Graham Carter the voice of age and experience

TIME for a trivia question now, and it’s one you can ask down the pub tonight, if you want to look smug. Who was the last person to be featured on This is Your Life?

The answer is at the bottom of the page.

What you might be surprised to find out – because I was – is the series continued until relatively recently: 2003, in fact, followed by a one-off in 2007, which featured that final ‘victim’, presented by Sir Trevor McDonald.

The original show, with Eamonn Andrews wielding the big red book, ran from 1955 until 1964, which was too early for me to remember it, but I well recall its revival from 1969, with Eamonn still presenting. After his sad death in 1987, Michael Aspel took over.

In the latter days, there were fundamental problems with the programme.

For one thing, some people they featured had hardly had much of a life when Michael popped up, as the 21-year-old Stephen Hendry actually remarked when he was the subject in 1990.

Even worse: by the end it was liable to feature people of dubious celebrity, and the guests they wheeled in to pay tribute were much less likely to be a teacher who inspired their early career or a friend who had made a difference at a crucial crossroads, but rather any recognisable celebrity who might have once bumped into them.

So I don’t think it was much missed in the end, and I dread to think how awfully over-the-top it would be if it was revived again.

But just lately I have been thinking a revival might be a good thing.

Because of my interest in local history, which seems to appeal to a mostly older generation, I get to meet a lot of people who have led interesting lives.

As every journalist knows – and you discover this in your first week in the job – everybody has a story to tell, but only a small minority realise how interesting that story is to other people, so rarely tell it.

None of them would have ended up on This Is Your Life, but because the programme seeped into the culture, there seemed more emphasis on recording other people’s stories than there is today.

Other reasons for this are the fragmentation of the media, the ‘soundbyte’ culture and the sheer pace of life today, which doesn’t allow for much looking back.

So the responsibility for recording personal histories has switched to the subjects themselves, and if they don’t make the effort to overcome their modesty and write their own memoirs, nobody will.

I have lost count of the number of people I have told to write down their own story – if not for public consumption then perhaps for their families or posterity, or simply because one day it will be too late.

In almost every case, I know they never will, but something sadder has emerged from conversations I have had just recently with genuinely interesting people who have fascinating stories to tell.

One or two of them have remarked how their children show little interest, so I am appealing to all sons and daughters of older people to persuade them to get their life story down soon, or do an Eamonn Andrews and compile a big red book for them.

Later this week it is, after all, Father’s Day (and Mum has a story worth listening to as well).

And no matter how mundane they might think their life has been, I guarantee it has more appeal than the last This Is Your Life, because that was all about Simon Cowell.