“WHY can’t life still be hilarious?” asks Greg Freeman in Marples Must Go! (Vole, £10). Looking back on a 1960s childhood — the Dandy and the Beano, school milk monitors, Space Patrol, The Flowerpot Men, Juke Box Jury — Freeman cannot help but make gloomy comparisons with the present.

These days the Bash Street School is an academy, Desperate Dan has diabetes, Plug has lost both legs in Afghanistan and Walter the Softy has won the Forward prize for poetry.

The book takes its title from a slogan painted on the M1 about the Tory transport minister in the 1960s who opened the first motorways and closed 4,000 miles of railway lines:  “And go he did,/after getting his peerage, flitting/on the night ferry to Monaco/to escape a huge tax bill. He’s history,/just another perverse politician/putting his foot down on our road to ruin.”