After watching Bad Education, Big School is as embarrassing as watching your dad trying to DJ

You know you’re getting old when TV starts getting nostalgic about eras during which you were already feeling old and nostalgic. Take Pogs, the subject of one of those ‘Whatever happened to them, eh?’ moments in Badults (BBC3, Tuesday), an amiable sitcom about twentysomething flatmates. Pogs were these collectable discs originally made from fruit-juice bottle caps (passion fruit, orange and guava) that were a massive fad in the mid-Nineties. Tragically, though, the reason I know this is not that I played with them myself but that my stepson Jim the Rat did.

How depressing is that? What it means is that even the generation below me, Jim’s, is already beginning to feel sufficiently past it to start lamenting its lost youth. I look at these late twentysomethings of Jim’s age, now fully formed, and opinionated, with a reasonable amount of life experience and their wilder moments behind them and plans to settle down, and I think, ‘At 48, I’m old and screwed and it’s all over, basically, is it not?’

About the only consolation is watching others being shafted by the same cruel process. David Walliams, for example. I’m old enough to remember when David Walliams was still the coming thing, back in the days of the first tech bubble when he played Jake in Attachments (that slightly poor man’s This Life about an internet start-up company) and even before that when he had a cameo role in Spaced as a pretentious artist called Vulva. There was no guarantee back then that he was going to become as famous as he did. But then two years after Attachments, Little Britain happened and the world became his lobster.

So how must he be feeling now, I wonder, about Big School (BBC1, Friday), the new all-star sitcom he has written in which he plays a prissy chemistry teacher? It really ought to have been a total winner, containing as it does — via cast members Philip Glenister, Frances De La Tour and Catherine Tate — the distilled magical essence of Life On Mars, Rising Damp and ‘am I bovvered?’.