My dad and I went to the Djanogly Gallery to take in the exhibition Saturday Night And Sunday Morning: The Authentic Moment In British Photography. Aside from using still photographs from the film, there were also contributions from people who had answered a call to arms for photographs from the era, depicting working class family life. It was startling to see these photos of children playing in the street, and housewives sitting on the front step, not only because we don't see that sort of thing anymore but because they were taken in the early 1960s and they looked like they were from the 1940s. The beauty of black and white photographs is that they don't ever look dated, whereas colour pictures seem to look old fashioned. The film Saturday Night And Sunday Morning still looks striking now, but the television adaptation of The Ragman's Daughter was made in the 1970s, with shoulder length hair and sideburns, wing collars and flares, looks ridiculous. The quality of the colour immediately places the photos in a certain time.

Some time ago, I pitched a television idea for a programme provisionally called A Job For All. The premise of the show involved trying to reduce unemployment by looking to the past for inspiration. Certain jobs have disappeared due to advances in technology, the alarm clock for example, has removed the need for the 'knocker upper' tapping your bedroom window. By bringing back the knocker upper, you have potentially created hundreds of jobs. Every estate, or postcode area, could have a person employed in the same way that a window cleaner is, and the residents pay a weekly subscription of a couple of pounds a week. I am a genius. Probably.

The reason I was reminded of this ill-fated TV idea, (wait and see now, it'll be stolen and made and I won't make any money from it), was a couple of exhibits. There was once a lucrative business in taking a photograph of a family or a couple at the seaside, and selling the picture back as a nice holiday souvenir. I have in the family archive several photographs of my paternal grandparents on holiday in Skegness, that were taken by one of these opportunist snappers, and they show the chronology of their marriage; holidaying with another couple, holidaying together, my dad in a pram, my uncle in a pram with my dad walking alongside, all seemingly taken in the same place. To go back to that era, cameras were an expensive luxury and as such, these businesses thrived. These days of course everyone has some form of camera, but I still think that something along those lines would make money because people will always want a souvenir photo. With a digital camera, it would be a cheaper operation to run, because if they said no you could just delete.