A PAIR of very different but equally important things happened in television this week.

The first was the return of the sleeper hit series Stranger Things on Netflix complete with creepy synthesizer music and a whole load of eerie goings on that might be something to do with secret experiments in the woods.

There will be folks who have not seen the initial eight part offering but if you are a fan of all those eighties horror comedies with a bit of ET thrown in for good measure then this will be your bag.

Cunningly, some of the child stars of those movies, now depressingly middle-aged, even crop up here.

In a piece of genius casting Sean Astin, whom my generation will remember as one of the kids from the Goonies but the Millenials will spot as Samwise Gamgee of Lord of the Rings fame, is here in this second series.

He plays the new, seemingly affable, boyfriend of harassed mum Joyce (Winona Ryder), desperately trying to look after her troubled son Will.

If you haven’t watched any of Stranger Things yet, I will leave it there so as not to introduce too many plot spoilers.

Because, having once bumped into a friend in the foyer of a cinema whilst going in to see a film and have him blurt out what happened to a key character in it, actually the main character, I know how irritating a plot spoiler can be.

That said, it can be very hard to keep a secret in these days of social media.

It has made us all verbally incontinent - we have to Facebook, Tweet, Instagram the contents of our dinner plates and what we are doing minute by minute so chatting about what we are watching on television is a natural extension of this.

Poor Prue Leith fell foul of this earlier in the week when she apparently accidentally tweeted the winner of the Bake-Off before the show had been screened.

Still not sure how one would “accidentally” achieve this - maybe she had prepared the tweet to run just after the show had aired but it flew off too soon.

When it did eventually come, however, the result seemed fair and just to me and since I am not the best twitterer in the world, I managed to avoid hearing the leaked name.

It has obviously become increasingly more difficult to come up with challenging bakes though.

But perhaps I am the only one who had never heard of an Entremet before ?