Now I've seen everything - in a desperate effort to find early footage of Miriam Makeba, BBC News screened some abysmal video from YouTube tonight. HD it was not - more like original Baird system with colour.

This is the fruit of granting journalists the final say of what is acceptable for transmission. Try to complain to the BBC about technical quality, rather than content, and you are brushed off.

Arise, arise, the hour is come,
For rows and revolutions;
There's no receipt like pike and drum
For crazy constitutions.
Close, close the shop! Break, break the loom,
Desert your hearths and furrows,
And throng in arms to seal the doom
Of England's rotten boroughs

A Radical War Song (1820) Thomas Macaulay