Just when you think there’s never going to be anything worth watching on telly, along comes the Discovery Channel’s documentary about NASA’s Greatest Missions. It was a corker, packed with reconditioned footage of the early years of space travel, which were also the early years of my life. Laika, the Russian dog, went into space (never to return) when I was 3 months old, and although I was a tad too young to remember that,  by the time I was 11, when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, I was completely obsessed with anything to do with the Apollo missions.

The men who went up on those early rockets must have been either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid. The original group of 7 astronauts all complained bitterly when NASA decided that it might be a good idea to put a chimp into one of the first flights before testing out the technology using a human being, just to see if its eyes fell out or its head exploded. “No“, they said, as one, “let me the first to be strapped to the top of an oversized missile, and blasted into oblivion!“

One of the most dramatic moments in the programme last night was close-up footage of John Glenn’s face during his first orbital flight, at the moment when he realised that there was a problem with the heat shield on his capsule. Although the “capcom” (the man at Mission Control through whom all communication was made) refused to give him any details of what was going on (the astronauts were always the last to know), you could tell that Glenn knew that there was a problem which, in all probability, would mean instant incineration on re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere. Gripping stuff, and I’m already looking forward to next Sunday’s instalment.  I’ve tried to get my boys interested, but sadly it seems that what was the height of excitement in the 60s is dull as ditchwater for the modern youth.