Howard returns.

TV One of the joys of the web is that it allows televisual figures, who have loomed large in your past then seemed to disappear, to re-emerge and actually explain what they’ve been up to.

As well as presenting the seminal children’s quiz Beat the Teacher in the early ’80s, Howard Stableford was a presenter on BBC science programme Tomorrow’s World in the 1980s and early 1990s, roughly contemporaneous with such giants as Judith Hann and Maggie Philbin. He’s just begun writing at Planet Earth Under Threat, a new blog connected to a Radio 4 series which is due to begin soon.

It’s good to see Howard’s doing well. According to his first blog post, he’s in Colorado, where he’s been living for the past seven years. “Through my office window” he describes, “I can see the spectacular heights of Pike’s Peak, a 4000-plus metre snow capped mountain along Colorado’s Front Range. At least I can today. Yesterday it was snowing!” The man lives in a ski resort.

I always saw Tomorrow’s World as the programme you eventually graduated to once you’d grown out of Blue Peter. In those days, the programmes were incredibly similar, and might have even broadcast from the same studio, with their presenter led demonstrations and outside broadcasts. It’s this period that the second series of Look Around You so mercilessly yet affectionately satirized, before the rot set in and went in the inevitable new direction with Carol Vorderman spoiling it forever.