In the good old days when I was a boy I would watch Children’s Television at five thirty on school day afternoons. My parents had finally bowed to popular neighbourhood pressure in 1956 and bought a television. It was many years before my parents watched it. They got it to keep the children at home. It had not taken us long to discover who our real friends were…and they always seemed to have a television.

In my memory it was always dark outside when I was glued to the television. On light summer evenings we would be out in the street playing cricket against the lamppost while Mum was in the kitchen preparing baked beans or roes on toast for tea. It was several years before I realised that we were eating fish and not roses. Each time a ball went astray and rattled the kitchen window there would be a cry from inside: ‘Why don’t you boys go up the park to play?’

This was a rhetorical question. Mum actually preferred to have us on hand. When we disappeared to Oxleas Woods or Eltham Park someone had to be sent to the park to tell us tea was ready…these were in the days before mobile phones. But we preferred the sideway or the road. It took ten minutes to get to our play places in the park and in ten minutes you lost a lot of playing time. It was also more fun to be out in the road and dodging the cars.

Crookston Road was two roads away from the Rochester Way which was the main car route from Kent and the South-East London suburbs to the other side of the River Thames by way of the Blackwall Tunnel and the Woolwich Ferry or up to Central London through Blackheath, Lewisham, Deptford, New Cross, Peckham and Camberwell to the Vauxhall or Westminster bridges.

By the mid-fifties at five on working days our road was something of a rat-run. Cars coming from Woolwich would turn off the Well Hall Road at the Welcome Inn and then turn up our road to cut out the long wait at the Westmount Road traffic lights at the junction with the Rochester Way. Drivers had their own SatNavs in those days…Local Knowledge. Nowadays the word rat-run conjures up a rather different picture.

For small boys in the 1950s, normal traffic was the milk-cart in the morning, the rag ‘n bone man on Mondays…both horse-drawn…the coalman in his lorry in the morning and the baker’s van in the afternoon. But between five and six in the evening we could reckon on some serious excitement with a car every few minutes. One game we liked to play was called buzz. It was variations on 'It'…'Tag' to Americans. Instead of tagging someone you hit them with a tennis ball. It didn’t take me long to find it more of a challenge to miss…accidentally on purpose…and hit a car instead.

My father came home at quarter to six for dinner at six. By then Mum wanted the boys out of the way so she would have our tea ready by quarter past five. By five thirty we would be finished and ready to ‘ask if we could get down from the table and put the television on’. It would be close some nights. To miss the start of Hop-along Cassidy, The Cisco Kid, The Lone Ranger, Ivanhoe…with Roger Moore…or Robin Hood at five thirty was not easy to take.

Another Children’s Television Programme was Mick and Montmorency with a Tommy Cooper-style giant of a man and the vertically-challenged Charlie Drake whose catchphrase was ‘Hello my Darlings!’ He went on to have his own Comedy Show before being pushed off the screen by Tony Hancock, Harry Worth…with Nicholas Parsons…and The Army Game in the 1960s. One particular Charlie Drake sketch that had the whole family in stitches was The Triangle Player. I was reminded of the sketch at rehearsals for The Pirates of Penzance in Winchelsea Hall yesterday.

The rest of the cast have had all summer to learn their parts but this was my first proper run through as Samuel, the Pirate King’s Lieutenant. Apart from re-learning the chorus parts I sang with Ryesingers in February 2004 there are two short solo verses and some dialogue in the opening scene, a short solo piece at the end of the first act and several quartets and sextets.

I did an hour with Elspeth at her piano last Thursday so was up to speed with note-bashing. But my biggest worry was the scattering of one-liners like ‘We’d better pause, or danger may befall; Their father is a Major General.’ where I am the cheer leader who brings everybody in. Miss my cue, come in on the wrong note or at the wrong speed and chaos rather than mere danger will befall. So now I know how it feels to be a Triangle Player.