Still listening?

Picture: Paramount/Gale Adler

The history of cherished TV shows being revived long after they’ve disappeared in their prime has not always been a happy one. For every success - a Doctor Who, say - you could cite the disappointing Open All Hours, relaunched without the deceased Ronnie Barker, or the recent attempt at reviving Will & Grace. Half the problem is that TV companies, much like their first cousins the film studios, have an interest in retreading something old and familiar rather than commission something new. 

Inevitably, this risks messing with the very magic that made a property much loved to begin with (the 2016 Dad’s Army film did just that - an awkward homage that failed to justify its rationale of updating a TV series that has arguably never been bettered). Some expired properties live on as spinoffs: you could easily argue that Better Call Saul is actually better than Breaking Bad, of which it serves as a prequel. 

Some, though, don’t live up to expectation. Matt Le Blanc’s Friends offshoot Joey was never the snappy ensemble piece of its parent. Even that highly anticipated one-off Friends reunion - planned for last May but shelved by the pandemic - hasn't exactly had people holding their breath in anticipation. Don't get me wrong, Friends was wonderful, 30 years ago in its pomp, and still holds its own in endless syndication, but are we really that desperate to see Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Joey, Phoebe and Ross in middle age? The whole premise of Friends was a group of twentysomethings living in New York. When it ended, with parenthood and suburban living, it felt like it had run its natural course.

So it’s with some apprehension that we read that Frasier is coming back, 17 years after it came to a timely end in one of the greatest sitcom finales ever. Paramount announced this week that Kelsey Grammer will reprise his role as Dr. Frasier Crane for a brand new run as an anchor of its new digital streaming service Paramount+. 

Demand may, then, meet supply in helping Paramount+ off the ground with a much-loved property like Frasier. But as Roseanne found, when it returned briefly, a revival is not helped if its principal then goes and does something stupid: Roseanne Barr brought it all abruptly to an end by posting a racist tweet (“repugnant”, in the words of the ABC Network president) that got her fired. 

That, though, didn’t hold back the reinvention of the show as The Conners - arguably the first ever spinoff of a reboot. It's still going, unlike Will & Grace which returned after 11 years away only to last three seasons before getting axed. In truth, it was no longer that funny, seemingly retreading old jokes around the central four characters and not offering much new. 

Frasier was, you’ll recall, a spinoff from the equally loved Cheers, and it’s still a matter of debate as to which was the better, both being blessed with faultless casting and faultless writing. Frasier ported one of Cheers’ supporting characters and turned him into the centrepiece of a new ensemble, built around the concept of the divorced and hoity-toity psychiatrist moving into a swanky Seattle apartment with his decidedly blue collar dad, and his scampish pet dog. The dynamic was brilliantly expanded by the addition of Crane’s younger and even more neurotic brother, Niles (David Hyde Pierce), and an English physical therapist, Daphne Moon, who looked after the brothers’ father while becoming the secret, and then not so secret love interest to the junior Crane sibling. Even Eddie the dog became a distinctive character in his own right, earning his own front cover on America's showbiz digest Entertainment Weekly. Rightfully, the show won 37 Emmy Awards over the course of 11 seasons, with Grammer and Pierce winning four between them, along with Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild gongs. 

This week's announcement placed Frasier’s revival as the headline act of Paramount+, and was accompanied by a suitably ‘corporate’ quote from Grammer, saying that he would “gleefully anticipate sharing the next chapter in the continuing journey of Dr. Frasier Crane.” However, it is not yet known who would be joining him on that journey: John Mahoney, the Lancashire-born actor who played Crane’s irascible ex-cop dad Martin, died of cancer in 2018; Jane Leeves, the other British cast member (who played Daphne, ironically as a Lancastrian, even though she was born in Essex), said earlier this month that had no intention of giving up her role in the US medical drama series The Resident to do the then-rumoured Frasier reboot. 

The joy of Frasier - much like Cheers - was that it was cleverly multi-dimensional. Frasier may have been the pivot - be it plot lines focused on his Seattle radio station, the relationship with Niles, or their dynamic with Martin - but there was also Martin's dynamic with Daphne, and Daphne’s ‘will-they-won’t-they’ relationship with Niles. For me, at least, it made Frasier ‘appointment TV’ on a Friday night. As for the new series, Paramount promised “more exactly the same than ever”, but wouldn’t be drawn on storylines or casting, including the likelihood of Pierce returning. Grammer himself had previously said that he wouldn’t revive the show without his on-screen brother, surely one of the most serendipitous casting decisions in television history (a happy accident - originally there wasn’t going to be a brother until a casting manager saw a 10x8 of Pierce and saw what appeared to be a strong family resemblance). 

In Cheers, the educated, pompous and ever-so slightly snooty Frasier Crane was the fish out of water amongst the bar flies he drank with in Boston. Frasier flipped personas in moving to Seattle, with his ex-cop dad and the Mancunian Daphne becoming the grounded points of reference, leaving the brothers to fuss over fine wines, Debussy and the cut of their well appointed suits.

Quite what the Frasier reboot will be like, then, remains wide open. When a potential return first surfaced in 2018, Grammer told The Guardian that there would be risks: “It would be quite a breathtaking failure to try to do it and not do it better than the previous show - and I think that’s almost impossible. To pick up that responsibility would be a very brave thing to do.” A year later the subject came up again, but this time Grammer put a little more substance behind ideas that were clearly under consideration, including setting the show in a city other than Crane's home town. “We’ll see how people respond to it because it’s not going to be the same place, it’s not going to be Seattle,” Grammer said in 2019. “It’s not going to be the same Frasier, it’s going to be the man in his next iteration.”  

That man has, in truth, gone through two reinventions, with his own show and a guest appearance by Grammer as the character in a crossover episode of the sitcom Wings. But what garnered all those Emmys during its run between 1993 and 2004, building to an audience of 37 million in the US alone for its final episode, was the combination of saturated creativity - a vast team of show runners, producers and writers - and a core ensemble cast who lived in our hearts for thirty minutes every week. Only Fools And Horses comes to mind as an equivalent (although that had just one writer behind it). 

Here lies the key to whether the reboot will work. “Great television is about creating characters that resonate with audiences and creating universes that viewers want to spend time within," Tim Glanfield, editorial director of the Radio Times said this week. And from that, he said, some shows create a genuine emotional need. “The characters are missed, the world it occupied is mourned for, a little gap is left in people's lives, and audiences often ask, 'why couldn't they have made more?’”.

Picture: NBC

The compulsion will be for Frasier’s producers to do their damnedest to bring back as many of the original cast as possible, simply as that was where the magic lived. Cryptically, when appearing on James Corden’s US chat show in 2019, he hinted that any reboot would be a “third act” rather than a continuation. “The same group of characters, but in a different setting,” he said. “Something has changed in their lives.” Quite what, we don’t know, but it's wise to suspect that it will not be the sort of franchised reinvention that Blackadder went through. All of the principle cast - if they commit - will have aged (even the lad who played Frasier and Lillith Crane’s son, Frederick, is now 32), which, like the Friends reunion, might either inspire the creative premise, or be its failure. Hopefully we will find out, if Paramount confirms details of when - and where - the reboot will appear.

The bigger challenge, arguably, is how Frasier will connect with its audiences. Unlike Friends, the show was never a feature of younger viewing habits. Since it came off air, anyone under the age of thirty will have become hooked on the myriad reality series that keep the streaming services afloat. But, like the Friends reunion, I’m sure there will be a quorum of viewers eager to recreate their Friday evenings in the '90s, settling down at 9pm in eager anticipation of that jazzy xylophone riff and an animated squiggle of Seattle’s Space Needle, welcoming us into Crane’s KACL radio studio. All followed by Grammer’s mellifluous baritone saying the words: “I’m listening”.

Reginald John Poulter – 7th July, 1929-18th August, 2019

We had been living with Dad having Alzheimer’s for a decade and a half. Perhaps longer. It's always possible that random lapses of mindedness going even further back were signs. In which case, I’ve got a grim future (one in eight of us - at least - will succumb to this cruellest of afflictions. Today there are 50 million people globally with the disease. By the middle of this century, that number is expected to reach 150 million).

We’re not entirely sure, either, what the trigger was, but a mini stroke some years ago followed by prostate cancer clearly contributed to a cognitive and physical decline that either caused the onset or contributed to it. Either way, it’s been a slow progression. From mild symptoms of forgetfulness, through the gradual erosion of both short and long-term memory, to an eventual end-stage when the brain and the body start disconnecting, functionally, and communication goes from barely verbal to just a hollow stare. This is Alzheimer’s: the progressive erasure of a life. I’m not being flippant by describing it in this way, but think of Marty McFly in Back To The Future, except unsuccessful in preventing himself from vanishing from his own future. More starkly, think of Die Hard’s Hans Gruber, falling away from John McLane’s grip at the top of the Nakatomi tower, only in even more, painful slow motion.

This time last year Dad went into Galsworthy House, the care home on Kingston Hill where, 12 months later, he would leave this world. His increasing immobility and a series of falls - probably brought on by the Alzheimer’s – brought us to the point where he was too much of a danger to himself and to Mum. When he fell, we needed an ambulance crew using a specialist device to lift him again. He wasn’t big, far from it, but he was a dead weight that fell at awkward angles (fracturing a vertebra, we later discovered, because it was never articulated at the time). The home was wonderful, a big old stately place. Dad had his own private room with a window looking out on his beloved Richmond Park. For the first few weeks, months even, however, he was more preoccupied with leaving it. “Are we going home now?”, he would incant, to be met by some plausible explanation-to-a-child as to why he’d be staying put, which would be repeated as often as the question it responded to.

Eventually the question loops ended as Dad accepted – mostly - his new surroundings. Occasionally, in moments of unbridled lucidity, they would surface again. Here’s where you realised that Alzheimer’s affects the brain like the CPU of an ageing laptop. The cabling between the brain’s various departments becomes frayed, forcing it to take shortcuts. Graphically, you can imagine these different sections closing down. There is compulsive, repetitive behaviour, which I always assumed was the brain trying to find a path that worked, like a guide rope leading out of a smoke-filled building.

Dad’s eventual death, in the early hours of Sunday, 18 August, was the first time in adulthood that I’d experienced the demise of an immediate relative. When we went to see his body that morning, it didn’t look all that different to his condition two days before, when I sat with him, sleeping peacefully, for the better part of an hour. I wasn’t to know he’d be dead 36 hours later, but perhaps, it wasn’t a surprise. On the previous occasion I’d seen him awake, there was no recognition of me. I could have been his son, or simply a shape before him. I thought, then, that the light was dimming. This forms the core of Alzheimer’s cruelty, the fact that you can see the physical manifestations of a lifetime, of loved ones and relationships, visibly disappearing before you. Without being too morbid, we do all turn to dust, along with our memories, but with Dad, living as he did until six weeks after his 90th birthday, it was something of a comfort that he had lived so long, even if his latter years were beset with such health problems.

Now his life is over we can reflect and recollect. In my case, even discover things for the first time, especially as we search through his fastidiously collated archives of paperwork, mementoes and obscurities which, collectively look like ephemera but by themselves carry vivid stories. We uncovered a cricket travel game called Owzthat!, which came in a tiny tin and comprised two hexagonal metal die, one each for bowling and batting scores which were recorded on a piece of paper. Simplest of pleasures, but the appearance of Owzthat!, on a wet afternoon, marooned in a rain-soaked Welsh self-catering cottage, was a bright, shining highlight of childhood. Along with Spencer, the glove puppet (another simple concept – namely, a sock with two buttons for eyes, which would generate hours of mirth). Dad was clearly someone who collected things. A holiday to a previously unvisited part of the world would necessitate the purchase of a new Ordnance Survey map for that particular area. A repeat visit would necessitate the purchase of the latest version of that map, just in case geography and roads had changed. These are just some of the adorable foibles from my own 51 years as his son, and I realise that these are just the tip of the iceberg of a life.

My elder brother, Martin, recalls even more: Dad selling his treasured old racing bike at Pitfields in New Malden to buy him a new one when money was tight; the bathroom at our old house - the one I was born in (and am here pictured outside) - which Dad, a keen photographer, turned into a makeshift dark room, complete with blackout boards for the window and a red light outside to keep out interlopers while he was developing film. My brother reminded me of just how creative Dad was: for the annual canasta 'tournament' between our parents and our aunt and uncle in Plymouth - a fiercely contested affair - Dad made a trophy out of a painted slab of Polyfilla, mounted beautifully on a piece of polished wood, with his impeccable sign-writing skills applied to the inscription. That trophy, much like The Ashes, would shuttle up and down the A303 according to the victorious participants. Dad would always be making things out of wood scraps. The garage still contains some of his tools, long since used of course. He once made a very good go-kart for my brother, fully capable of taking him around the block, using the slight slope from our road to the next for propulsion. Alas, a practical skill I've not inherited.

Perhaps this self-reliance stems from the fact Dad was born in 1929, at the end of The Roaring Twenties in the year of the Wall Street Crash, which heralded The Depression; a teenager during World War II; a husband in the '50s and father to three babies between 1959 and 1967; an elderly man in the Digital Age. He never got the Internet, or mobile phones for that matter, but he always loved being shown photographs on ours, especially of our own life adventures. Photography was his thing. Few family pictures exist without a camera strapped around his neck.

He was no Luddite, though: a trainee electrical engineer at the age of 15 in wartime Birmingham, joining the Great Barr Telephone Exchange at the age of 16, returning to London from evacuation in 1946. With an aptitude for such things, Dad was called up for his National Service on 1st January, 1948, aged 18, where he was dispatched to Catterick Barracks in Yorkshire to train as a radio mechanic in the Royal Corps of Signals. Somewhere ahead of him at Catterick was Sydney Lotterby, later to become a BBC producer and director, with Porridge amongst his many credits. While in the Signals, Dad worked on radio calibration for the Parachute Regiment, for which he managed to blag a coveted Paras' red beret, later hanging in the garage, covered in decorating paint. On being demobbed in March 1949, Dad rejoined the Post Office as a telecommunications engineer. It was here, while working out of telephone exchanges in the Surrey area, he met Mum, a telephonist at Elmbridge exchange. I have a romantic notion of Dad, up a telegraph pole, chatting up Mum, though neither ever corroborated such an idea. One thing she does remember, however, is Dad applying for a job at the BBC in 1954.

It was here, successfully employed from 1st November, 1954, that he began his 35-year BBC career, to our enormous pride and advantage as a family. It was here, too, that over the following years he earned a sequence of promotions, starting out as a ‘dolly operator’ in the camera department before becoming a camera operator full time. Eventually he would become the head of a camera crew – Crew 4 – at a time when, slowly, senior camera operators began to get credits at the end of programmes, though it wasn’t commonplace. Thanks to this, however, parts of my father’s BBC career are installed for the rest of time on the pages of the Internet Movie Database, IMDB.com, with entries for episodes of Eastenders, Doctor Who, Last Of The Summer Wine (produced by one Syd Lotterby), 'Allo, 'Allo, Hi-Di-Hi, and Only Fools And Horses (for which he’d maintain was his most enjoyable studio experience due to the on-set camaraderie between cast and crew).

Inevitably, we’d benefit as a family from his work at the BBC, getting to visit Television Centre on many occasions. I, in particular, got to be in the studio audience of Top Of The Pops (a much coveted ticket, in its day) a few times, and also met all the stars of BBC children’s TV when he was working on the All Star Record Breakers, the end-of-year special version of Roy Castle’s gentle celebration of achievement. One year I filled up an entire autograph book with the signatures of people like the Blue Peter presenters, Johnny Ball, Brian Cant and others from Play School and Play Away.

I’m buzzed by those encounters, even now, and that’s after I’ve met plenty of famous people in my time as a journalist. To the child-me they were my idols, long before I would make idols out of rock stars. In fact, early on in my career, there was a strange moment of crossover when, a couple of years before Dad retired himself, I went up to Television Centre to interview Philip Schofield (in his Broom Cupboard/Gordon The Gopher days) for Smash Hits magazine. I seem to remember Dad not being that impressed, even though the interview took place not far from a production office where he himself had worked. In 1988 I joined the fledgling Sky TV, and the sort-of family footsteps progression was complete. I was, however, hardly a media brat. I was never encouraged to work in the media. But I know how proud - secretly, perhaps - he was that I’d carved out a career in the industry. When I moved into technology with Philips, we had something new in common, given his army and telephony days, and indeed the fact that the bit of Philips’ business I was responsible for in my PR role was the consumer electronics arm.

By the time I returned to the UK, in 2016 and after 17 years abroad (and now working in telecommunications, another link to Dad’s professional origins), Dad's Alzheimer’s was already advanced, though he still had some degree of stubborn mobility. Osteoporosis, a side-effect of treatment for prostate cancer, had rendered him bent-double. We grew used to this figure appearing at door handle height, still getting himself up and down stairs, vainly refusing to use his Zimmer frame. That period always struck me as profound. His insistence on still propelling himself, as stubborn and even as stupid as it was, indicated his state of mind - decaying, it may have been, but he was still prepared to fight.

That fight ended last week, peacefully and painlessly, from what we can gather. To the end, Dad maintained his famous reserve, a quiet dignity. The lights may have been flickering, but the looks he’d give Mum, in particular, showed that his love for the woman was undiminished after the better part of seven decades together. It was hard, at the end, to know what he recognised or acknowledged, even with Mum sat beside his bed. She, for her part, has been brilliant. As painful as these last 12 months of separation have been, Mum has been stoic, accepting even. That doesn’t ease any pain of losing your husband, a week and a half short of 66 years of marriage - but I’d hope her knowing that Dad’s final days and hours were peaceful and in comfort would at least be of comfort to her.

They say you only appreciate how someone shaped your life after they’ve gone, but I’ve always known what Dad has instilled in me. Firstly, and perhaps foremost, a sense of humour. Actually, I get this equally from both parents (Mum’s remains robustly intact, I’m happy to report, despite her 89 years and various challenges to health and wellbeing of her own). Dad’s sense of humour came partly from the things he found funny. Even as the first signs of dementia were showing, he could still lose it watching a Tom & Jerry cartoon, or a Pink Panther film. Slapstick was clearly his thing, but thanks to his curation of tapes of old radio comedies like The Goon Show, Hancock’s Half Hour and The Navy Lark, and our gathering around the dinner table at 6.30 each weekday evening to listen to I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, Just A Minute or some such comedy in Radio 4’s  ‘funny half hour’ before The Archers, I gained an appreciation for ‘the theatre of the mind’. Dad once took me to see Jacques Tati’s comic masterpiece Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, one Saturday afternoon. I would have been 13 or 14, so being dragged to see some black and white film featuring a French actor with little if any dialogue sounded like the absolute worst, uncool thing he could possibly take me to. I ended up loving that film, and still do.

There are many moments of mirth that I could recount here, but would take an entire book, not a blog post, to record. Indeed, in a life of 90 years, there’s so much about Dad that could be retold, largely to convey who he was, but also to provide therapeutic process. There’s no space for the holiday recollections, those annual visits to Devon and the gales of laughter that blew up the stairs from the living room below during that canasta tournament; being stuck outside the pub in Tolworth with a packet of crisps and a lemonade while he and my grandfather shared a beer; damp cottages in Cornwall and rain-soaked fortnights in Wales (yeah, while the rest of Britain turned brown in the drought of 1976).

Every family has such memories. It’s what’s called normality. The cruelty of Alzheimer’s is that Dad’s memories were washed away as the disease progressed, along with name recognition in the latter stages. And then the eyes grow hollow and you have no idea as to whether you’re a son or just a noise. Others’ experiences will, no doubt, differ.

Strangely, though, my dad’s incarceration over the last twelve months has been mostly without any heavy drama. I can’t speak for other family members, but even the sight of him in his wheelchair, parked up in the care home dining room like Operation Stack lorries on the M20, for enforced viewings of old black and white films, didn’t upset me as much as I thought it would. But twelve months is a long time. In recent weeks the contraction of various infections and illnesses, all symptoms of the body’s gradual disconnection from itself, moved him from unwilling participant in the Cuckoo’s Nest to being bed-ridden and struggling to communicate (or not at all) and slowly creeping up on Death’s Door.

Dad’s passing has been my first true experience of family bereavement, other departures not withstanding. You find coping mechanisms, the self-reassurance of saying to yourself “He’s comfortable” when, in truth, he probably wasn’t. And later, “He’s still got his dignity,” when the reality is somewhat less. But still you remain stoic. You know the worst is coming, but it’s just too convenient to recognise. And then you go and see Paul Carrack at the London Palladium, and he performs The Living Years, the Mike + The Mechanics song he leant his sublime, blue-eyed soul vocals too. And then you realise that you are tearing up. Properly moist. Beads of tears down the cheeks. The voice as wobbly as a resigning prime minister on the steps of 10 Downing Street. And you feel winded, not because you’ve involuntarily started crying in public in your 50s, but because reality just caught up with you like a mugger in a dark alley. But it’s a warning sign. A sign that you’re vulnerable to emotion, even if you’re rationalising things simply, it's still the sore throat heralding the full-blown bout of flu that is fully grieving. That is still to come.

Now, today, I’m still in a strange place. Perhaps due to being more mentally prepared for Dad’s death than I’d realised. And whether that’s a good thing or not, it has allowed me space to appreciate what a wonderful life Reginald John Poulter had in his 90 years, the fun and laughter we had as a family, the cool stuff we got to experience through his job, and the profound, enduring love he had for his wife, consciously or not, right up to the very end.

While going through his things, my brother found, in his wallet, three tiny photographs. One, of (we presume) a family gathering not long after Dad had met Mum; the second, one of my mum, brother and sister when the latter were still in single figures; and thirdly, one showing the infant me, together with Mum and my siblings. An enduring reminder of what we meant to him. And what he meant to us.

20 years on: the rebirth of cool...and Apple

Last Wednesday Apple reported quarterly earnings of $61.1 billion, almost $10 billion more than the same quarter a year ago. Its 2017 annual revenue was $229 billion. To put that into perspective, the UK's annual defence budget is about £50 billion. That Apple is loaded is common knowledge. That consumers like me are still prepared to fork out for premium-priced products to keep that turnover going says much about the company's brand resilience, despite it lacking any true, must-have innovations for some time.

But at risk of sounding like a Apple fanboy, my ownership of multiple iPhones, iPads, iPods, Macs (including the MacBook on which I write these words), is the product of an infatuation that began almost 30 years ago. In the very early 1990s I, like many others in the media professions, was introduced to the Mac as a production tool. Apple's desktops were in most newspaper and magazine offices as the digital, desktop publishing revolution transformed the business of ink. Working, first, on Apple's SE PCs, I migrated to larger machines as I moved from the Sky TV press office to the company's in-house creative services department. There, the ease and simplicity of the Mac I was provided with allowed me, completely untrained, to master the production of print advertising. Within my first week I'd mastered programmes like QuarkXpress and Illustrator, and had produced my first billboard - a poster for The Simpsons, which was about to launch on Sky One. Six weeks later, I saw the finished poster for real on a 96-sheet billboard on the A3 in New Malden.

Near Sky's offices in Osterley was an Apple reseller. Occasionally I'd go past it and, like Mike Myers in Wayne's World eyeing up that white Fender Stratocaster, would press my nose up against the glass window, drooling over an Apple PowerBook. Clever product placement of these laptops in various films had made them extremely desirable, which also made the one I kept drooling over completely out of range of anything I could afford. And, to be frank, there wouldn't have been much justification for me owning it. But it did look effortlessly cool.

Apple ownership arrived, eventually, 20 years ago, on May 6, 1998 when, under the leadership of the late Steve Jobs, the company unveiled the product that would, finally, satisfy my Apple infatuation, and at the same time, would set the company on the path to unprecedented riches that it enjoys today. That product was the iMac. Essentially a 15-inch portable TV with a computer built into it, that, however, wasn't the appeal, or the point. With its translucent 'Bondi Blue'-coloured casing around a 15-inch CRT tube screen, matching keyboard and mouse, it was everything the home PC user needed in one, neat unit. Even the grab handle led some eccentrics to treat it like a laptop.

The first model was somewhat rudimentary, and functional upgrades progressively followed, along with the expansion of more colour choices ('Blueberry', 'Grape', 'Tangerine', 'Lime' and 'Strawberry'). But that first iMac, however, was an instant design classic. Jobs and his team - in particular, Sir Jonny Ive - had brilliantly thrown away all the aesthetic norms of a PC - beige or grey boxes - and created something that looked good out in the open, not just hidden away in an office. Even the mouse and keyboard matched the 'fruity' colours of the computer itself. The iMac was (and, seven generations on, still is) an extremely daring move. It was also relatively affordable, too. $1,299 might not sound cheap, but that was half the price of most other Apple computers on the market. Finally, Mac ownership was within reach.

The iMac was an instant success. By January 1999 the previously struggling Apple had more than tripled its quarterly profit. Demand was, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, "insatiable". Moreover, the iMac reinvented Apple as a cool consumer electronics brand, and by introducing a machine with such popular appeal (the word "fun" had never been previously associated with computing) the naysayers who believed that Apple was just a niche brand selling to professionals were soon being proven wrong. Visit a coffee shop today - especially one within the catchment of a major university or college - and that ubiquitous, illuminated Apple logo will be glaring right at you from the lids of MacBooks. So much for niche.

I bought my first iMac in Amsterdam in 1999, a year after Apple had launched it. Now, I was not only owning my first PC, but I was also finally owning a Mac. At the beginning of 2001 I moved to Silicon Valley and bought my second iMac, a second-generation model front-loading CD slot and better connectivity. Soon I was embracing the "digital lifestyle", thanks to a USB-based 'hub' device as attractive as it was functional, colourful and, relatively speaking, powerful, too. With its convenient means of ripping and storing CDs, I now had a digital jukebox. The purchase of my first digital camera in the summer of 2001, followed by the iPod's arrival the following October (an introduction somewhat overshadowed in the US by the pallor left by 9/11 a month before) completed my conversion to the twin cults of Jobs and Apple.

It's not an exaggeration to say the iMac saved Apple. It turned a professionals-only computing business into a consumer brand. In the 20 years since that first iMac was unveiled, I've upgraded my Apple fleet in overlapping steps: the original iMac gave way to the first flat screen model, that gave way to sleeker and thinner models. The iPod gave way to larger capacity models, Nanos and then Apple's next masterstroke, the iPhone, followed by the iPad. There are parallels here to the tale of Trigger's "award-winning" broom in Only Fools And Horses - owned for 20 years, but with 17 new heads and 14 new handles. Of course, this continuing Apple fandom is partly the result of clever Apple marketing, but it shouldn't be dismissed, either, that Apple's design excellence - both inside and out of its products - has kept me on board all this time.

Apple has its justified critics (not least of which the mess it has made of iTunes - transforming what has been a brilliantly efficient music management program for the iMac into a morass of user-unfriendly layers designed to push consumers to the Apple Music platform). But much of what drew me to that first iMac, 20 years ago, continues to draw me to its products today - design, simplicity and, yes, just a little sprinkling of fairy dust.