DAVID BADDIEL

Truth is, I can’t pinpoint what my favourite kids’ show was when I was a child, as memory and nostalgia play strange tricks on adults.

The programmes that virtually make me cry with Proustian pain when I see them again (I recently bought a set on DVD for my kids) are the gentle English ones – Camberwick Green and Trumpton, especially the song “Time goes by when you’re the driver of a train”. And the merest sound of Oliver Postgate’s voice can make me ache for my long-lost innocence.

When I actually force my mind back, however, I think what I really liked at the time were brash American imports: Scooby Doo, Wacky Races and Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines (catchphrase: “Stop the pigeon!”), all of which raise no goose pimples when I stumble across repeats of them now. Strange.

MICHAEL ROSEN

My first TV heroes were the Lone Ranger and Tonto. I was gripped by the idea of the stranger who does good but then disappears before anyone can thank him. “Who was that masked man?” “Why, that was the Lone Ranger.” Tonto seemed to me, in the space of a suburban front room, to be a perfect human being: handsome, athletic, outdoor, modest and wise. We didn’t really know the actors who played these people. In fact, I’m pretty sure we thought there really was someone walking about with a mask on saving people with the help of his loyal Indian companion. But who was it, at the beginning of the programme, who called out in that off-screen, stentorian voice: “A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust, and a hearty ‘Hi-yo, Silver’. . . the Lone Ranger!”? We didn’t know, but we practised it in the playground over and over again – along with the William Tell Overture and a good deal of galloping about whacking our backsides to make us run faster. No, no, no...it has to beBertha’s cogwheels

LIBBY PURVES

We believed in watching alongside our small children, but some shows were a trial. Thomas the Tank Engine had that dreary Ringo voice and the Mussolini Fat Controller; Postman Pat led a life of unspeakable rural tedium. But the one we gladly snuggled up for was Bertha the Big Machine.

In the mid1980s, even as Thatcher wore down our industrial base in favour of City asset-strippers, the adventures of Spottiswoode’s factory evoked the thrill of manufacturing. Bertha (I was forced to make a model of her out of cardboard boxes) throbbed at the factory’s core, tended by Ivor Wood puppets: she could be programmed to make anything. Ted the engineer lovingly tended Bertha’s whirring cogwheels, backed by Mr Sprott the designer; in the warehouse Nell and Flo sang “Packing and stacking, no, we don’t believe in slacking!”, and up in the office the manager, Mr Willmake, and his secretary, Miss McClackerty, struggled with paperwork. I can still sing that song, too – “Mr Willmake will make sure/ Orders coming through the door/ Will be treated as they should/ Down at Spot-tis-woode!” Everyone was happy – “Going to work on Monday never seems too hard/ When you’ve got yer workmates waiting when you’ve punched yer card!” When Bertha is making jigsaws and a piece is missing, it is Roy Willing the apprentice who spots it, and when the decorators are in and Miss McClackerty can’t find the phone under the dustsheets, Mr Sprott designs a painting robot.

Even as the 1980s threw real factories to the wolves, our children played at Bertha all day long: the three-year-old standing over his sister with a makeshift clipboard as she crouched earnestly in her nappy stacking bricks – “Come on, Rose! Tea break over! We’ve got a big order in from Boffingtons!” Sometimes he was the foreman, sometimes (with a tea cosy on his head) the Sikh forklift driver Panjit. Rose was Nell, Flo, or Mrs Tupp the tea lady, but I once caught her singing the apprentice’s song – “Dweaming of de day his name will be – on de manager’s dooooor!” Sometimes, late in the evening, we would hear a faint chorus of the song about Mr Willmake – “His family pictures on the wall looking down on him/ Remind us of the past when they all went out there to win / Making Spottiswoode the place where orders kept on rolling in . . .” It was like having Sir Terence Beckett of the CBI singing at you down the baby alarm.

But somehow the show faded – not unlike British industry – to be replaced by stupid, hippyish Tele-tubbies with VDUs stuck in their fat guts, and coked-up fools in dungarees introducing pop videos.

But for a brief golden time we all dreamt of sturdy British engineering, family firms manned by cheery workers, Nell and Flo packing and stacking and Mr Willmake the trusted manager announcing “a surprise for the shopfloor” that didn’t mean mass redundancies but Bertha’s birthday party. Ah, innocent days!

Tell us your favourite children's TV programme below

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010