Who do you think you're kidding, all you cynics?

It might be a matter of perception, but the new Dad’s Army film seems to be dividing viewers and reviewers along far deeper lines than most film releases.

For many of us over a certain age, Jimmy Perry and David Croft’s series was a highlight of the 1970s TV schedules and deservedly retains the status of national treasure.

Reruns have ensured that it has never dropped out of the public consciousness and continues to gain a new audience, and it has consistently been voted as one of the best examples of British TV and, specifically, sitcoms.

For me, there’s the added little point that my paternal grandfather was seriously myopic (thanks, Grandpop) and thus did his WWII service in the Cornish Home Guard. Decades later, he’d chuckle at the series and note that it was very true to life.

When the film was first announced, I suffered a fit of apoplexy. How could they? The original is sacrosanct and should not be tampered with.

Then I saw the casting. Goodness, the casting of this film is genius. And I started wanting it to be okay.

There were other worries, though. I originally heard that the script was to be written by those responsible for the St Trinian’s reboot, but it turned out to be by Hamish McColl, who previously penned 2014’s utterly delightful Paddington.

After seeing the trailers, I decided to make it another cinema visit and, by coincidence as much as anything, The Other Half and I saw it on the opening day, last week.

There will be no spoilers here, but suffice it to say that the film sags in the second half.

Parade time in Walmington-on-Sea (Bridlington)

However, the idea that it’s rubbish is difficult to grasp. The script is more than mere pastiche. There are innuendos and physical comedy, certainly – both of which existed in the original series and are staples of British comedy – but also layers of far subtler stuff.

It has the thread of class running through it, as did the original series – a subject that is every bit as relevant today.

The catchphrases are used with care. Charlie Mole’s score is clever, with all sorts of subtle references within it both to the original theme and assorted songs from WWII (and even, I thought, James Bond).

The cast is wonderful and don’t make the mistake of trying to impersonate the actors who made their characters famous. Particular mentions will go here to Toby Jones, who is wonderful as Mainwaring, Bill Nighy as Wilson and Michael ‘The Great’ Gambon as Godfrey.

It was also delightful to see the two remaining original cast members appear, including Frank Williams reprising his role as the vicar.

The women in the film are not, as one or two have alleged, shoehorned in in the interests of some sort of political correctness, but are worthy characters in their own right – and for goodness sake, it was hardly as if WWII excluded women.

In a role that could, given the original series, have been awkward, Felicity Montagu makes an admirable Mrs Mainwaring.

I had a worry, about half way through the film, that many of the core characters were making fools of themselves, and that what I couldn’t cope with was it being left in that way.

The denouement, though, is surprisingly tense and solves this question in fine fashion.

This is not, of course, the first Dad’s Army film, but 1971’s effort was not good, suffering from the inability to transfer a small-screen series to the big screen (and the same can be said of other British sit coms).

This is far better.

Mrs Mainwaring leads the women

Nor was I alone in my enjoyment: before the film started, The Other Half whispered that, at just gone 56, he didn’t expect to be one of the youngest members of any audience.

There was a ripple of applause during the film at one catchphrase and another at the end.

I shall assume that these were not, in some way, sarcastic.

Of course, it offers the chance to consider the issue of ‘ownage’ of characters and, indeed, dramatic works.

What this film of Dad’s Army illustrated for me was the quality of the original writing and creation of character. In recent years, I’ve been appalled on occasion when certain remakes have been announced.

But great stories and great characters can have a life of their own: would anyone suggest that there should never have been any film adaptations of Sherlock Holmes after, say, those with Basil Rathbone? Were that the case, we’d never have enjoyed Jeremy Brett. And if it had stopped there, we’d not have Benedict Cumberbatch.

What, in this case, does such a reboot give us?

Well, I think it’s a nice reminder of people who, however daft they could be in certain circumstances, they also did the right thing when the chips were down.

It’s a please, in such cynical times, to see something that is essentially uncynical.

I left the cinema with a broad smile on my face. And while it most certainly not the best film ever made, I cared about the characters once more and certainly wouldn’t object to watching it again. 

A reminder of just how good television can be

Certainly not brutal on the mind

Television used to be at the heart of home life: the large box on legs in the corner of the living room around which the family grouped after homework and the evening meal.

That was in the good old days, when there were just three terrestrial channels and, in our household at least, ITV was almost beyond the pale, except for Saturday afternoon wrestling and when my father wanted to get sentimental over This Is Your Life.

Childhood memories are seasoned with TV programmes and their theme tunes. Strangely enough for such a Europhobic home, foreign-language programmes left abiding memories of childhood: Belle and Sebastian, Robinson Crusoe (the never-ending, black and white French version, with the beautifully evocative and short opening), The Flashing Blade and White Horses.

And then, of course, there was Blue Peter – you can measure your age by the earliest presenters you can remember – Vision On, and Animal Magic (I blame Johnny Morris for a propensity to voice my cats).

There were also the cartoons – the first programme I saw in colour was Top Cat, to be astonished that his waistcoat was purple and his fur yellow.

Later, there were all the cop shows from the States.

Catching some recent repeats of Kojak has reminded me how good this was was. But I loved Harry O too (already a world-weary cynic) and, of course, since I am of a generation, Starsky and Hutch. Later still, there was Cagney and Lacey, which beat the homegrown Juliet Bravo into a cocked hat and which my mother also loved but my father detested.

Some years ago, when she was playing Annie Wilkes in a stage version of Stephen King’s Misery, I got the chance to meet Sharon Gless and, among other things in a wonderful conversation, thank her for what Cagney and Lacey meant to me and, I’m sure, many other young women.

Somehow one never felt quite the same attachment to the likes of Dixon of Dock Green, Softly Softly and Z Cars, although I remember them all. But there was always a sense that they had more to my parents’ generation and rather less mine.

Oh indeedy: the US crime shows of the ’70s and  early ’80s rocked: who loves ya, baby?

That’s not to say that there were not plenty of British dramas that also form part of that patchwork of televisual memories that seem to possess such a powerful sense of time and place.

All Creatures Great and Small, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Maybury, those BBC Shakespeares, I, Claudius: later, there were joys to discover in the utterly superb Singing Detective, and the likes of Boys from the Blackstuff …

Theo Kojak: grittier and 100% sexier than Dixon

Comedy too: Morecambe and Wise of course, Porridge and Dad’s Army: my paternal grandfather served in the Home Guard (I get my myopia from him) and would chuckle merrily at Jimmy Perry and David Croft’s timeless comedy, observing that it was incredibly accurate.

One could be forgiven for assuming that the vast increase in available channels would have meant even more good telly, but the opposite seems to have been the case.

The drive for viewing figures means TV executives and programme makers playing inevitably to the lowest common denominator.

Thus Big Brother, in proving such a ratings hit – and one that could also generate money by persuading viewers to invest their hard-earned in phone votes – has spawned countless further ‘reality’ TV where the only reality is a lack of quality and similar money-making ruses.

And each passing year demands, of such series, further sensation to fill the pages of a media that is increasingly voracious in its need for the sort of page-filling non-news that has increasingly eased out the inconvenient real news.

In a televisual sense at least, there are, of course, exceptions.

In the US there has been, in recent years, a real blossoming of TV drama – not exclusively but not least at HBO.

Deadwood, The Sopranos, The West Wing, Broadwalk Empire and so forth. I’d go so far as to suggest that certainly the extensive use of multi-season story arcs was kicked off by Babylon 5 (1993-98), which had moments of hitting quite classically dramatic heights and has had an influence that has gone well beyond any genre and beyond what people might like to suppose.

It's worth watching in its own right too – right from the beginning, at least until the end of season four.

In terms of home-grown TV entertainment, there are occasional bright spots: it might not please the purists, but the reincarnated Dr Who continues to look good as entertainment that doesn't actually insult the mind – not least when compared with the rest of the schedules – while Sherlock has been an absolute delight and, on the comedy front, The Thick of It is utter genius and at least all those retro channels allow us frequent repeats of Blackadder, which, the more we move from  on from the time of creation, the more we realise just how good it was.

But it’s rare for me at least to get excited about something on the box in the corner – a box that is no longer a box but a flat panel.

However, just as you might imagine that this post is going to be all negative, we come to the unexpected – because television excitement is precisely what I have felt over the last eight days and, with catch-up TV, it’s worth mentioning because, if you missed it, you can still catch up.

Well hello, Officer Dibble

Stuck away in the BBC’s ghetto for the sort of ‘serious’ programming that used to occupy BBC2 until it was hived off into the digital realm of BBC Knowledge, and which subsequently became BBC4, there is a season of programmes on architecture.

Which is worth mentioning in its own right.

But part of this has been, in two parts, another television essay by Jonathan Meades: this time, on Bonkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry.

There is style here, but no shortage of substance. Indeed, you may well find yourself wanting to rewatch these programmes, so thick and fast fly the ideas and the information.

You don’t have to agree with Meades all the time to appreciate him – not least, to appreciate that he neither talks down to anyone nor dumbs down his arguments.

You may find yourself looking up a word or two in the dictionary or even Googling the name of an architect that you haven’t heard of before – I certainly do – but how much better is that than the mind-numbing inanity of Britain’s Got Whatever?

These are not documentaries, mind, and so rarely do we get anything like this to watch that you have to remind yourself of that rather obvious point.

They are, however, hugely intelligent, provocative (in the best sense of the word) and the sort of events that wake the little grey cells and makes them dance the fandango from sheer excitement.

There are reasons I watch so little television these days – it no longer forms a centrepiece of my home life. But when it’s as good as this mini Meades series, it makes you long for more.

Catch-up TV can let you see it – even if you missed it.

And as for whether he's right or not about brutalism ... well, that’s the stuff for another post, not least because, in terms of the quality of the programme, it really doesn’t matter.

How grown up is that?

A pie from the past

The week just ending has, apparently, been British Pie Week. It’s difficult to know just who declares such things – whereas it’s also been National Butcher’s Week, but that’s rather clearly industry-related.

The only proper-looking website for pie week revealed that it was all the idea of Jus-rol pastry, which is one of the brands owned by General Mills, itself one of the world’s largest food companies, so on that basis, I decided against making much of it.

But then something else happened.

Some time ago, out of curiosity and a certain sentiment, I bought a copy of Recipes of Lakeland, which was complied by readers of Cumbria and published in 1966.

It’s an intriguing record in its own right, illustrated with idealised black and white photographs from the area.

It’s very easy to view Lakeland through the haze of Wordsworthian daffodils and chocolate boxes, as an eternally picturesque part of the country.

But it’s also a hard place – the fells are not the easiest farming country and the eastern fells of the Eden Valley perhaps even less so. For instance, it doesn’t get much bleaker than Shap Fell – yet my parents knew people who farmed even up there.

Browsing that booklet again a few days ago in a mood of nostalgia, I had been looking at the vast array of biscuits and breads and cakes when I spotted something called a Westmorland farmhouse pie, and the germ of an idea took root.

The recipe itself is scant in detail. Diced mutton, beef and bacon are layered in an earthenware pot on top of sliced potatoes and followed by layers of onion and carrot in between. It’s finished with a further layer of potato.

The ratio of potato to meat is approximately two to one, but it's not really the sort of dish where you need to worry about measuring things.

Water is added to cover, the lid is popped on and it goes into a slow oven for two and a quarter hours. Then a pastry top is added and it has another 45 minutes.

A pretty picture and plenty of puddings.

Voila.

The recipe doesn’t say what sort of pastry.

I don’t remember eating anything like this when we were staying on farms in later years – I have abiding memories of all the family where we stayed, plus us, sitting around the vast, old table in the dining room next to the kitchen; a room with a sort of ancient, dark wood dresser built into one entire wall, full of small, square cupboards.

And I remember having tea with cold meats and Cadbury’s miniature chocolate rolls, and I remember hams.

Nothing like the farmhouse pie features in those memories, but I had a hunch that this was a dish for the end of winter, when supplies were running thin. And a little research supported this – not with any mention of the dish itself, but noting that those meats would have been dried to preserve them through the harsh fell winter.

The right pot for the job.

There were always going to be limits to just how authentique it could be – not least because I wasn’t going to be using leftover mean that had been preserved for the winter.

Question one was the dish: I have an earthenware one – but it’s rather deep to make this for just two people and be able to put a pastry lid on.

The best option seemed to be one of my enamel pie dishes, which would then tightly ‘lidded’ with foil for the first stage of cooking.

And finally – what pastry?

The obvious would be shortcrust, but I did consider trying my hand at puff pastry before settling for a really flaky short made with lard.

It’s a dish that reminds me of Lancashire hot pot, with its layers of meat and vegetables, topped off with potato.

On Broadway Market early this morning, before many stallholders had even got their produce ready, I was delighted to find that Matthew had a little mutton – already diced: we were on.

In the end, with the amounts I had (approximately 400g beef and 200g mutton, plus two rashers of unsmoked back bacon), I plumped for that earthenware, half-glazed pot – a lovely worn, old one, made in France originally and a house-warming present from the days before I was really interested in cooking.

First layer of potato with some of the meats and thyme.

It has, in the years since, been used for more than one Lancashire hot pot, and although it made the pastry lid a tad awkward – that had to be fitted inside the pot – it was the best choice from a practical point of view because of diameter and depth, while it even leant aesthetics to the business, its very sense of age seeming perfect for this culinary dip into the past.

So, the base was lined with a sliced potato, followed by a layer of mixed, diced meats, then onion, carrot and celery (another slight change) and more meats, before the final potato.

Seasoning was salt, plenty of ground black pepper and dried thyme, added as the dish was built up.

Water was added – but not to cover, only up about three quarters of the way; also reminiscent of how I've learnt to cook a hot pot.

The oven was heated to 140˚C (fan) and the lidded pot placed inside.

It got two and a half hours to start before I added a shortcrust top – 150g plain flour mixed with 75g lard, a pinch of salt and cold water to bring it together.

The temperature of the oven was raised to 180˚C (fan) for a final half an hour with the pastry but no lid.

It could have done with more salt – I’d been particularly cautious about that, given the bacon – but let's face it, it's easier to add salt than take away.

Otherwise it was a success, with enough to feed two of us twice – it'll be reheated tomorrow for lunch, with a fresh pastry top made from the remaining dough.

This is the sort of food that wins brownie points just for the glorious smells that gently fill the house as its cooking; the sort of smell that makes a house a home.

And if the combination of meats and vegetables seems a little clichéd, that’s because it works well.

This was hearty food – and is very much a dish that, having been discovered, will be made again.

A taste of the '70s

It’s one way of measuring age to say that you can tell you’re getting older when things you remember from your youth become fashionable again; when what was nostalgic turns up once more, but repackaged this time as retro chic.

The weather is not the only source of deluges of late – inspired no doubt by the Diamond Jubilee, we've been swamped too with nostalgia for all things ’70s, when the last big Jubilee bash occurred.

That was a decade in which scampi was posh food. I remember day trips to Blackpool, my father desperate to go to the famous circus; my mother less so.

We did go, at least twice; in the halcyon days of the great Charlie Cairoli. I remember with enormous pleasure the mix of innocence and anarchy of his troupe of clowns (catch an example).

Stopping at souvenir shops on the promenade, my father bought my sister a Bolton Wanderers pendant and me a Manchester City one: the roundel badge in enamel on stainless steel. Very much of its time.

And we visited a restaurant where scampi came in a basket and I felt so sophisticated eating such a swanky meal.

It was the decade too of chicken Kiev: the sort of dish that you'd never have at home, and which I only remember as some sort of mythical, exotic concoction.

The Other Half used to quite enjoy a Kiev: the sort that came out of the chiller cabinet in the supermarket and was cooked on a tray in the oven. Neither of us had experienced the real deal.

And so, in this mood of nostalgia and retro chic, it occurred to me last week that it would inserting to actually make some. Within a day or two at the most, the Guardian, having clearly anticipated my mood, published a column by Felicity Cloake, testing out five recipes to find which was best Kiev.

Frankly, I was surprised at just how easy it looked. And so on Sunday, between the football, I set about the business. It's something that is made in stages, so you need to some hours beforehand.

First, make your butter. Cloake used a variety of flavourings: I settled on straightforward crushed garlic, with some chopped parsley from the garden. Once it's blended into the butter, simply roll in cling film until you've got a lengthy sausage shape, then wrap tightly and pop back into the fridge.

A hour or so later, take your chicken breasts, place them between cling film and beat out carefully. You could cut pockets. You could used the piece of meat that comes attached to the main breast flesh. Or you could do as I did and simply wrap half of the chilled utter 'sausage' in each breast, tucking in the ends. The cling film helps enormously. Get your meat nice and neat and tightly wrapped – and then pop it into the freezer for two hours.

So, what next?

Well, after about two hours, beat a couple of eggs. Make a load of breadcrumbs. Season some plain flour.

Take out your rolled chicken. Unwrap. Roll first in the flour and the in the eggs and then in the breadcrumbs. Repeat the eggs and breadcrumb bit, making sure you've got even, all-over coverage.

Pop on a plate and pop into the fridge. And this is the key that Cloake had found works best. By letting it get close to frozen, the breading is made easy. And then you simply allow it that final hour to thaw before cooking.

When you're ready, heat a large pan of oil to 160˚C – a thermometer makes this so much easier than guessing and doing the bread cube test – put the Kievs carefully into the pan and cook for eight and a half minutes.

If you have more than your pan will hold, you can put each cooked batch into a pre-heated (to 150˚C) oven while you do the rest.

And voila! You have chicken Kiev.

I let the oil get hotter than I should have (impatience) and the breadcrumb crust became very brown. But they were perfectly edible; the meat had remained decently moist - and the biggest achievement of all was that none of the butter leaked out.

I was going to serve them with a salad of orange and pickled beetroot, but since The Other Half had bitten his tongue rather nastily while listening to the radio commentary of a particularly tense Castleford Tigers match, he asked for something less sharp.

So they were served with new potatoes and asparagus, with further butter - hardly a hardship.

It wasn't to be the end of the retro food, though. Or, for that matter, the beginning.

Over the Jubilee weekend, I'd tried my hand at trifle for only the second time. Boudoir biscuits crushed at the base and mixed with raspberries, good raspberry jam and a smidgen of Banyuls that had been languishing in the fridge, were topped with raspberry jelly - The Other Half insists that jelly is essential to trifle.

Later, came homemade custard, topped eventually with whipped cream, more raspberries, grated chocolate and a few sprigs of mint. It didn’t have a very firm set, but it tasted fine.

And so to this Tuesday and a visit to my parents. They have decided, in the last year or so, that instead of my mother spending hours in the kitchen to rustle up something, they'll take me out for a meal. It means less hassle for her, and also ensures that we actually spend time as a trio together.

This time, it was to a country pub a few miles away: the Grumpy Mole at the Inn on the Green. And jolly pleasant it was too. I don't exactly get to such places very often - you really do need a car.

Unrushed, with very pleasant service, the menu was the epitome of nostalgia, with fish and chips, steak and kidney pud, liver and bacon, and various pies, together with a few nods to more ‘modern’ tastes – or put another way, curry.

I started with a very pleasant chef's pate, followed by another retro classic. Yes, you guessed it – scampi.

The peas were the frozen variety, as were the chips. But at least the scampi wasn't any of the reformed nonsense that I've had whenever I've ordered it in assorted hotel restaurants on my travels around the UK in recent years. The tartare sauce hit the spot exactly.

It’s not posh; it’s not sophisticated. But there is a place for such dishes. And it’s still a darned sight better than most of the rubbish served up as ‘fast food’ these days.

At home later, with the mood still over me, I downloaded some music from the decade too. Punk.

Unsurprisingly, given the prominence of the Sex Pistols et al at the time of Her Maj’s celebrations in 1977, there has been a swathe of programmes about that counter culture too.

I didn’t ‘do’ punk at the time. Oh, I have vague memories of it, but while the memories are vague, they’re invariably negative. I had just started my O’level music course - with no parental encouragement, I hasten to add - and was infinitely more interested in Beethoven than the Buzzcocks.

I was also a million miles from being a rebel – although to be fair, I was finding my own little ways to do just that: studying music and proclaiming a future trading the boards were my rebellion, and they took plenty of energy to maintain in the face of much objection.

Standing on a stage, even doing Shakespeare, was my punk. It was my freedom. Punk sailed over my head.

But listening to some of it now I can hear the music - and the poetry. Ian Dury and the Blockheads are a prime example of the latter.

Watching a TOTP2 special, The Other Half was voicing disappointment that so many of the artists had ‘sold out’ – or to put it more clearly, are reforming to ride the wave of the nostalgia boom.

I still have never ‘got’ the idea that people really expected musicians to somehow stay outside of so many of the norms of our time.

John Lydon advertising butter makes me laugh - not beat my head in despair.

It is, it seems to me, as inherently foolishly idealistic as those people who condemn football players for moving clubs when higher wages are on offer – and more chance of winning things, but let's forget 'career profession' for the sake of this argument.

They voice regret that ‘loyalty’ no longer exists. But in a world where staying in the same job, with the same employer, for all your working life is now derided, why do they expect anything different from footballers?

It seems as though we put vast faith in others to buck the system on our behalf.

Perhaps it’s retro and perhaps it’s not, but maybe there’s a moral in that little observation?

Serge Danot lied to me

I was an innocent child. There I was in my formative years – open to the power of suggestion.

And as I sat in front of the television, transfixed by the jolliness of The Magic Roundabout, I was being fed a whopping big lie.

Dogs might be daft and fun; children might be nice; rabbits might be a bit dopey but are generally fluffy and cute, and cows might be gentle.

But snails are NOT sweet and lovable. No matter how Danot – and later Eric Thompson – pretended otherwise.

They are good for only two things: as bird food, and being skewered out of their shells once cooked, and eaten, drenched in melted butter, garlic and parsley.

Okay, three things: take the shells of dead ones and crush them into soil to add calcium.

Last weekend, I replaced four pots of flowers that had been wrecked by an unholy alliance of apocalyptic weather and snails.

The British are perversely squeamish about the idea of eating snails. It is plain daft, given the traditional British predilection for whelks and winkles and cockles, but we baulk at the idea of eating Brian Snail.

That’s something the French do – along with frogs’ legs and horse. And that’s what makes us different from ‘them’.

Perhaps that was the point of the lie that Danot foisted on us?

Personally, I don’t mind eating them occasionally – and oh, I long for the chance to one day try that Catalan speciality, a cargolade: a vast banquet of barbequed snails, eaten communally at Easter and Pentecost.

But in any other sense, snails are now my sworn enemy. Indeed, that's another of Danot's deceits: how could gardener Mr McHenry have done anything but chase Brian the Snail until he'd got rid of him?

Never mind the flowers: this morning, I popped out into the garden to give a little extra water to my thirstiest plants – and found that my entire (small) crop of baby salad leaves had disappeared overnight.

Gone. The lot. As if they have never been there.

Closer inspection revealed a snail, attached to the inside of the planter, looking fat and content.

It went over the garden fence in an elegant arc, landing on the concrete of the carpark with a pleasing crack, where it will serve as a tasty snack for one of the local birds.

Seeking a quick resolution to this particular aspect of the urban garden warfare I have now become embroiled in, I asked for advice in a couple of the gardening shops on Columbia Road last week.

Given the combination of the cats and growing things for my own consumption, I don’t want to be looking at solutions that could make any possible negative impact on either of these.

The suggested answer was death by drowning in beer.

Take a pot; fill with beer (or full-fat cola); pop it near your plants and wait.

None of my local shops had the relevant pots – proper ones have lids on – so I ordered online. They have just arrived and are sitting on my desk, ready for action later.

The snails will slime their way up the side of the little pots and, in their greed, squeeze under the lids and then plop into sweet, sticky, yeasty cheap beer to die.

While waiting for the order, I improvised with a couple of shallow bowls I had. I found no drowned gastropods, but until this morning at least, I had found no more damaged plants or snails themselves either.

We shall soon find out what these little ‘snail inns’ achieve.

And in the meantime – ‘Boing’, said Zebedee.

Ten little chives

Chives are the smallest members of the edible onion family. Allium schoenoprasum is a perennial that is native to Europe, Asia and North America – and while it’s the baby of the allium family, it’s the only one that is native to both New and Old worlds.

And here’s a bit more edumacation. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes the internet fascinating – and when Wikipedia comes into its own.

What most of us would describe as the stem of a chive is technically called the scape.

A botanical term, it refers to a long internode that forms the basal part or the whole of a penduncle.

Phew!

Other plants with a cape include the Taraxacum. Or the dandelion, as it is far more familiarly known. Actually, I quite like Taraxacum.

How good would it sound to sit outside on a summer's day, sipping a glass of Taraxacum and Arctium lappa?

That’s probably enough of that. Let’s stick with stem, shall we?

In France, chives are one of the fines herbes, which also include tarragon, chervil and/or parsley.

For some of us, of a certain age, The Herbs was also a short-lived (13 episodes) animated children’s series from the late 1960s, which was set in an herb garden and starred the likes of Parsley the lion, Dill the dog and Sage the owl. A spin-off series, centred on Parsley, was later produced.

Written by Michael ‘Paddington Bear’ Bond, there were also chives – 10 of them, and “because there are so many chives, all looking like each other; it makes it even hard to tell, a sister from a brother.”

Their parents were Mr and Mrs Onion and the former was their teacher, in a sort of ex-sergeant major sort of way. The missus was always crying. Well, as an onion you probably would.

My sister, who is younger, was the one who watched. Personally, I’d moved on to stronger stuff by then. Like Blue Peter. And Top Cat.

The green stems, though, are every bit as boring as the indistinguishable animated characters (with no character).

Herb and cartoon alike, they are bland.

Just look at the picture above – could they even look more uninspiring?

Well, that was my thinking. When do you use chives? Well, perhaps occasionally as a garnish for, say, a bowl of leek and potato soup. Because it looks pretty.

But you don’t do such things regularly because, frankly, you can’t ever buy just 10 chives and are never going to use the entire, big bag, which has also cost you the best part of a quid.

So while chives don’t impress me much, they had always been on my list of herbs to plant when I got around to sorting out the garden.

The first time I used any was in a herb omelette at Easter. The chives didn’t particularly stand out, but then they were with several other herbs.

And then, a couple of weeks ago, as I was preparing a simple dinner of white fish, new spuds and some seasonal veg or other, an idea popped into the space between my ears.

Why not try some chive butter?

It had a bit going for it, this idea. It wasn’t difficult to see that it would work with every ingredient I was going to put on the plate.

So I popped into the garden, snipped half a dozen of the stems, and then snipped them into butter that I lad left out to reach a malleable state.

Once that’s done, it’s simply a matter of rolling it up in a little foil and popping it back in the fridge to firm up.

The result was amazing. Light years from bland, this was a serious taste – and it was the perfect accompaniment for such a gentle meal.

This is the benefit of having fresh herbs, harvested when you want them. And it saves money and gives variety.

Since then, I’ve tried parsley and lemon butter, and mint butter.

The former was good – the latter less interesting than I expected. The chive butter has been done twice more already.

Chives produce pretty purple flowers but, like most herbs, you need to get rid of the flower as soon as it appears if you want to benefit from those stems.

Frankly, after this revelation, I can’t see any chive in that pot getting to the point of producing a flower.