with huge collars and sideburns and hair that looked like a wig.

In recent years they've released a massive batch of old episodes on dvd, of course. My favourite EVER is Christmas 1979. It was in the first bumper volume that came out maybe four years ago and I rewatch it every Christmas Eve. It features a final sequence with the entire cast celebrating in Meg's swish sitting room in the Motel. Even those characters who didn't really get on with each other are perched there, cramped together, holding aloft schooners of sweet sherry in the olive-walled boudoir of the Queen of Soap. It's all rather poignant. It's like they're gathered there for the end of the Seventies. Soon, everything would be changing for them and the rest of the country.

Meg rallies them all for the close of the episode by bullying a pianist to accompany her and busting into song. She swirls her arms up and gives them, 'We Need a Little Christmas.' The whole cast complies and what sounds like a jazz ensemble tucked away somewhere leaps into action as well. Doris Luke the cleaner gazes from the velour settee at her boss with what seems like raptly sapphic desire. Poor depressed Glenda rallies from her doldrums to get the song words mixed up. David Hunter stands with his brilliant new novelist wife and the two of them look elegant and festive, but complex and sophisticated, too.

Network dvd (I love what they do. They unearth real treasure, they do) have slung together every single one of their Crossroads releases and are putting them out in the ludicrous Motel-shaped boxed set above. Isn't that marvellous? With all the characters looking out of the windows? Just exceptional. I wish their releases had gone beyond mid-1979, though. What I really want is the second half of 1979 - so I could have all the brilliant build-up to that year's final singsong in the sitting room of Meg Mortimer.