LIKE most people of my age, I can trot out the usual list of historical stepping stones of the last 50 years and tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing at the time.

First there was the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 (I remember hearing the news on the wireless with my dad).

And then of course there was the landing of men on the Moon 40 years ago this very week.

I stayed over at my friend’s house and we sat up through the night to watch those flickering images of Neil Armstrong taking his “one small step”.

It was a milestone all right and truly a “giant leap for Mankind”.

But dare I admit that I found it all just a little bit of an anti-climax?

Before you rush to condemn, bear in mind that we’re talking here about a spotty teenager who’d probably spent far too much time in his formative years following the adventures of Dan Dare in the Eagle and watching cheesy old sci-fi movies on the TV.

Now I didn’t expect a green-faced Treen like the one above to leap out and interrupt Armstrong’s stirring speech.

But after all that incredible build-up an alien encounter of some sort would surely have been the cherry on the cake.

In a Fifties B-film an imposing figure in flowing robes would have stepped out from behind a boulder to declare (in perfect English, of course): “Greetings, O Earthlings. I am Mee-Ron, supreme councillor of the Lunarian Congress. We have been expecting you.”

But then real life rarely measures up to the movies, does it?

PS: What’s the surest way to lose Brownie points with your daughter?

Easy. Promise to video one of her favourite TV programmes (as I did with the new Red Dwarf adventure a couple of months back) and then tape over it before she gets a chance to view it.

I felt a proper idiot. But probably not as much an idiot as the bloke at Nasa who – it has now been revealed – taped over the first-generation film of the Moon landings back in 1969.

I’d love to know what he taped over that priceless footage. In my case it was the Coronation Street omnibus.