Among the drivers were Earl Howe Sir Henry Birkin and Count Giovanni Lurani

Among the drivers were Earl Howe, Sir Henry Birkin and Count Giovanni Lurani. This upper- crust line-up explains why pre-race formalities extended to audiences with the King of Italy and the Pope.In the 1970s, entertaining advertisements for the MGB were written by the likes of Alan Coren. His first car, he recalled, was a pre-war MG Midget for which he paid £12 in 1959. "Its sturdy little doors were bound to its sturdy little body with piano wire (since what it conspicuously lacked were sturdy little hinges), and when you hit the brakes, the speedometer fell in your lap.

In wet weather it was fitted with a passenger, this being the only method of holding the roof on, and the combined roar of the engine, exhaust, tappets, rear-axle whine and wind was a feature that has left me with a permanent shout."The first sports car I ever drove, 36 years ago, was a friend's MG TD. Accustomed to a pre-war Austin Seven with all the speed and agility of a geriatric tortoise, I wondered if I could master such a potent machine. According to Autocar, it accelerated from 0-60 mph in 23.9 seconds - slower than all but the feeblest modern runabout - and declined to exceed 75 mph.Alas, MG suffered all manner of indignities as John Bull's motor industry slithered into decline after the doomed British Leyland Motor Corporation was formed in 1968. Nothing of consequence was done to replace the MGB or the Midget. Launched in 1962, when true believers were appalled by such wimpish features as wind-up windows, the MGB soldiered on until 1980.

By then, what had been the world's top-selling sports car had exceeded its shelf-life by almost a decade. Future generations of affordable sports cars came from the Japanese. Their attempts to create anything stylish and stimulating had earlier been regarded by Europeans and Americans as more of a joke than a threat.Mike Hawke was one of the few outsiders to see the new MGF before its official unveiling. He shook his head when asked if the marque had passed the point where the flame could be re-ignited. "The bhp and mpg figures look good and it has all the makings of a super little car," he said. "From the MG Car Club's viewpoint, this is the best thing since sliced bread."The Heritage Motor Centre (01926 641188) is on the B4100 between Banbury and Warwick.. There's a garden to the west of the centre of Florence called the Cascine.

The arty guidebooks will tell you that this was where Shelley wrote "Ode to the West Wind"; the racy ones that the long, tree-lined avenue bisecting the gardens is where the city's transvestite prostitutes line the tarmac, baring their implants and waiting for custom. Back in town, tourists can gawp at nudes - Michelangelo's Slaves, Botticelli's Venus and Masaccio's Adam and Eve Here, tourists can touch as well as look But most just come to look. This, presumably, is the kind of sexual tourism Channel 4 had in mind when it came up with "Red Light Zone", an "exciting new area of late-night programming focusing on sex, the sex industries and sexual tourism". The channel only needed to add "and the dialectics of pornography" to this description and they would have had a presentable title for a dissertation. By billing the season of telesexual globetrotting as discerning enquiry - High Interest meets Travelog in the small hours - Channel 4 seems to have absolved its audience from the guilt of voyeurism, while still promising enough flesh to put bums on seats at an hour when they're normally in pyjamas. So the question needs asking: like the journalist who goes to a peepshow to research an article, is Channel 4 having its cake, smearing it over the taut nubile form of a limbo dancer and licking it up, cream, crumbs and all in a transport of delirium?"Possibly yes," says Stuart Cosgrove, the channel's commissioning editor for independent film and video, and the man behind the "Zone".