Dear Cathy and Claire, I think I’ve lost my critical faculties

TODAY'S rant is all about nostalgia.

This won't come as any surprise to anyone who regularly reads this crud, admittedly. I am an unashamed nostalgist, and while I draw the line at actually coming out and saying "things were better then", at least in those days I was naive enough not to notice how grim things were. And see how young we all looked?

There's real money to be made from the nostalgia market, particularly around Christmas, so it's no surprise that the shops at this time of year are rammed with products promoting the spurious notion of an entirely idealised past. However, I have to say that as nostalgic concepts go, Jackie - The Album is a real winner.

Before we go any further, I should quickly point out that I wasn't a Jackie reader, being a bloke and all. However, in the 1970s my girlfriend and her mates all bought this teen totem every week so I got to hear a great many of the salient details second-hand.

The sweet and sighing innocence of it all would probably elicit howls of derision among the readership of today's teen mags, with their advice on what flavour condom to choose for which occasion and whether it is appropriate etiquette to get the crack pipe out on a first date. Mind you, my girlfriend swore blind that she had actually seen the supposedly apocryphal letter on Cathy and Claire's problem page which read: "Dear Cathy and Claire, when I kiss my boyfriend goodnight I can feel this hard lump in his pocket. Do you think he's a cosh boy?" This is all by the by, however. What really impresses one about Jackie - The Album is the genuine love and care which has gone into its assemblage. It's a fantastically evocative package - a phrase which on reflection may have a special meaning for ladies who fancied David Essex at the time - and it's safe to say that if you were an avid Jackie reader in its 1970s heyday, you will be swooning like a hothouse plant at the memories compressed over these three CDs.

The song selection is immaculate for its chosen demographic, consisting largely of the kind of doe-eyed, blow-dried jessies whose navels were stapled on a weekly basis in their role as Jackie poster fodder. Donny Osmond, David Cassidy, Marc Bolan, David Soul, The Bay City Rollers, The Rubettes, Paul Nicholas... God bless them, every one.

While all of this was going on, us blokes were huffing and puffing with haughty distaste and listening to REAL MUSIC. This blinkered tribalism was (and remains) the default setting for young males everywhere, and while my tastes even then tended towards the abstruse end of the spectrum I was still more than happy to belong to the Led Zeppelin encampment in which all my mates lived.

Last week, you may recall me foaming at the mandibles about the band's immaculately-remastered Mothership compilation, and now the same lovingly-wielded wire brush has been applied to the band's controversial 1976 film The Song Remains The Same.

Its original release, within spitting distance of punk rock's Night Of The Long Knives, saw it widely derided as an obscene act of self-indulgent folly from bloated satyrs who had long since lost all contact with "the street". Certainly, those fantasy sequences are comical and pointless, but the band at least have the good grace to look intensely uncomfortable throughout.

If the film only consisted of those sword-and-sorcery shots, it would now just be a charming sub-Hammer period piece. The live footage, however - particularly in its crisply remastered form - is deathless and crushingly powerful.

There's something immensely liberating about the barrelling, exultant, chest-beating confidence of Led Zep in full pomp, living high on the hog like old-school rock stars used to and unknowingly laying down a carbon footprint so vast (in their own freakin' jet, if you will) that it could only have been made with clown shoes.

John Bonham, as ever, is man of the match, whaling the tar out of his Ludwig Vistalite kit to tectonic plate-shifting effect. Forty minutes of bonus footage, including a whomping Misty Mountain Hop, make this DVD the ideal Christmas present for the discerning, once-ringleted rock bozo in your own household.

Finally, and most overwhelmingly nostalgic for me, the latest release from the consistently wonderful Trunk label compiles the original TV music from the much-loved Oliver Postgate/Peter Firmin productions Ivor The Engine and Pogle's Wood by The Vernon Elliott Ensemble.

Where would my childhood have been without Elliott's gentle, doleful, solemnly pretty compositions, which underscored Postgate's sleepy voiceovers so gracefully and naturally that it was as if they also sprang from the narrator's mellifiluous throat.

The little-remembered Pogle's Wood was my favourite children's programme at the time - and hearing this gorgeous music now makes me realise just where my lifelong fascination with the magic and mystery of the woods sprang from.