made nails manufactured in America? I don't.

But then I have some modest background in studying businesses that rise and fall - why it happens and what it means in growing economic wealth for all the people in a society. The closing down of old industries does not merely mean that nasty businessmen are being stupid.

Poliakoff showed silly rich people at extravagant parties and a hippy group in which the same people appeared to have become poorer but wiser. None of this told us anything of importance about what was really going on in British society. It did not tell us, for instance, that violent crime was dramatically increasing over the years the play covered: because this is outside the self-regarding life of the essentially upper-middle-class media, politics and business elite which Poliakoff depicts.

As for the politics, as so often before on the BBC, the years of Margaret Thatcher were written off with some old television footage of street riots and policemen. This would be