Why you want a motorcycle (but just don’t know it yet)

If you have the grizzled privilege of being my kind of age, I’m willing to bet that automotive mayhem formed a key part of your Saturday teatimes. We were truly blessed in the 1980s, whether it was The Dukes of Hazzard, The A-Team or, best of all: Knight Rider.

Preposterousness was no barrier to TV commissioning execs of the era, who quickly realised that fighting crime in a super-vehicle carried a high chance of a ratings smash. Thus next came Airwolf, and perhaps least appreciated of all, Streethawk.

Why go on this nostalgia trip into brilliantly conceived but half-baked 40-year-old TV shows? Because they tapped into a truth as universal as it is fundamental, up there with Newtonian physics and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity: things that go fast and go brrmmm are cool.