This video comes from Andy Benham, who couldn't do anything about the sound dipping in and out at random, but only for a nanosecond each time and you get the gist.

It's late on the night of Friday November 3rd 1995 - in fact it's past midnight, so it's technically the 4th. An Officer and a Gentleman gives way to a trailer for tomorrow - ie Saturday night. Heralded with a then-brand new pinball-based trailer motif that, because it was CGI, was able to incorporate the day of the week into the design and stick around as a frame. The narration's odd and even faintly unsettling, however, because its delivered in first-person. Maybe it's just me but there's a definite cognitive dissonance in the disembodied voice being treated like an actual person. That's not what they're supposed to be. The voice artists themselves, sure, but not the "characters" for want of a better word they're playing.

Besides, it's hard to relate to this one in particular as soon as she describes Jim Davidson as "lovely". It's only the first series of his Gen Game stint, so he hasn't thoroughly destroyed it, but it's still basically ruined by his mere presence.

By comparison, Noel is relatively unobjectionable, despite the disturbing coquettish expression he's pulling. This is the House Party's imperial phase and arguably its peak; it'll reach 100 editions in a few months time and then really should have stopped, but didn't.

After that, the lottery. It's 30 years old this year (I might do a video, I dunno) and as such is taken so much for granted that they don't even televise it anymore. In 1995 it's still inherently exciting to have its own (albeit 15-minute) show instead of being tacked on to some other format. This week's celebrity button pusher: Patrick Swayze!

Then, the ever-softening Casualty with a more or less unremarkable episode, although apparently it does have the splendid John Abineri, appearing alongside his son Sebastian, so there's that. His character's even a Brigadier.

After that (and the news), the voiceover tries to sound enthusiastic about half-decent US TV movie Race Against the Dark, aka Lost in the Wild, aka Nurses on the Line. A plane full of nurses (including a young Jennifer Lopez) crashes in the jungle, low-budget peril ensues. The kind of thing that only appeared on BBC1 to fill the precise amount of minutes before Match of the Day was ready. Which it does. There was a bit more to Saturday night than that, as we'll see, but they clearly didn't think it worth promoting past MOTD as a package.

But now, our really rather late indeed (20 past midnight) film is the bizarre cross-Tasman fantasy production The Navigator, in which a bunch of medieval peasants (in black and white) dig a great big hole to escape the Black Death and some how end up coming out the other side (in colour) in 20th Century New Zealand. And hopefully don't end up spreading the plague. Inevitably starring Chris Haywood. Announced by Patrick Walker, who is not a dead astrologer.

Once that's over, another trailer for Saturday night. After Match of the Day - so ten to midnight - the efficiently named Stand Up Show, in which various comedians on the circuit stepped up to deliver their current routines to camera to see if anyone cares. One of several such formats through the years, and not the most interestingly named, although it was compered by Barry Cryer. So that's something. This week: Tim Clark (seen briefly being bald, routine unknown), Lynn Ferguson (Craig's sister and occasional co-writer, and more importantly Mac from Chicken Run) and Ardal O'Hanlon (just over five months after the first series of Father Ted finished). The real programme was shot conventionally, as I recall, not with violently skewed perspectives all over the place. That's just something they're doing for the trailer for reasons I couldn't begin to fathom.

But at this point it's getting on for two in the morning and BBC1, and more specifically Patrick Walker, just want to go to bed. As, I imagine, does Peter Cockroft, but he's got to do the late night weather anyway, so here it is. Or the start of it, anyway - Cockroft is able to tell us it's going to be bloody cold before he's rudely faded out.

And so Walker brings up the clock and announces the entire television network is going to bed, so if you must continue to hear human voices you'll have to put on Radio 1 or 2, or 5 Live maybe. He then namechecks that evening's presentation director - Carina Skinner, now a leading agent - and puts on God Save the Queen*, expertly timing it so the drum roll ends right as the second hand hits the six, and at the exact same split second fades from clock to ident. It's an art.

*For some reason it's been copyright flagged as something called "Vegetable Soup", which I haven't done anything about because it amuses me

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