Her advice to this summer’s stressed-out secretaries is: “whatever you do, take the holiday and, ideally, more than once a year and for more than one week. It’s for these reasons, in fact, that a rapidly increasing number of people are choosing to spend their time off from work at home.”But Laura Nicols, business psychologist at Nicholson McBride, disagrees. And finally, the chances of feeling recharged upon your return are very unlikely when you’ve lived a fantasy for two weeks only to return to more work than ever and the reality that it’s another year until you do it again. One of you might want to go to a hot beach whereas the other wants to go on an activity-based break in the mountains, or visit a city,” explains the director of the Stein Clinic, which specialises in stress management.”In addition, people tend to put 48 weeks’ worth of expectations into one relatively short trip with the result that it’s rather like Christmas – it can’t possibly live up to all the hype. “If you’re going away with a family, you’ve got to accommodate everyone else and have probably had to make compromises.

“In some European countries today, and in some UK companies in the past, companies would close down for a designated period every year But now that rarely happens here. As a result, during the summer months, and especially around the school holidays, many organisations are running on a skeleton workforce, which can have serious repercussions on the morale and productivity of their staff,” explains Paul Jacobs, Corporate Communications Director of Office Angels.
“Holidays are supposed to be a time when people unwind and recharge their batteries,” he continues. “But for many secretarial staff, trying to cram in the work that they would normally be doing, briefing other colleagues, worrying about it while away and then having to cope with mounds of work on their return, can cause enough stress to make them need to take another holiday altogether.”As if that isn’t bad enough, research recently carried out by chartered psychologist, Trevor Jellis, reveals that holidays themselves can often cause high levels of stress. However, according to new research from recruitment consultants Office Angels, almost three-quarters of today’s secretaries are working an additional 40 hours to make up for time they take off. What’s more, nearly a third of the survey’s respondents have been forced to change their summer vacation dates due to work demands, and a staggering 60 per cent have been contacted by someone at the office while on their break. Whether this year’s summer holiday will be a week in Blackpool or six weeks in Tahiti, you can be sure of one thing – an escape from work Or so you would have thought. The revolution has become part of coy, unreliable theatrical nostalgia, like singing the National Anthem, matinee tea at the Savoy, and being felt up by older gentlemen at the back of the Palladium stalls..

Whatever its merits, as a play, the Look Back phenomenon is of the past, not the future. Osborne is dead, having mutated from angry young man to grouchy old tosser. Tynan predeceased him, publicly observing, years after his moment-defining eulogy, that “Osborne’s reservoir of bile has swelled as his audience has dwindled”.The milestone has become a millstone. Yet theatre is ephemeral – last night is unrecoverable, so to be still harping on about decades ago is looking through the wrong end of the telescope.All but the most precocious Billingteenies (Michael tells us how he took a pilgrimage to Sloane Square as a Leamington Spa sixth-former) present at that 1956 nativity are coming up for their bus passes.