I was only a kid when Nationwide was broadcast and looking back it epitomised a decade best forgotten. The reports it did were supposed to be of interest to the viewing public but they just gave air-time to sad characters like a bunch of middle-aged men playing war games with remote controlled model tanks, bikers who owed hundreds of pounds in unpaid fines for refusing to wear crash helmets, and people who'd decided to re-christen themselves Elvis Presley or Marlon Brando. It took trivial matters that most people weren't interested in too seriously. For a while it featured a nostalgia item called Memory Lane where it looked back to a certain year. It seemed to me in the 1970s that the BBC was always looking on the past instead of the present. I also think it should have really been called Englandwide. Items from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland very rarely appeared in it. Michael Barratt, its anchorman in the early years, couldn't have thought too highly of Nationwide otherwise he wouldn't have agreed to do these parodies of it on The Goodies.
