Rewind to 18–24 September 2006, when your car had an ashtray, your phone definitely wasn't connected to it and turning on the interior light was, according to every dad, a jailable offence.

🚗 Booster seats, but make it generational — New child-restraint laws hit Britain, requiring kids to use a booster until age 12 or 135cm. We use it as an excuse to remember the family cars of our childhood: cigarette smoke, manual windows, street directories, station-wagon boot seating and the parental arm across your chest as an emergency restraint.

🚀 Hammond's 300mph horror crash — A Top Gear stunt turns terrifying when Richard Hammond crashes the jet-powered Vampire at nearly 300mph, suffering a serious brain injury in the show's most infamous accident.

🎮 Australia gets Good Game — Junglist and Kapowski plonk themselves on an old ABC couch and launch a show dedicated entirely to video games. What starts on ABC2 becomes a cult institution, spawns Spawn Point and proves gamers might actually watch television when television bothers talking to them.

👖 Chingy's checking out dem jeans — Hoodstar arrives with Pullin' Me Back, Dem Jeans and Chingy's continuing commitment to rhymes that sound suspiciously nursery-adjacent. Naturally, Sing a Song of Sixpence is called in for testing.

🕺 Scissor Sisters don't wanna dance — Elton John plays piano, Jake Shears brings the falsetto and I Don't Feel Like Dancin’ becomes an enormous dancefloor hit despite being explicitly about wanting absolutely no part of the dancefloor.

🏈 The Rock gets serious — Before he was Dwayne Johnson: Global Movie Franchise, The Rock coaches juvenile offenders through American football in Gridiron Gang, while Monster House reminds children that sometimes their irrational fear of the creepy neighbour's house is entirely justified.

📚 Hot mic, cold reception — Anna Quindlen's Rise and Shine sends America's favourite breakfast-TV host into crisis after one spectacularly ill-timed hot-mic moment — while Goodreads readers respond with the devastating literary equivalent of a shrug: three stars.

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