A few years back, while I was still living in the house of filth, I stumbled across a series (or rather a "miniseries", as such things are called across the Atlantic, for all that its twelve solid episodes) called "From The Earth To The Moon" - made by Ron Howard and Tom Hanks, on the back of the Apollo 13 film.  At the time, I thought it very well made. And promptly forgot about it. Spotted the DVD set on Amazon recently, and bought it.

Granted it's a bit "gung-ho America saving the world from communism" in places, but curiously I've found it rather beautiful. I remember well the last years of the 1960s, and the attention we, as awestruck kids, paid to the Apollo program. For us, of course, it wasn't Walter Cronkite and Jules Bergman, but Patrick Moore and James Burke, but the excitement, the tension, the wonder, the wonder, are the same. What's more, the series puts a far more human face on to the clean-cut American jocks that rode the biggest firework the world has ever seen. With only a moderate amount of starstripey cliché and mawkishness, too, which is impressive.

Thus far, I've only reached Apollo 9, first Earth-orbit rendezvous with the LEM, and the first two-man spacewalk. I find myself feeling odd sadness for people like Rusty Sweickhart, who never flew in space again (his own words in the episode suggesting it was his bout of space-sickness that would ground him).  And I find myself very aware of those people who maintain that the moon landings were faked...  and, in a most peculiar (and vaguely inappropriate) way, I want to say, "of course man landed on the moon - I was there".  Well.  I was there watching the telly, anyway.  They went.  Of course they went. Of course they went.  I watched them do it.  It was the defining moment of my generation.

I remember, as I'm sure millions of others do also, my father taking me outside, around 9pm on the night of 20th July 1969, and standing there with me in silence, gazing up at the moon. Still gives me a most extraordinary thrill up my spine to think of it.  To have been alive at the point in time when mankind first stepped on to another heavenly body, and to have watched it happen. To have lived in times of wonder and glory.

"Homo sapiens. What an inventive, invincible species. It's only a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenseless bipeds. They've survived flood, famine, and plague. ...  And now, here they are, out among the stars"

Yes, I'm a corny, sentimental old sod. Yes.