This was the parent's savior. Children watching a cartoon on television they liked where the characters were off to bed.

?Go to bed?, said the narrator. ?Go to bed,? says mum. From the beginning of time, when a bed would have been a pile of leaves, or of grass, or of moss, bed time has been a battle fought between parent and child. We all need sleep in order to live healthy and happy lives. Some people need more of it, some less, but evolution has decreed it, so if it wasn't for the good old bed society would be very different from what we know today.

Over the centuries designers and manufacturers of beds have tried to appeal to the young. Beds became fun things, not a simple platform with four legs, or a terrible daily threat to an active youngster who sees bed as a total waste of time.

Bunk beds were a great innovation for capitalizing on a small space, or gave great fun for a sleepover. How could a bed above a bed, and that's all that it is, become so popular? But if you think from the point of view of a child ? that is use some imagination - the bottom bed could quite easily resemble a cave; whereas the upper bed might be like sleeping in the tops of the trees.

Then again, sit on the top deck of a bunk bed, at the end, with your legs sticking out. Put as many of your yelling, excited friends in the bottom bed as you can fit, and pretend you're riding a stage coach. There you go, over desert and through forests, clattering along rocky paths and careering through shallow stream beds, rocking from side to side as the terrain decides.

This type of bed needs to be built well to travel half way across the Wild West'or survive the over active imagination of a child.

But what do you do if you only have one child, or you are not happy that they share a room? Enter the theme bed. It could be in the guise of a Ferrari, or a Space Ship. Ion fact if you think about it the bed shape lends itself well to becoming a type of vehicle. Fairly low, oblong, and only missing a real wheel at each corner to be more than just a bed.

Of course the bedding itself is used in imaginative ways. What about a duvet cover emblazoned with the crest of your favourite football team? Or pillows printed with cartoon characters?

For the last few years there has been another type of bed. Given the way technology has developed, from the television to the computer it was only a short step to creating a new form of bed time; a new way of getting the young to be happy with their bed.

Now we have Sleep Station beds, or activity beds. These have desks inbuilt under them, where a child can play computer games, or watch television. They might, under a certain amount of pressure from the poor old parents, sit and do their homework here.

The Sleep Station bed is almost like a room within a room, and was an inevitable development when you think how much more time children spend in their rooms. Gone are the days of one television per household, and one computer.

So perhaps the days of??Time for bed said?.? Are well and truly over? No, it will take more than a fancy bed to make that happen.