The recording is a compilation of some of the most fascinating moments from the legendary radio series which delighted in the simplest of things.
No effects, no sensationalism, no nastiness of any kind; simply ordinary people opening up their or
dinary lives to a master interviewer, the man with the ever-ready laugh and the permanent twinkle in his voice.
Johnston enjoyed life - and Down Your Way found him enjoying other people's lives, dropping in on the widest range of people from the utterly-incomprehensible Gloucestershire postwoman to the rather bizarre chap who camped for years at Loch Ness and could tell you pretty much to the minute how many thousands of hours he spent on its water.
Fascinating too is to go under London into the sewers and into the Bank of England vaults. But maybe best of all was to visit one of Buckinghamshire's most famous Scottish ex-pats - a certain John Laurie, still known to millions all these years later as the skinflint doom-and-gloom merchant Private Frazer of Dad's Army fame.
Peppering the CD are Johnston's own reminiscences of his part in the landmark series, the fun he had and the satisfactions he enjoyed. Think how tacky and awful so much reality TV is these days. This was reality radio before the reality notion had become debased.
Maybe it was just a little rose-tinted in its evocations of pastoral lives led in country quiet; but these were real people with real tales to tell. A classy piece of classic radio, well worth revisiting.
Phil Hewitt
