After three days on the trot of getting up at 7am to help in the B&B you'd think I'd have been glad to get to bed early when I got home but I couldn't tear myself away from the telly before midnight.

That's when the wonderful rerun of the 1966 election results programme which had occupied the BBC Parliament channel since 8 in the morning ended.  I saw only the last four or five hours; those  that were originally broadcast on the afternoon of the day following the election.

It was a feast for the memory.  All the journalists and presenters who were household names at the time were there.  The studio was under the control of Cliff Michelmore.  Bob McKenzie and David Butler presented the numbers and analysed the swings.  Iain Trethowan gave political commentary.  Robin Day interrogated Grimond and Heath (Wilson kept himself aloof which rather surprised me).  Smooth James Mossman gathered comments from a bar in the square mile. Fyfe Robertson stumbled along the production line at Fords in Dagenham drawing out nuggets of opinion from the workers. Trios from various interest groups were marshalled by Kenneth Allsop to give their take on the result.  He also handled George Woodcock from the TUC who delivered vigorous opinions.  We heard from the likes of Esmond Wright for the Scottish results, Michael Barratt in the Midlands and so on.

They took us out to various live counts, to Downing Street (no security gates and the press milling around onto the very steps of the house) to see Wilson arrive back at number 10 with his majority increased from less than a handful to nearly a hundred, to Heath's losing press conference.  He was in great form, relaxed, cheerful, humorous, positive.  Having got used to his sourpuss image after being supplanted by Thatcher it was a delight to see this earlier incarnation.

Leaving aside the fact that I was watching a squarish black and white video recording sitting slightly unsteadily in the middle of my wide screen it was interesting to see how far from our present flashy computer graphics we were fifty years ago.

Individual results appeared on caption cards reminiscent of silent film dialogue frames but less professionally created.  Apart from a couple of block graphs the principal information presentation form was rather like an oldfashioned cricket scoreboard.  The most high tech item was the swingometer, lovingly tended by Bob McKenzie and whose development in later years was even more lovingly supervised by Peter Snow.

The most striking difference, noted by my inner feminist, was the absence of women.  None of the presenters, pundits or interviewees were women.  Not a total absence though, illustrated in a slightly surreal sequence in which two presenters held a discussion. Between them sat a woman who stared fixedly ahead hands resting motionless on the desk while remarks passed over her head like tennis balls over a net.  One of many female gofors I suppose.

Did that strike me as odd or unfair at the time I wonder?  I don't suppose so.  We did after all have some women fronting serious TV programmes, such as Mary Marquis and Joan Bakewell.  The vanguard of the many who have followed.