Brief 42: What was the best thing of the 1990s?

It was not lumberjack shirts. It was not Expecting to Fly by the Bluetones. It was not Just a Gigolo starring Tony Slattery, or Caffrey's.

It was Italian football on Channel 4.

When live top flight football left terrestrial TV at the start of the Premier League in 1992 (and no one had Sky back then), when Paul Gascoigne was playing for Lazio, when Serie A was the best league in the world, Channel 4 had a brilliant idea, a brilliant idea which worked.

We were always told that Italian football was technically excellent but dull and defensive. I still remember watching the first live match in September 1992 (at a family friend's house in Gloucestershire), a 3-3 thriller between Lazio and Sampdoria, two goals for Beppe Signori.

There were many memorable games and memorable players - a 3-2 victory for Sampdoria over Milan where Ruud Gullit, for Sampdoria, avenged his jettisoning by Milan with a stunning winner ... not just the superstars like Baggio and Gullit, the likes of Diego Fuser, Abel Balbo, Daniel Fonseca, Pietro Vierchowod.

Gascoigne was a bit of a side issue - he was meant to present the Saturday morning show Gazzetta Football Italia, but was completely unreliable, so the job, serendipitously, went to producer James Richardson, who turned out to be one of the great sports broadcasters of all time. Gascoigne was meant to be Lazio's star, but he was mainly disappointing there. Not just that he was injured a lot, he just rarely played particularly well when he did.

Paul Ince and David Platt, on the other hand, were excellent in their stints at a variety of Italian clubs. So much of 90s football is forgotten, I find - a story narrowed down to Gascoigne, Shearer, Cantona, Beckham, Bergkamp. Ince and Platt were England's two world class players in the first half of the decade, trying to hold an average team together while Gascoigne wasted his talent away.

The commentary on the live games was magnificent - Peter Brackley is, for me, one of the three greatest British football commentators, and he'd be joined, mainly, by Ray Wilkins, Paul Elliott, Luther Blissett or Joe Jordan, all of whom were super-knowledgeable, and with all of whom Brackley had a great rapport.

When there was so little football on TV, it was such a steady and reliable joy - I, and millions of others, watched it regularly for most of that decade, saw the coming of Boban and Savicevic, Asprilla and Zidane, Seedorf and Henry.

It's time came and went - more bought Sky, or went to the pub on a Sunday to watch the Premier League, La Liga began to dominate more, something like that. It finished in the early 2000s, I think. I remember I was disappointed, but had not been watching regularly for a while. Such a place and time it was, though.