THAT’S WHAT BILL COTTON wanted to call it, and who are we to disagree? Format pickled in time: automatic chair, square tin medallions, Mr Cigar, “guys and gals”, letters on corkboards, kids on beanbags, Mr British Airways, “what we have ‘ere”, extra special surprise, celebrity guest, “this very brave/beautiful young man/lady”, everyone waving at the end, “Now you’ve done it”, etc. Watched by everyone, and if you didn’t write in or dream of writing in you’re lying. Doesn’t hold up at all well nowadays, appearing tired, wrinkled, hugely contrived and plain dull.

But enough about the host: what about the Fixes? In no particular order: scouts eating packed lunches on a rollercoaster; kid playing for Liverpool FC replete with Match of the Day graphics and John Motson commentary; kid whose Gran had made him a Dr Who costume and got to appear in specially written mini-story In A Fix With The Sontarans; kid playing drums with Adam and the Ants and ending up with a drum kit of his very own; kid getting to “drive” the Lotus from The Spy Who Loved Me (stunt driver hiding under his feet); kid getting to wrestle in a Tag Match with Big Daddy (because, as he explained in his Nice Letter, “Big Daddy never loses”), Giant Haystacks and AN Other, with Big Daddy still winning because it was the 1970s and that’s what always happened.

Plus the blind lady who sent Jim a piece of music composed by herself which was subsequently arranged by Bob Sharples and conducted by Ted Heath; people who always wanted to stand on the wing of an aeroplane; kid who wanted to make his own computer game, resulting in an isometric affair involving going round a supermarket with a shopping trolley (it was in the Virgin 1.99 range – bearded photo-opportunity ahoy!); that kid who wanted to be in TERRY AND JUNE and got a scene aboard a cross-channel ferry wherein T Medford, for some reason or other, had a ripe Camembert in his coat pocket – cue Fix-It girl walking past on deck: “Pew! What a smell!” Tezza: “I think it’s the age.” F-IG: “Well, I don’t want to get old, then!”.

Not forgetting the kid who actually got her own record released, to wit ‘I’m A Girl’ by Stephanie Davies, which unsurprisingly failed to chart; kid who transformed her back garden into a show-jumping course, at which point Harvey Smith, David Broorne and Caroline Bradley showed up pretending to take part minus horses; kid who wanted to read the football results, which they wouldn’t let him do on GRANDSTAND obviously, so Len Martin came into the studio to coach the sprog who was then positioned in a miniature version of one of those cardboard results boards they used to use and the whole thing beefed up with getting him to guess the missing score from Len’s tone of voice, as in “Leeds nil, Brighton and Hove Albion (measured tone)…” which would be nil, of course, except the kid fucked up the one involving his own team, which was supposed to have won 2,645 – nil, or something.

Finally, perhaps the most outrageous moment in the show’s history: the kid who wanted a new bedroom. If you recall, some design/furniture firm provided him with thousands of pounds worth of stuff – TRS-80 computer, telly, bed with ladders going up to it (oh no, hang on, that’s just a bunk bed), and remote-control curtains. For the grand handover, the comp drew the Jim’ll Fix It logo on the screen. What made kids utterly sick was the boy’s casual acceptance of everything, particularly the computer, which would have cost a fortune on its own.