Easter parade, Battersea Park (1980) – ITN archive

If you’re News at Ten reporter Paul Tilsley, you describe the main events from the two-hour parade as quickly as possible, taking the chance to insert suitably light-hearted quips, where applicable, along the way, writes Ian Searcey.

So we’re treated to a procession of sights such as Buzzby “the GPO bird” (remember him?) gyrating on the back of a lorry, some other less commercially minded bird costumes, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on a visit from deepest Somerset, beauty queens from Jersey waving from a float of flowers, an RAF jet on a lorry, and the Garden City High School Band from New York.

Tilsley, meanwhile, describes someone in a woodpecker costume as being “in a flap”, explains the RAF plane is wingless “while some local people are getting legless”, that the New York band is more used to “performing next to cheerleaders than chicks at Easter”, and that the people on the boating lake were obviously more interested in “floating than floats”.

After squeezing all of this into one minute and 15 seconds, he signs off. I expect he then went to have a lie down.