"He can't walk very fast." ITV (Thames) adverts, 27th May 1991

Finally, Cromwell's sodded off. It was a Thames Television presentation for nothing and no-one. Coming up next, Philip Elsmore promises the news and weather from ITN followed by Home and Away. The Thames version of the generic ITV logo doesn't work at that size, does it? They didn't think through all the possible combinations and permutations. A bit like the BBC logo at the time: a perfectly good design at the correct size, but it quickly dissolved into random pixels at the kind of sizes it was used at onscreen. Anyway, the adverts are mostly repeat repeats of ones we saw in the film. There's those Jersey Royal potatoes again. They're here. Now. After that is that pillock drawing on himself because GORL SMELL NICE only to realise he should maybe have tried talking first? Finally, a quick cartoon for ORACLE. After a decade of fairly straightforward promotion for the ITV teletext service, once Simons Palmer got hold of it (and advertised the fact in the advert) they went for (initially) Tex Avery-influenced humour based around the concept of the dog fetching the newspaper and how ORACLE makes that more or less obsolete. They weren't sophisticated but they were often genuinely funny. A couple of years later the style's changed to a more Cordell (Cat Came Back) Barker aesthetic, fitting the grungy early 90s, and the mascot is now a mutt named Hi-Tech Orace, the envy of other dogs because all he needs to do to deliver the paper is pick up a remote. All of which should be enough information to explain what the joke is here besides animal cruelty. He also has the backing of the Old Testament God, by which I do mean Patrick Allen, so watch out. That's it for advertising, now for a trailer. ITV branded, because they were still going heavily on the network and its still-relatively-new logo, which took the starring in the trail packaging for a good few years in the early 90s, along with the voice of Bruce Hammall. This one has a nice pastel-coloured spring aesthetic (complete with faintly resigned use of raindrops) and it's listing everything that's on this Bank Holiday Monday evening. At 5:45, It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet! The second of two pre-Christopher Timothy adaptations of James Herriot's books. The first, which was also called All Creatures Great and Small, came out a year earlier and had Simon Ward as Herriot alongside Anthony Hopkins, of all people, as Siegfried. This one has John Alderton and Colin Blakely and was adapted by Alan Plater, so it's probably a decent enough watch. Seems a bit long, though, with the next programme coming along at eight. It's a Ruth Rendell Mystery! Billed as a "movie", even, although it's actually a repeat of a three-part Wexford adaptation that they've smooshed together and probably sliced up to make it fit two hours. Skipping ahead to 10:50, a premiere (only 11 years after the fact) of Used Cars, the early joint from Bobs Zemeckis and Gale that Steven Spielberg helped get made partly as a penance for having made 1941. Oh, also Sue Lawley is in conversation with Queen Noor of Jordan at ten o'clock, but that has fewer car crashes. (Insert Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor joke here.) And there's twenty minutes of news after that. But anyway that's your Bank Holiday Monday on Thames, and you'll just have to make your peace with that. But now: the generic ITV ident, which Thames are still dutifully plodding along with for now. I can't swear it's the loss of the franchise in a few months that makes them drop it, but it does coincide. Elsmore is introducing the news so he does his important voice. THIS IS THAMES TELEVISION FROM LONDON. The bank holiday time is the same as it would be if it wasn't the bank holiday. Here's the news. Thailand just had its own personal Lockerbie as an Austrian 767 crashes on Phu Toei National Park, killing all 223 people on board. Except it wasn't a bomb. They thought it might be, but the plane just exploded of its own accord. In better news, the Ethiopian Civil War, which had been going on since 1974 and encompassed the apocalyptic famine, is finally about to end as Mengitsu is overthrown, Addis Ababa falls and peace talks are held here in London. Rajiv Gandhi went the way of his mother just a few days earlier; now his ashes are being delivered home. What they could find of them. And cricket: the West Indies are in town and England actually do pretty good, whitewashing the one-day series and drawing the tests 2-2, which is pretty good going against Viv Richards and Curtly Ambrose's Windies, especially for an England team heading into the long decade in the wilderness, during which they'd be lucky to beat the Shepherd's Bush Spud-U-Like Irregulars Second XI. In two weeks: this whole news broadcast.