Fat end of the wedge

Not a lot of people know this, but I hold the unofficial world record for the greatest number of unanswered letters ever sent to an editor of The Guinness Book of Records.

It's true. I posted more than 200 of them in the early 1980s, each starting with the words "Dear Mr McWhirter, please forgive the formality but I can never remember whether it was you or your brother Norris who was shot dead by the IRA", which in retrospect probably explains why I never got a reply.

That's a pity, because my letters went on to ask if I could be invited onto Record Breakers to demonstrate how I'd trained my pet sheep to swim underwater (with the aid of an oxygen mask), and to dive into the pudenda of a whale during its "time of the month", thus transforming my humble Herdwick into the world's largest organic tampon.

But Norris (or Ross) didn't answer, and now he never will, having recently been taken from us by the Grim Reaper. If only he'd remembered the wise words of the show's presenter, Roy Castle: " Medication, that's what you need."

The generation that grew up watching such shows has since come to man's estate, and some of them now work in television, commissioning and producing programmes that remind them of their own childhoods.

That's certainly true of the team who dreamed up Globo Loco, a deranged and enjoyably silly kids' series that has more than a whiff of Record Breakers about it.

But this bizarre-challenges-against-the-clock show is no mere copy, it's a cleverly-constructed hybrid that also contains the DNA of Runaround and Tiswas, and even a trace of the boys-and-girls competitions that used to run through dear old Crackerjack.

That show, if memory serves me right, always played to a studio audience full of Girl Guides and the sort of effeminate boys who would suck red Smarties until damp before applying them as lipstick, unlike we rougher tougher boys who used to chew wine gums and suck cider ice lollies, then stagger around the park pretending to be drunk.

The resonances with children's programmes of an earlier vintage weren't detectable only in the format of yesterday afternoon's edition, but in the choice of presenters too.

"Dad" (Peter Cocks) is a mouthy bling-dripping caricature of Mike Reid, taking boxed-up electrical goods from the back of his white van to offer as prizes (" luvverley!"), while his colleague Stephen Mulhern is a dead ringer for Phillip Schofield during his youthful mid-Eighties "broom cupboard" heyday.

In keeping with the title, the opening is a mad pastiche of Hispanic television at its gloriously glamorous worst (bikini-clad dancing girls, sitar-playing furry dinosaur, roller-skating nurse, and much more), and the relentlessly frantic pacing of the programme guarantees the instant gratification that our fast-food culture nowadays requires.