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IT’S GREAT service you get, renting your colour set, from Granada. Television advertising jingles from the 1970s keep popping into my head. Tell me I’m not alone.

That one comes from an era when, instead of buying a TV, we all paid a monthly fee to Granada, or Rediffusion, or Radio Rentals, and used one of theirs instead.

If we were feeling really flush, we could also rent one of the new video cassette recorders which, if you could press down the two giant levers simultaneously, promised to capture television programmes on to tape so that we could keep them to watch for evermore.

Some top-of-the-range televisions even came – at premium prices – with remote control devices which allowed us to change channels without walking over to the other side of the room.

I dwelled on that for a moment, but the obscure TV advertising jingles wouldn’t leave me alone.

At the weekend I picked up a brush and slapped paste on paper so that Mrs H could hang it on the wall. I know my place. I am hopeless at the fine tuning, the hanging, the lining up of seams and the meticulous cutting around odd shapes.

Mrs H is very good at it, so I slap on the paste, offer up and do the general labouring while she does the clever stuff. That’s how things get done around here.

But I found myself humming the old Granada advert, and it only left my head when it was replaced by an old jingle for oven chips. To the tune of Que Sera Sera, a Transit van full of homeward-bound brickies dreamed of the dinner that would be awaiting them when they got home. With a wistful, faraway look in their eyes they sang: “Will it be chips or jacket spuds, will it be salad or frozen peas? Will it be mushrooms? Fried onion rings? We’ll have to wait and see.

“Hope it’s chips, it’s chips. We hope it’s chips, it’s chips...”

I remember it as if I last heard it this morning. I sang it lustily. The dog left the room. How Mrs H didn’t smother me in slimy wallpaper I don’t know.

This old adverts thing seems to be happening to me more and more. In the supermarket aisle the other day I hummed ‘Don’t be mean with the beans mum, Beans Means Heinz’ loudly enough to startle nearby shoppers.

Horticultural Steve and I spent much of this year’s Paignton Regatta week quoting long-forgotten television commercials at each other. We earned a stern rebuke when we used our walkie-talkies to clutter up the valuable airwaves by singing: “1001 cleans a big, big carpet, for less than half a crown.”

This was not what we were given walkie-talkies for, we were told. If we did that again we would have to give them back and communicate by hand signals instead.

You can test yourself for susceptibility to old TV adverts. Watch a cyclist going past. Do you look at how uncomfortable the cyclist looks as he or she goes by? Do you wish them a little more comfort and cushioning?

Do you say “I were right about that saddle” just like the man in the old Yellow Pages ad?

You’re as bad as I am.