Nice to see you…

Sir Bruce Forsyth’s achievement in presenting the first decade of Strictly Come Dancing was bringing off the very trick he had pulled with The Generation Game in the Seventies and Sunday Night at the London Palladium in the Fifties. This was to take into sitting-rooms up and down the land light entertainment that families could watch together at weekends, as once they gathered around the fireside. Some 26 million watched The

Generation Game, and if today’s 50-somethings are nostalgic for the consumerist “Kim’s Game” of fondue sets, toasters and tape-recorders sailing past on the conveyor belt, an older generation can’t help remembering the Palladium’s “Beat the Clock”. Perseverance works, and from the age of 76, Bruce Forsyth made his last, longest and most successful campaign to win the nation’s hearts.