Some evenings, when we’re simply not in a mood for watching a sloppy romance, old sitcoms or the latest modish-sadistic thriller, we indulge in putting on ancient BBC Archive programmes from the 1950s.

This is particularly amusing to the young given the terrible outfits, and for us in the boomer generation who thought at the time that we looked terrific. Sometimes we reflect on how lucky it is that barring a few improved materials, yachting outfits have hardly changed at all. There were of course still a few stubborn elder-skippers who wore stiff black oilskin down to the boot-tops, and mildewed sou’westers left over from Maurice Griffiths’ time.

But by the early 1970s anyone likely to have to change a jib would already be in salopettes or pull-ons in violent hi-vis yellow or orange. We need not speak of the brief vogue for elegant dove-grey, designed to be invisible when falling overboard. But given the allied costs of sailing, plenty of us have stayed in the same kit ever since, with possibly just one refreshment of the jacket round the millennium.

So what struck us more powerfully in the latest outbreak of aged BBC documentaries was attitudes to yachts. One was about how an advertising and marketing agency tried to promote coffee as a beverage in 1972, astonishingly.

It was a minority drink at the time in the UK. The aim of coffee-producing nations and companies was to get us quaffing the stuff several times a day like Americans. But what riveted us was an advert made by Ridley Scott, the legendary film director who later created the ad featuring the Hovis delivery boy doing his bread-round to the New World Symphony.

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Here in Suffolk, on a frosty new year’s morning, a walk across the common always takes me to the river,…

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Ever wonder what a person learns from 57 summers yacht cruising, serving as crew aboard boats from 18 to 50ft…

This one was aimed at youth: dozens of scramble motorbikes roared by, culminating in the winning bikers on a marina pontoon preparing (without a change of jacket, even) to board what was breathlessly described as ‘a 25ft yacht’! The last shot of this mini-masterpiece has the lad at the helm next to the lucky girl with good hair.

Two things struck us after half a century. One was the modest scale of the marina pontoon compared to the imperial spread of modern yacht harbours.

The other, frankly, was its excitement at the idea of a 25ft boat being impressive: a little sloop treated as almost a James Bond vehicle, as the music rose in triumph.

Well, it shows we are old, because we can actually remember the excitement of a Contessa 26 after a Leisure 17.

That size, like a folkboat or a SCOD, felt and indeed was a little ship for proper voyaging, blue-water journeys.

What on earth happened to us, apart from having children, to make us all feel we needed more?

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