Doesn’t it seem so long ago? No Big Brother, Saturday night television filled with singers and talent shows, cynicism over Britain’s Olympic hopes… yes, just marvel at how different the world was 10 weeks ago, before I Love the Seventies.

The Saturday night fixture reached the end of its run with the same mix of great archive footage and irony-filled soundbites. The only real difference was that some new pundits made their debuts. Of them, Alan Cumming was pleasantly fey, Tracey Ann Oberman was rather pointlessly bitchy (describing the Rubik’s Cube as “something that boys who masturbated a lot used to play with”), and Shaun Ryder was – well – Shaun Ryder (“I think that was my glue-sniffing phase”). I’d like some sort of conformation that Zandra Rhodes’ only appearance in the entire series was for two seconds, announcing that “this is the Rubrik Cube (sic)”.

The “Rubrik” Cube sequence was actually the most successful part of the programme, and really sums up what was great about the series. It took some marvellous archive footage – including Noel Edmonds announcing that it was “driving me absolutely mad” and Jonathan King proudly unveiling the puzzle on Top of the Pops, among lots more great period news coverage – and some inspired guests. It was brilliant to see shots of the Daily Mirror-sponsored British Cube Championships, and then see the winner interviewed today. Also present was Patrick Bossert, the pre-pubescent author of “one of the publishing sensations of the year”, You Can Do The Cube, accompanied with clips of him actually introducing a programme explaining successful cube technique. This footage hasn’t been shown for years, and so there’s automatic nostalgia straight away (like, say, if the BBC were to repeat The Goodies, rather than Fawlty Towers again).

The programme’s been at its best when dealing with cultural phenomenon that haven’t lasted. Therefore, while the sections devoted to two-tone and the film 10 were well done, and pretty essential to a programme on the year, they weren’t really providing anything that we hadn’t seen before – 10 has been shown several times since 1979, and some unfortunate scheduling meant that the two-tone item was broadcast just four days after Madness had been the subject of a 40-minute documentary, on the same channel’s Young Guns Go For It.

So it was perhaps more interesting to see the retrospective on Holly Hobbie, a phenomenon that I’d almost forgotten, and it was fun to see it again. For a bit, anyway – and as has been noted here, the programme struggles when it deals with ephemera, and particularly clothing, where little footage exists. The section on tight jeans relied on a few old adverts, then lots of straight anecdotes over mocked up shots of actors wearing them, and in the end this became a little tiresome.

These are criticisms that could be levelled at all the programmes in the run, and there have been many plus points that have ensured a series that’s been consistently entertaining. The two main plus points, of course, were Stuart Maconie and Peter Kay, and both went out on fine form. Peter was enjoying himself remembering “Monkey magic, and it were, weren’t it!”, and pointing out that the title sequence to the legendary import was almost identical to Bergerac (congratulations to the programme for allowing us to make our own comparisons – he was right). Our man Maconie related a marvellous story about watching Quadrophenia in the ABC Cinema, Wigan, where he’d “never been involved in such an atmosphere of simmering violence … sporadically bricks were thrown across the cinema”. It was enough to make you wish that BBC2 would show the whole film, but alas, this wasn’t the case.

Even Jamie Theakston managed to do himself proud in the end, during the sequence on The Dukes of Hazzard -”When I was young I used to live outside a town called Hassocks, and me and two friends used to pretend we were The Dukes of Hassocks”. And there was also the regular amusing Pops clip – this time, Kid Jensen looking rather too earnest introducing Tubeway Army. It’s this good natured reminiscence (that’s good natured, Oberman) that has made the series such a success, and it’s fortunate that 1979 managed to turn out enough worthwhile topics to fill a programme – two major movements in pop (electro, two-tone), a pivotal film (Quadrophenia), a heart throb (Leif Garrett), a new toy (Rubik’s Cube) and so on. Other years were not so lucky – specifically, 1977, where, as was stated, there were really only a few things that actually had a major effect.

Perhaps we can look back at the series as a whole – it’s hard to tell whether the individual programmes were successful due to the years that they covered or the way they were produced. Maybe we could say that the weaker programmes in the series (1973, 1977) were a combination of both – both seemed to overdose on “ironic detachment” and both seemed overtly fond of dramatic reconstructions of events, but both also seemed to have little material to work with. The best programmes seemed to come from earlier in the run where maybe the format was fresher and we were less attuned to the techniques that were at times overused. The presenters have been almost uniformly weak, but most had the good grace to simply stick to the script and avoid getting in the way.

It’s probably impossible to make a mess of a simple format like this, and though at times it clearly could have been loads better, I Love the Seventies has been one of the outstanding series of the year, and, were it not for Big Brother, would have been the best series of the summer. What else is there to say, then, but roll on I Love the Eighties? Now that’s a decade I really did love…

In 1978, I was a mere two years old, having just learnt to read with the assistance of Lenny The Lion. It is therefore with some trepidation that I sit down to write this review as I have no authentic recollection of the political or pop-cultural reference points of that year but then again with I Love the Seventies that isn’t really required. There is probably no way of knowing whether this programme truly is a genuine reflection of what popular culture was like in 1978 – or more accurately what it was like to be a child in 1978 – but reflections can be refracted without losing their essential “truth”.

Lynda Carter, looking presumably by virtue of some Faustian pact, barely a day older than when she played Wonder Woman, is a likeable host. The conventions and structures of the programmes are by this stage set in stone and the whole thing runs as smoothly as a well-oiled limousine, or in this case a Top Trumps Lamborghini. The standard ensemble of cultural pundits – Peter Kay, Miranda Sawyer, Fiona Allen, Rhona Cameron – are all present and correct, delivering more of the same. Their observations as ever are no more insightful than your average “I remember when” pub conversation but still evoke the commonality of the experiences of an entire generation. The range of participants actually involved in these cultural artefacts was impressive, including the director and one of the original actresses from Grease, three of The Boomtown Rats, a Sodastream engineer, four lead actors from Blake’s 7, three members of Hot Gossip and the Japanese inventor of Space Invaders. The level of research as exemplary as usual, I Love 1978 struck up an appropriate balance between those responsible for the material and those who consumed it, all coming together with a very satisfying click.

Occasionally, there was the feeling that these vox pops dominated the programme rather than complimented the topics for discussion, and it might have been better had the items been left to speak for themselves. The silver-clad futurist spectacle of their Starship Trooper routine encapsulated the essence of Hot Gossip far more effectively than any comment its members made, even if they did consider the admittedly fairly static number unrepresentative of their repertoire. The commercial for Sodastream and its construction as an innovative essential lifestyle-enhancing accessory for your home spoke volumes about the modernity of the product and the concept of making new technologies, like the advent of Space Invaders, more accessible to the people. This was of course in stark contrast to the basic reality that a Sodastream drink was indeed genuinely vile, flat, synthetic and entirely lacking the allure of the tooth-dissolving originals. Ken Mabb commendably kept the faith, citing contemporaneous sales figures and praising his company’s risibly wrong-footed venture to topple Coca-Cola’s supremacy. Interspersed between the features were a selection of contemporary adverts, including those for Popomatic Frustration and Mousetrap. In a sudden stream of consciousness, I instantly remembered the hours of fun I had with both games – giving adults headaches by popping the plastic dome in the centre of the Frustration board and getting sick of Mousetrap because it took ages to set the bloody thing up. Both, like the family Sodastream machine, are gathering dust up in the loft – all simultaneously so far away and so near.

Amongst all the differing sections, three were pre-eminent. The obligatory look at the popular film, pop act and TV show of the year. Like Jaws and Star Wars, Grease consolidated the development of the high concept box-office smash. Reintroducing, like Star Wars before it, an element of gee whizz sensibility and romanticism that a jaded mainstream cinema had previously overlooked, Grease saw youth establishing themselves as the most visible formation of the cinema audience. The superfluous Johnny Vegas speculated on the rituals of girls’ pyjama parties while failing to point out the obvious irony. Grease is very much like I Love the Seventies itself – a calculated piece of nostalgia primarily popular with those were too young to genuinely be a part of that era.

In a seamlessly sequential flow, the Boomtown Rats were next up under the spotlight, ripping up magazines containing photographs of John Travolta having knocked Summer Nights off the number one spot. Proud to have “upset the apple cart”, Bob Geldof and co commented on their dismissal by punk purists whilst archive clips showcased the Rats’ coherent, textured take on the post-punk New Wave. As punk indeed began to diversify into differing forms, the BBC also tapped unwittingly into a vein of rebellion against the establishment and gave us the saga of a group of revolutionaries who fought each other as much they fought the Federation. The total anathema to the safely sanitised utopian excesses of Star Wars, Blake’s 7 attained a sophistication in its serial narrative and credibly flawed characterisation that belied Paul Darrow’s overtly simplistic assertion that the series was but “cowboys and Indians or Robin Hood in outer space”. Indeed, the appreciation of this series seemed to be negotiated within predictable parameters – Jamie Theakston, still struggling to remember something of note, hit his stride with the incisive bon mot “The special effects on Blake’s 7 weren’t very special.” Whilst Gareth Thomas admirably defended the programme’s frugal resources and made the point that the series should be looked at primarily as a product of its time, the montage of shots comprising the effects sequences slid perilously close to sneering at the show through a self-conscious kitsch perspective. Nevertheless, Jacqueline Pearce’s obvious delight in revealing that Servalan had become “a masturbatory fantasy for an entire generation of young men” was the highlight of this episode.

The remainder of this edition centred around discussing the narrative redundancies of The Incredible Hulk, the limit of Wonder Woman‘s super powers, Kate Bush’s nipples and the bizarre cult of Dean Friedman, making the programme a rounded, cohesive, enjoyable whole. I was sometimes left with the impression that “1978″ was a thin thread on which to hang a string of somewhat generic retrospectives, but then this is a light-hearted, generalised evocation of an era, not a definitive excavation of the preoccupations of a particular 12 months in our history. Designed to do nothing more than provide an hour’s worth of good-natured reminiscence, I Love 1978 does its job very efficiently. And it would take a hard heart indeed not to warm to something that is at once so strangely familiar (even to those who weren’t there at the time), comforting and precision made.

1977 was the year of my first dateable memory. Dressed up by my parents as a giant coin, I remember precariously making the short walk from our house to the local village fête. There – much to the delight of the enraptured parents – my siblings and I joined a procession of infants dressed in fanciful Jubilee related costumes. It might not have been 1976, but it was my long, hot summer. 1977 is also eating berries at playgroup, being frightened by Doctor Who and enjoying toy cars – all for the first time. Consequently it is a year I hold in some affection. However, I Love 1977 confirmed that it is also a year that we have all come to know too well. It is the 1996 (Euro ’96, Britpop, Spice Girls) of its decade. Three S’s sum up that 12 month period: Sex Pistols, Silver Jubilee and Star Wars: everything else is an entry in the margins.

One of the great triumphs of I Love the Seventies has been its reclamation of punk. The first six programmes gradually led us from the radicalism of bedism and Performance, and into the playpen of the Bay City Rollers. By 1976, the emasculation of youth culture seems complete. Then, from out of nowhere – here comes punk. Viewed in this context, punk once again is the explosion of aggression and sound; the alien and opposing force that it should always be remembered for. Truly the Sound and the Fury. Yet, not for the first time tonight, I Love 1977 struggles to find anything fresh to say as it attempts to juxtapose the preparations for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee with footage of the Pistol’s assault on the popular consciousness. Reliving the Jubilee barge trip up the Thames mildly entertains, but one leaves this section with the belief that – for the viewers of I Love the Seventies – punk will have begun and ended with the Sex Pistols.

Juxtaposition, in fact, seems to be the latest narrative gimmick for such nostalgia fests. Vox pops interviews are increasingly cut into actual footage of the subject under discussion (this week it’s Peter Kay humming the theme to The Deer Hunter), and – on some occasions – the pundits are even seen to be intercutting each other with amusing affect. Like footage of the Queen manipulated back and forth to make her look as if she is dancing to an inappropriate soundtrack (see Not The Nine O’clock News in two weeks time – probably) – this technique date stamps I Love the Seventies, revealing how much of a derivation the format has now become.

Still there are some highpoints: the television advertisement for 2000AD does seem – literally – from another world, and the airtime (although undeserved and rather baffling) given over to Take Hart allows a generation of viewers to remind themselves once again of where they first heard that haunting classical guitar – and in what context (Wildtrack would perform a similar feat, forcing a baffling scratch of the memory in those who would come upon Midnight Cowboy latterly). Asides from these moments, the vox populi are allowed to assume significance over their subject matter. Stuart Maconie (truly the Carol Vorderman of the punditry world) is still being filmed vaguely in profile (as he is on Channel 4′s 100 Greatest TV Moments From Hell) and is still spinning out irritatingly accurate summations on the pieces of ephemera under question. He bestrides the vox populi like a nostalgic colossus. As for the rest – Jamie Theakston is becoming more attuned to the format, and Peter Kay more exposed. Carrie Fisher presides over the whole affair and is seemingly still keen to maintain her vaguely anti-Star Wars position.

Yet perhaps tonight’s biggest surprise is the treatment of that film. Constantly alluded to throughout the programme, its final representation is somewhat spartan as the programme makers finally seem to accept the fact that there are some things that – although dearly loved – you don’t need reminded of. Unlike the Sex Pistols and the Silver Jubilee, the ‘Wars is very much still with us. As for the rest of 1977? Well, as I Love 1977 testifies – it all seems a galaxy far, far away.

“Past tennis champions have included tough guys, posers, even homosexuals; but if the girls like Bjorn, he returns that compliment – with interest.” It’s a piece of dodgy film, voice-over by some eccentric Scandinavian reporter, showing one of icons of the ’70s jiving with some women in a seedy disco. Hooray, it’s I Love the Seventies again.

Farming each programme in this series out to different producers has made for a sometimes unnerving variation in quality from week to week. The imaginative idents that cropped up in the first couple of shows haven’t really been equaled – this time we had a rather uninspiring few shots of “1976″ spelled out in reflective tin and wooden pegs. Similarly the footage of young actors “using” archive produce – items of food (this week, lollies) and fashion (lip gloss) – has begun to get boring, serving as it does only to provide a backdrop to more spoken reminiscences from the guests.

But I Love 1976 was still an utterly involving hour’s telly. What made this week’s show particularly great was the wry editing of the production team. This has become more pronounced as this series has unfolded – the clever cutting between different footage to either make a sarcastic amusing point, or one of the speakers look foolish. This time round it made for several high points, such as the cunningly sequenced comments by Stuart Maconie and Reece Shearsmith:

SM: “People say the internet is CB radio for the ’90s, that’s a fashionable thing to say amongst really boring people.”
RS: “It was the internet of the day.”
SM: “No it’s not.”

and between Jonathan King and Peter Kay:

JK: “Eurovision is not necessarily damaging to an artist’s career.”
PK: “Kiss of death, isn’t it? Like doing a James Bond film, soon as you do one of them, that’s it, you’re finished.”

Most of the usual gang looked in – Ainsley Harriot, Kathryn Flett, Ice-T (whoever decided to include him is a genius – his contributions, despite extending merely to whether something was “cool” or not, capture a certain endearing tone), Jamie Theakston (still struggling to remember anything about the ’70s), and even a one-word cameo from Sir Jim himself (“Mega”). And while Wayne Hemingway wasn’t included, there was a great deal more of Peter Kay. His contributions, together with those of Stuart Maconie, make for a distinctly Lancastrian feel to these shows, their respective Bolton and Wigan accents helping to offset the flat Southern drawl of the rest of the cast.

They’re both mining the same seam really, but do it so well, and so engagingly (the absolute highlights of the programme being Peter’s attempts at singing I Love to Love and Stuart’s thoughts on Bjorn Borg – “That headband was way too tight … sooner or later the grip would increase so his eyes became just a mono-eye, a uni-eye …”) that there’s no real need for anyone else to appear. Others here have already said as much, but it bears repeating, especially as it has become more obvious as the series has continued: namely that most of the talking heads conspire to frustrate and distract the viewers, while only a select few serve as great entry points into nostalgia and popular culture.

Malcolm McLaren showed up to offer a few comments on punk. It was refreshing to see this tired, endlessly recycled topic treated here in a slightly different way, with the emphasis more on the fashion than the music. Punk seemed to be at root a culture of appearance and style – it was how punks looked that really shocked and scared the rest of the country, not the sound; and even if you couldn’t play a guitar you could rip up a T-shirt. It was useful to have this subject covered in ’76 as well, not left as it usually is to be lumped into 1977 when punk was already a parody and a mainstream movement. However the absence of the perennial “fucking rotter” Thames TV Today footage of Bill Grundy and the Sex Pistols, which happened in December 76, suggests that next week’s show is going for the big music punk/Jubilee treatment. Maybe then we’ll get comments from Danny Baker and Julie Burchill whose thoughts on punk you would’ve expected to see here (though Mark Perry, editor of seminal punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue, was an imaginative choice).

I’ve seen photos of myself as a baby learning to walk in 1976 and crawling over grass so parched it looked almost on fire. A long hot summer is the only thing I’ve ever associated with 1976 and it was good to see footage of a dapper Bill Giles carefully explaining to an interviewer that he was wearing a tie, not because he thought it was going to turn cold again, but “because it’s BBC Television.” But there were plenty more inspired inclusions, such as a plethora of fine shots of Zooms, Fabs and Mini-Milks, the great depiction of Abba vs. Brotherhood of Man (especially the latter ripping-off Fernando with Angelo – cue more Peter Kay crooning) and perhaps the best section of all, the rubbishing of CB radios. Here we had footage of a bewildered John Humphrys joining a mid-’70s US convoy (“This is BBC Limey One”), Dave Lee Travis on Top of the Pops dressed up in lycra as Laurie Lingo and the Dipsticks singing Convoy G.B., and even Tony Blackburn (or “Jockey One” to use his original CB handle) appearing humbled by his former pastime (“The most appalling thing that I’ve ever got involved with”).

Our host this week was Kermit the Frog (or Kermit The Frog to be precise). This could’ve been really good – witty narration of the cynical knowing Muppet Show kind, plus a few in-jokes and subtle references back to that timeless programme of a Sunday evening. It wasn’t. Kermit’s voice was the main problem, it just doesn’t sound right anymore, and of course it can’t because it’s no longer Jim Henson with his hand up the frog’s arse. The clips from the original Muppet Show were all jumbled up and stupidly edited (the back of someone’s head – ?) while one shot of Miss Piggy being “Miss Piggy” was enough. It only made you pine for some proper re-runs (Gonzo and George Burns are backstage, Gonzo is playing a violin; George: “What is that?” Gonzo: “It’s my new act. Gonzo fiddles while George Burns!”)

As the series moves towards its conclusion the chances are there’ll be less surprises (in the way of unseen footage) and more subjects jostling for attention. There’s also always going to be stuff you thought should’ve been included but wasn’t, stuff you remember belonging to another year, and so on. Enough grumbling; the show’s still the best thing on Saturday nights. So altogether: “I love to love, but my baby just loves to dance, he wants to dance, he loves to dance, he gotta dance…”

Halfway through I Love the Seventies, and this strictly retrospective show clings to its common blueprint; a series of clip sequences comprising of various relevant and irrelevant people discussing particular trends or artefacts with popular recognition either born or reaching the height of their ubiquity in the year 1975, backed by occasional archive footage from contemporary sources.

Put like that makes it sound like a complex programme, but it really it isn’t. Its true essence and style have been analysed in this forum before, and almost don’t bare repeating – Stuart Maconie was there, Wayne Hemingway was there, Ice T was there, the full-length non-DOG-polluted period advert was there. After the entrance of a ragged-looking Dennis Waterman and an initial round-up of ’75-centric clips (reminiscent of the quick burst of info that modern This Is Your Life gives you), the show quickly settled into a five-minute round-up of The Bay City Rollers’ year. Overall there were 12 subjects covered – along with the tartan clowns we got perfume, wrestling, puddings, Bob Marley, Barry Sheene, Rocky Horror, Jim’ll Fix It, David Essex, Jaws and The Sweeney. That depicts a varied and exciting mixture, but averaged out over 60 minutes it demonstrates that a short attention span is presumed by the producer. It’s a shame, as the sequences can leave a desire for more. The Jaws run-down, for instance, was as quick as could be – Peter Benchley, the author of the original book, popped up to offer some background, but he was used sparingly. In equal amounts though we heard from current celebs with no real connection to the film. The controversy rages over whether “Jeremy Spake” (who has become a label for all low-rent talking heads) should be included in these sorts of programmes, and I feel that while they have as much right as anyone to talk about such popular events, for me they have nothing to do with it and I don’t care what they have to say. Unless they’re Stuart Maconie.

The Jaws sequence in particular would have benefited from more time. It was enhanced by footage of an actual cinema audience watching the film, clips from the trailer (a common theme throughout the series), a quick cry of “you have been warned!” from Barry Norman, and what were essentially highlights from one scene of the movie itself. It set me thinking – wouldn’t it be good to see an extended version, with the complete review from Film 75, the full reaction of the captivated audience, the trailer, other contemporary media reports, and the film to boot? This sort of setup is no doubt too valuable as “currency”, especially as we head towards a digital age. Is this why we get such short clips? Saying that, Jaws has been shown rather a lot in the last 25 years.

Of course, the knowing touchstones were there for all to grab – Arctic Roll, Janet Ellis in The Sweeney, Barry Sheene’s shattered leg, Jaws – The Action Game (used to have that), a chat with a Jim’ll Fix It “fixee” (as Savile termed them) … and it left as many questions as answers – why were the Bay City Rollers popular at all (as asked by Guardian pop kid Caroline Sullivan, who managed to lure two of them to her hotel room, only to find them dull and offensive), why was Giant Haystacks called that (‘cos he doesn’t sound hard at all), and why did Janet Ellis have a pot on her head in her role as “Prostitute #2″?

The rigidity of the show makes one wonder if it’s a deliberate tactic. Each week has tended to feature a pop group, sport, TV programme, toy. A simple task could be to re-order all these into relevant subjects areas – bung in a few common voice-over links and you have a new set of programmes. The rules on repeats seem to have an over-bearing effect on these sorts of programme, pad it out with enough new chatter from Ainsley Harriott et al and you’ll be OK. Please, why not just show the whole thing?

This is one of the better clip shows: overall it’s fun, and the level of research is almost unsurpassed. In a straight fight between this though and, say, Channel 4′s Top Tens, Top Tens would win easily. Their interviews with the people that actually made it happen in the first place wins the day.

Halfway through I Love the Seventies, and this strictly retrospective show clings to its common blueprint; a series of clip sequences comprising of various relevant and irrelevant people discussing particular trends or artefacts with popular recognition either born or reaching the height of their ubiquity in the year 1975, backed by occasional archive footage from contemporary sources.

Put like that makes it sound like a complex programme, but it really it isn’t. Its true essence and style have been analysed in this forum before, and almost don’t bare repeating – Stuart Maconie was there, Wayne Hemingway was there, Ice T was there, the full-length non-DOG-polluted period advert was there. After the entrance of a ragged-looking Dennis Waterman and an initial round-up of ’75-centric clips (reminiscent of the quick burst of info that modern This Is Your Life gives you), the show quickly settled into a five-minute round-up of The Bay City Rollers’ year. Overall there were 12 subjects covered – along with the tartan clowns we got perfume, wrestling, puddings, Bob Marley, Barry Sheene, Rocky Horror, Jim’ll Fix It, David Essex, Jaws and The Sweeney. That depicts a varied and exciting mixture, but averaged out over 60 minutes it demonstrates that a short attention span is presumed by the producer. It’s a shame, as the sequences can leave a desire for more. The Jaws run-down, for instance, was as quick as could be – Peter Benchley, the author of the original book, popped up to offer some background, but he was used sparingly. In equal amounts though we heard from current celebs with no real connection to the film. The controversy rages over whether “Jeremy Spake” (who has become a label for all low-rent talking heads) should be included in these sorts of programmes, and I feel that while they have as much right as anyone to talk about such popular events, for me they have nothing to do with it and I don’t care what they have to say. Unless they’re Stuart Maconie.

The Jaws sequence in particular would have benefited from more time. It was enhanced by footage of an actual cinema audience watching the film, clips from the trailer (a common theme throughout the series), a quick cry of “you have been warned!” from Barry Norman, and what were essentially highlights from one scene of the movie itself. It set me thinking – wouldn’t it be good to see an extended version, with the complete review from Film 75, the full reaction of the captivated audience, the trailer, other contemporary media reports, and the film to boot? This sort of setup is no doubt too valuable as “currency”, especially as we head towards a digital age. Is this why we get such short clips? Saying that, Jaws has been shown rather a lot in the last 25 years.

Of course, the knowing touchstones were there for all to grab – Arctic Roll, Janet Ellis in The Sweeney, Barry Sheene’s shattered leg, Jaws - The Action Game (used to have that), a chat with a Jim’ll Fix It “fixee” (as Savile termed them) … and it left as many questions as answers – why were the Bay City Rollers popular at all (as asked by Guardian pop kid Caroline Sullivan, who managed to lure two of them to her hotel room, only to find them dull and offensive), why was Giant Haystacks called that (‘cos he doesn’t sound hard at all), and why did Janet Ellis have a pot on her head in her role as “Prostitute #2″?

The rigidity of the show makes one wonder if it’s a deliberate tactic. Each week has tended to feature a pop group, sport, TV programme, toy. A simple task could be to re-order all these into relevant subjects areas – bung in a few common voice-over links and you have a new set of programmes. The rules on repeats seem to have an over-bearing effect on these sorts of programme, pad it out with enough new chatter from Ainsley Harriott et al and you’ll be OK. Please, why not just show the whole thing?

This is one of the better clip shows: overall it’s fun, and the level of research is almost unsurpassed. In a straight fight between this though and, say, Channel 4′s Top Tens, Top Tenswould win easily. Their interviews with the people that actually made it happen in the first place wins the day.

When I Love the Seventies was first publicised, the BBC said that each programme would be accompanied by a complete episode of Top of the Pops from the year in question.

This idea, though, seemed to be forgotten about by the time the series began – a shame, because it would have given us the chance to see how ’70s ephemera was thought of at the time, rather than having to be reinterpreted by pundits. However, we still have the opportunity to see some genuine old television, given that early on Saturday evenings, BBC2 are showing ’70s comedy programmes.

These are rather poorly scheduled between Correspondent and The Nazis: A Warning From History, thus rather spoiling the feel-good nostalgia factor. Some of the reruns have been fairly obvious – good as Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? and The Good Life were, we’ve seen these many times since. But sometimes, they’ve unearthed a real gem from the archives – for 1972 we had a complete Dick Emery Show, and for 1974 we saw Mike Yarwood in cabaret at the Talk of the Town, London, a programme that can’t have been repeated for about 25 years.

Yet there’s something disappointing about seeing these complete programmes. For a start, the concepts and jokes rely on a knowledge of what was going on in the early ’70s. Also, they often appear to be much worse than you remember – this would probably be the case with an archive Pops, where there would undoubtedly be some absolute classics mixed in with forgotten old rubbish. And one thing that I Love the Seventies is doing is proving that for a “golden age of television”, a lot of the programming was really quite inadequate.

So this week on I Love 1974 we saw The Six Million Dollar Man battle against some laughably bad visual effects, a toe-curlingly embarrassing encounter with Mud’s Les Gray on Val Meets The VIPs (“Well, I certainly know a lot more about the pop scene …”), John Conteh singing badly on some variety show, an archive Crackerjack where contestants battled it out on a primitive version of Pong, and worst of all, a dreadful, amateurish interview with Pan’s People on Jimmy Savile’s Clunk-Click show. This was a real eye-opener, given that the programme was described as “a children’s show”, while Jim came out with a massive amount of innuendo and sniggering asides – “I shall be talking to these ladies about their attributes!” and “I asked these young ladies to come in showing a bit of leg because there are gentlemen in hospitals and places who, y’know, wanna see ‘em.” Hmmm.

The exceptions to this array of poor programming were, of course, Roobarb and Custard. Bob Godfrey’s films bubbled with creativity and wit at the time, and are equally refreshing now. With newly produced animation by Godfrey and new narration by Richard Briers, they became the first presenters of this series not to irritate or bore with their presence. There was an innocence which was perhaps missing from previous shows, and the sight of the duo in T-shirts and jeans doing the Tiger Feet dance must rank as one of the best moments on TV this year.

Aside from them, the programme followed the by now familiar mix of mini-features on the fads and fashions of the year, with plentiful vox pops from those involved and the usual suspects – “cultural commentators” like your Miranda Sawyers and Stuart Maconies. Some people were up in arms about the appearance of Jeremy Spake this week, as seemingly he’s the most hated man on television – yet his comments on Roobarb and Super Noodles were really no more irrelevant than those of Smug Roberts and Simon Donald, and besides, everyone’s an expert on nostalgia.

A quick word about Stuart Maconie – he seems to now be setting himself up as a one-man nostalgia industry, and though he didn’t feature in the first programme, he’s cropped up a lot in the subsequent editions, and at times has veered towards self-parody. Yet it’s easy to forgive him for pointless wibbles like “Why was it called Pong? Oh, yeah, cos it was a bit like Ping Pong – can we cut that bit?”, when he can come up with such amusing observations as describing the ’70s as “a very Yorkshire decade” and, this week, reminiscing that “for a child in Lancashire, [Vesta Chow Mein] made us feel like Egon Ronay! It was a party in a box waiting to happen!” This series is going to make Maconie a star – alright, so we could do what he does, but not so well. Indeed, it’s much like his comment on Les from Mud – “You could see a twinkle in his eye as if to say ‘can you believe the money I’m making doing this’, and you felt ‘Yeah … good on you, Les!’”

So we’re now halfway through the series, although there’s to be another one afterwards which will cover the ’80s. It could be that it starts getting boring, and some of the topics covered are becoming slightly over-familiar. Indeed, much of the Pan’s People feature regurgitated what was said on Lowri Turner’s Lipstick Years a few weeks back, and included the same montage (which in itself was lifted off a previous documentary). I think we’ve seen Dee Dee thrust her pelvis quite enough this summer. Nevertheless, the clever tactic of getting different producers to work on separate episodes means that each programme is distinct from each other. And besides, who could get tired of reminiscing? This episode closed with John Conteh attempting to remember the words to Remember You’re a Womble. At the same time the entire nation was no doubt doing the same. We’re fast becoming the most backwards-looking country on earth, and I for one am enjoying it immensely.

I have fond memories of 1973.

This in itself puts me in a somewhat exclusive club, so far anyway, being the only OTT writer who was actually born in the year they were reviewing of this series. For most of this year I was five years old, old enough to have many memories, and notable experiences, such as having started school. Mostly it is marked in my mind by being in the local paper as part of the “Plant A Tree In ’73″ campaign.

I Love 1973 was for me rather an odd experience. Having watched the previous programmes, and enjoyed them, I was well-disposed towards the series. However, tonight felt too much like the programme was falling into the trap of looking back and laughing, just because people were wearing “funny” clothes. The lighter touches, which had dominated the previous programmes, were overwhelmed tonight, and there were very few moments of fond remembrance, or surprise at an un-obvious guest, like Bill Woodward, the hairdresser from Leicester, aka Mr Mastermind.

The “family of ’73″ was hideously patronising and quite unneccessary, as they hammed it up in bad costumes, and even worse wigs. The programme also felt extremely unstructured as it staggered it’s way through clothes, to style, to pop, to clothes, through home furnishing and back to pop. You were left feeling a little bit like you were in one of those ’70s sci-fi movies where they flash up millions of images to brainwash you. Much of the time the programme didn’t seem to know what it wanted to say about things: was the parka cool or nerdy? According to Noddy Holder’s commentary it was both.

Much time was spent on rather pointless items, like Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, and it felt like their marriage break-up was given more prominence than the career of an icon like Bruce Lee, or the England v Poland match which put England out of the 1974 World Cup. Coverage of Uri Geller was fascinating, if only to see him debunking his “imitators” for copying him with “tricks and magic”.

Discussing television from 1973, the fair point was made that much of it has been so often repeated that it now has little meaning to review it in a programme such as this. Most of the programmes we saw tonight are somewhere in my recent memory, rather than in the past. There was also some recognition in tonight’s show that the ’70s are often remembered in a rather naïve, almost “anodyne” way, through a soft focus lens, which is often in stark contrast to what was actually happening at the time – indeed, I Love 1973 opens with references to power cuts, oil crises, Richard Nixon, and bombing campaigns, before moving swiftly onto Glam Rock.

As to whether the show was “true” to 1973, I have no idea. And I suspect that most people wouldn’t know either. Shows like this evoke general memories and feelings, which is the point of the exercise. They are not produced for “experts”, they are not social commentary or documentary. They are produced for the general public as Saturday night entertainment. As such they are fine. Tonight’s programme went a little off kilter. Hopefully, this was a mere blip and we can look forward to more nostalgia and less sniggering in the rest of the series.

So who’s for a game of Mastermind (Royale Edition) then?

Most archivism on present day TV is so poor and lazily uninformed that I Love The Seventies is clearly a cut above the rest simply because it knows something about its source material, and appropriately contextualises it.

The appreciation of the ’70s is from people who were there, experiencing it, looking back to how they felt and how things seemed at the time, rather than from people who weren’t even around and have no understanding of the era.

Although shying away from any meaningful representation of the rootlessness that some say signified that era, there were some great moments in the third programme of the series. The choice of David Cassidy as host was perhaps a mistake, weighting the programme too much towards a recollection of his own success that year and the rivalry with Donny Osmond. But however tedious and anodyne their music was, it did excite the teenage girls of Britain in 1972 (for a present-day comparison, I’d say Boyzone and Westlife are even blander) so probably deserved representation for nostalgia reasons, though the look back at the New Seekers’ career was less understandable. As ever, too much time was given to the likes of Katie Puckrik and Rhona Cameron, whose insights into these teen idols were no more interesting than those which any fan could probably give.

We did have a welcome return to the favoured Sounds of the ’70s technique of including Public Information Films to evoke the period – and they chose well including the “Learn to Swim” animated PIF with its slightly dim-witted cockney-accented girl and boyfriend referring to “losing me birds”, which was made in 1972. Period adverts added to the feel, and chewing the cud over Spangles and the like, while tedious to me (comedian Johnny Vegas’s contribution was unspeakably bad), was doubtless significant to those who can actually remember 1972. It was also fascinating to see the end of another era, still just about struggling on in the early ’70s – a black-and-white Movietone newsreel of that year’s Oscar ceremony, dominated by Cabaret, with the same old plummy voice despite very 1972-ish background music. But what was the reason for the several tedious minutes given over to Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz, other than to show how scarily old Barry Davies now looks? Why was so much time given over to The Joy of Sex and the launch of Cosmopolitan magazine?

It really got interesting when wider social and cultural history was touched on, however vaguely. While Cassidy’s introduction for clips of Love Thy Neighbour, “prepare to cringe”, would have been horrendously irritating for any other programme, it applies perfectly to this infamous Thames sitcom (shown on UK Gold as recently as 1997, but absent from terrestrial television for many, many years, and almost certainly forever). Looking at it now reveals one aspect of British life and TV that has unquestionably moved on since 1972. It isn’t just the exchange of racial terms of abuse as the programme’s main source of humour that has dated so badly – it’s the entire style, its tinny studio-bound quality, its very slow pace even for then. All those involved agreed that it was a programme of its time and should not be shown again; it had to end in the mid ’70s as its style became increasingly predictable (this wasn’t mentioned, of course, but it ended in the month – January 1976 – when the Race Relations Act came into force). Nevertheless, Radio 1′s Trevor Nelson made the point that, appalling though it may seem now, it was watched by virtually all black families at the time because there was no other black representation on peak-time television, and because the character of Bill Reynolds was clearly cleverer than Eddie Booth, usually ending up triumphant.

Cassidy’s presentation of the Blue Peter vs Magpie split was typically simplistic and reductive on the BBC’s part – implying that Magpie did not exist until 1972 and ran out of steam very soon after, when in fact it was virtually continually successful from 1968 to 1980. Still, Observer TV critic Kathryn Flett pointed out that her mother did not allow her to watch ITV – a ’70s attitude often ignored today, but not an uncommon situation in the straight class-divide split of what was still, essentially, a two-channel society (BBC2 having limited broadcasting hours and being very much the third player). When the Harlem Globetrotters were featured, Wayne Hemingway made the potent comment on how much more distant American culture seemed back in those days of slower and more expensive flights to the US, however all-pervasive and potent it was in a British childhood.

But the best moment was the retrospective of T.Rex – so magnificent was Marc Bolan’s string of hits, so extraordinary was his charisma as a live performer, that you couldn’t really go wrong. Teenage girls en masse have rarely absorbed something so striking and outlandish, and Bolan never failed to live up to his dictum that “pop should be a spell”. John Robb’s salutation was spot on, but why did the T.Rex sequence have to be followed by some impersonator appearing on Channel 5′s Open House With Gloria Hunniford?

There is room on television for a fairly straightforward, nostalgic look back to a particular period. OK, there was too much filler, too little real examination of the nature of the era, but a programme about the ’70s which understands its subject half the time (such as this) is far preferable to a programme which doesn’t understand its subject at all (like most others).

I Love 1971 reeks of unashamed nostalgia. Concurring with its forbear of last week each section was interspersed with snippets of cine film and imbued with a sunny, yellowed taint. Tonight some of us relived clackers, The Banana Splits, Middle of the Road, Get Carter, Jackie Stewart, Shaft and the Brucie-era Generation Game, whilst those of us who couldn’t make it to 1971 felt an illogical pang of yearning anyway.

We seem to know the drill already, so simple was the format established last week; a celebrity with some vestigial connection to the year in question chairs an enjoyable hour of archive footage and contemporary commentary. There’ll be a pivotal film, a defining trend in fashion, playground crazes, a couple of representative personalities and survivors and – we hope – old telly.

I Love, and tonight’s I Love 1971 rightly celebrate the subject; unusually veering away from the smug retrospective sneering that normally mars these sort of ventures. Instead we take on 1971 on its own terms – as emphasised by the wonderfully unexpected incursions of contemporary adverts (and to see those Matchbox cars magically delivering themselves into their own toy garage still gets one counting the days until Christmas).

Of course the normal sticking point is with the inclusion of pundits, and while Jamie Theakston ummms over The Banana Splits, one cannot help but think of the footage we’re not being shown. But, let’s accept it, punditry is required to deliver this material to the audience, and the punditry here isn’t half bad. Mark Gatiss, although a little underwhelming, appears quite happy to quietly wallow in the past and seems to have a genuine personal response to the material. Jonathan King, still the epitome of toad-faced, leaps on the chance to self-mythologise but reminds us that, despite our inevitable associations of 1971 with childhood (and let’s face it, this series is aimed at now grown-up clackerers and Space Hopperers) there were cynical operators working within pop music then – no different from today. Stuart Maconie puts in an appearance, and succeeds in raising a smile with the odd uncovered detail, even if his shtick (which is oft times a verbalisation of an already accepted response) teeters perilously close to easy mockery. But the most welcome appearance was probably from show-jumper Harvey Smith who even now seemed the epitome of the year he was tagged to. Ragged in profile, staunch and crusty he still had an element of iconoclastic fun about him. One of Maconie’s best bits of observation was that the V-sign (which Harvey had proffered to a dreadfully partisan crowd) was the epitome of 1971. He was right, and Harvey still seemed to carry the gait of a habitual “up-yours” man even now.

Even though we weren’t looking on 1971 as a foreign place, with all the smirking that normally entails, there were some moments that made the year seem quite alien, and funnily enough as we continue to consider Harvey Smith it was the revelation that 29 years ago show-jumping was second only to football in popularity that unsettled the most. The only other moment that rivaled this was watching Jack Carter take a bullet on a ’70s shingle beach, whilst the mechanisms of ’70s industry lifted away the man he had in turn murdered – all on that subdued ’70s film-stock. Otherwise this programme was all about familiarity.

One cannot deny there is a simple pleasure in recognition and the spiral of associated thoughts it provokes. Ah, here are the Liver Birds! Didn’t Elizabeth Estensen succeed Polly James? Didn’t Pauline Collins precede Nerys Hughes? And that’s the essence of this programme. It’s a collective memory, touchstones in our own histories – far enough away to be mythologised, but so close you can almost touch it.

And it makes someone who wasn’t even born then feel as though the memories are theirs too. Come 1973; that’s when the ’70s really started. For me, anyway.