MANY aspects of the BBC’s Electric Dreams series have been fascinating.

For those who’ve not followed it, the programme features a family stripped of the gadgets we all take for granted and equipped instead with what was state of the art in the seventies, eighties and nineties.

It has provided the family’s young children with their first look and feel for such things as Sinclair calculators, Raleigh Chopper bikes, Sony Walkmans and Betamax video recorders.

Apart from that wandering towards nostalgia, the programme has focused on the impact technology has on the social cohesion of typical families.

Without computers, games consoles, iPods or other distractions in every room of the house, the family has found itself together as a unit more often.

This has enabled it to make its own entertainment, rather than be reliant on technology.

Time travelling in this way through the decades has been made more credible with the selected editing in of news footage to remind those slightly older viewers of what was happening in those distant days and give younger viewers a taste of the social history of each decade.

Thus, we’ve been reminded, variously, of the three-day week, strife in the nation’s motor industry (when we had one big enough to accommodate strife), blockades at ports and power cuts.

By coincidence, some of these clips were aired as news filtered through of the latest twist in the saga of Royal Mail’s troubles.

Both sides seem to be in an industrial relations wilderness reminiscent of the sort of head-to head-confrontation that used to unfold at factory gates up and down the country in the days featured in Electric Dreams.

No change over the decades there, perhaps.

And yet things are very different.

Many people – ranging from Ministers of State to Royal Mail customers – believe this dispute takes the organisation to a precipice.

The Government makes no secret of its desire to shore up public finances by selling off attractive assets – from the Tote betting service, to the student loan book, to a stake in the Channel Tunnel.

Legal obstacles may need clearing before it happens, but what price (at the Tote, naturally) for a Royal Mail sell-off finally being secured?