We miss Tony Lewis. We miss the eyebrows of Tony Lewis. The sprightly, probing, Robin Day-like, ‘If I may say so’ eyebrows of Tony Lewis. Of Tony Lewis, we miss the asides and the wryness. We miss Tony’s slow, drawn exhalations when a thick edge runs down to third-man, “…and it always goes for fourrrrr…” We miss the owlishness. The blazer. The glint, the shoulder lean, the rectitude. The resemblance to the bloke out of the Addams Family. We miss him, and his tribe, and all that they stood for.

We miss the sublime, pre-Lewis emptiness of the sportless, Kilroy-occupied TV vacuum before 10:50am with no recourse to 24-hour clip cycles. We miss going to the news at the top of the hour, and wondering what arrows have been slung in the interregnum, and returning to the action, and nothing having changed. We miss Jim Laker saying ‘superlative’ like he’s bent-double over the counter at Boots spluttering into his sleeve.

We miss having it on in the background at our gran’s. We miss sudden unifying moments, non-fans turning face, bandwagons jumped, national conversations. We miss an alien from another planet saying ‘Morning, everyone’ and sensing that ‘everyone’ meant exactly that. That’s what we miss. And we miss getting it for free.