With the clip show format arguably starting to go off the boil, if we need anything at the moment we need a sense of strangeness, otherness, distance, among programmes of this genre. I Love the Nineties therefore seems rather unnecessary and pointless, and to have come too soon.

That said, this programme was better than it could have been: as a summary of 1990s pop-cultural trends it was pretty good (with the exception, of course, of the Manchester “baggy” movement and, unforgivably, craze of the year Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which had been shoehorned into the late 1980s editions). With Sheryl Lee fronting the show, Twin Peaks was an inevitable lead-off, and I wouldn’t argue with the inclusion of GoodFellas. The lengthy feature on supermodels – Linda Evangelista, Elle Macpherson et al – revealed how much the culture of obsessive style and marketing of the self so characteristic of the ’80s had embedded itself in modern life (remember here that, in 1990, much was made of “The Caring, Sharing ’90s” and some kind of notional shift away from those values).

Other sequences were fun but didn’t tell us anything new: the sequence on “New Man” imagery in car adverts smacked of filler, though the advert featuring “God Bless the Child” sticks in the mind, and top marks for tracking down the actual girl who appeared in it, complete with her mum. But we’ve been told too often how iconic Gazza’s tears in the 1990 World Cup were, how great New Order’s World in Motion was, and how the tournament was the turning point for football away from its ’80s image of hooliganism towards its 90s success and fashionability. Hearing all this again can only bring on a “Yeah, so what?” sort of reaction, though the Des Lynam clips showcased the man at the peak of his game. And I was never much of a fan of Nick Park’s Creature Comforts, though the excellent research that has always run through these programmes (more so than with any other nostalgia strand) was in evidence when some of the “men on the street” whose voices were featured in the films turned up.

There was some great music on show: Adamski was, briefly, the great pop star to come out of the acid house scene (itself already covered in the 1988 programme), and the clip of his Top of the Pops performance of NRG in early 1990 with its anachronistic Legs and Co dancers brought out of retirement showed how out of touch the programme – like daytime Radio 1 – was becoming at this point. Killer remains an awesome single (shame that, apart from Crazy which we also heard, Seal never did anything to match it). It was fun to see his amateurishly keyboard-smashing Smash Hits Poll Winners Party performance of the punky flop Flashback Jack as well.

MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice were both hugely popular for a brief moment at the start of the ’90s, and fit the remit of these shows to capture the ephemeral and fly-by-night, their success having been incredibly short-lived but symbolic of a particular time. Both were unable to make any significant comeback and neither could regain credibility with hip-hop audiences after their pop stardom – although both had their part to play in hip-hop becoming the world’s biggest-selling musical style. Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U is still brilliant, though, and the video can never be shown enough. The vogueing sequence was justified for me simply by its featuring one of Madonna’s best ever singles.

The Simpsons sequence underlined the problem of these short-term nostalgia shows – great as the programme is, and necessary as it is sometimes to be reminded of the poorer, Bart-centric early episodes (“Don’t have a cow, man!” etc.), how can you have a whole sequence of nostalgia for a show that is still running today? Obviously most references were in the present tense, and this is something which will clearly become more and more common as the decade flows on and we cover more and more phenomena which are still with us, therefore taking the I Love format well away from its original, purest form.

I felt the same way about the sequence on Baywatch (which amazingly only finished last year) and seemed fairly pointless – though well done to the producers and pundits on avoiding the same old “joke” about David Hasselhoff being a big pop star in Germany (ha bloody ha).

In the absence of the familiar pundits we heard more from the likes of Jim White and, alas, Chris Moyles, who was thankfully almost invisible here but who I fear will take a more prominent role as the decade wears on. And far too much from Paul Ross.

Overall verdict, then: decent and often entertaining stuff, but it seemed slower and more plodding to me than the ’70s and ’80s editions, and I reckon the short-termism of this series’ starting principle will become more and more obvious, more of a hindrance, and make it less and less interesting.

The year 1981 will be remembered for some of the greatest and most visually striking pop music ever to have ascended to the highest peak of the charts. It was entirely appropriate that a key exponent of this – Adam Ant – should have fronted this show; like Marc Bolan a decade earlier, he was a teen idol from the unlikeliest origins, the leading subculture at the end of the previous decade (hippy for Bolan, punk for Adam).

The segment devoted to Antmania which headed up this show – a reflection of their 9 weeks in ’81 with the number one single and 10 weeks with the number one album – showed them to be more influential than some of us imagined. Dave Hill was spot on to point out that they were one of the first (possibly the first) band to build their success around their videos as much as their songs, at a time when the video medium was still very new. Although Adam’s time in the spotlight was brief, the Ants’ stress on image and contrivance was a key factor in forming what became known as the “designer decade”, and did much to further pop’s shift to become a high-concept multimedia project, away from its comparatively low-rent, utilitarian ’70s incarnation, where visual image and appearance counted for much less (compare Top of the Pops in 1984 with Pops in 1978, and see the effect of these changes). It was also noticeable just how good the Ants’ records still sound, 20 years later; the combination of proto-New Romantic poise and punk gang mentality and rhythmic intensity has survived two decades better than any of us could have imagined back then.

The rest of the pop coverage in this programme was uniformly excellent, like the music itself; Kim Wilde’s early singles still sound pretty good, and it’s a classic turn-of-decade pop trick; the image is very 1981 indeed but the actual sound of the records is thrusting, airy ’70s glam-rock (it was a masterstroke to have Mickie Most pointing this out, since most people seem to have forgotten that he produced Kim’s early singles, and that they were released on his ultra-’70s RAK label). A feature on the New Romantics not only evoked the scene’s image and aesthetic, but the introduction of a slightly bemused middle-aged presenter “explaining” the movement to his audience conveyed a real sense of how pop and youth culture used to be filtered through the adult, middle-class establishment, where now they are presented as though most of the audience will instantly recognise them (it’s significant that the broadcasting outlet which has done most to bring about this transition – Channel 4 – began the following year).

Various adverts and features (especially on executive toys) and records in the background like Landscape’s Einstein A Go-Go, Depeche Mode’s Just Can’t Get Enough and the Human League’s Love Action (I Believe In Love) confirmed our consensual memory of the early ’80s as a time of rather naïve interest in synthesizers, early computers, and the mystique of “new technology”, but thankfully viewed it with affection and respect. The section on Gregory’s Girl - fusing into clips of Altered Images’ magnificent Happy Birthday and I Could Be Happy – was a genuinely well-meant and affecting tribute to the film and to Clare Grogan herself. Even Shakin’ Stevens deserved acknowledgement, not only for his seven weeks out in front with two number one singles in ’81, but as a representative of the ’50s nostalgia boom that was arguably even bigger in 1981 than, say, ’60s nostalgia in 1995/96, kick started by Grease and Happy Days in the late ’70s, and given its low-rent, down-at-heel British equivalent in 1981 with Hi-De-Hi!(which remained unmentioned throughout this programme). Ekow Eshun nailed him good and proper as “mums’ music” (the songs This Ole House and Green Door may be 1950s hits, but they aren’t exactly rock’n'roll), but I felt slightly uneasy about the attitude taken – Stevens in 1981 was a symbol of populist, shared nostalgia being sold to a new generation, the very phenomenon to which this programme owes its existence; one might therefore argue that no contributor to I Love 1981 has any right to sneer at Shaky.

The segment on Dangermouse was probably the most entertaining part of the whole programme; David Jason “in character”, Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall themselves, and writer Brian Trueman, combined with clips from the series, showed just how intelligent, well-made and fantastic a programme it was, playing about with the clichés and conventions of virtually every genre extant like virtually no other cartoon series ever. Top marks for the research in the section on Bullseye (which correctly prefigured the titles of the programme with the ATV ident – shortly before ATV became Central) and the brief mass popularity of darts as a TV sport in the early ’80s. The segment really did make 1981 feel like a foreign country; the lumpen-proletarian working-class culture embodied by darts seems to have been largely superceded, as British life and culture generally have become more metropolitan and sophisticated, and it’s hard to imagine that world getting that amount of TV promotion today.

The scenes of the crowds in London on the day of Charles and Diana’s wedding were tantalisingly brief; I’d been vaguely hoping for people recalling how distant that week of hysterical national fervour now seems, and how it could more or less have been happening in a different country from the inner-city riots that were going on pretty much the same week. Nevertheless, the sections that bored me, those for which “you had to be there” (the tedious sex comedy movie Porky‘s, huge Valentine’s Day cards, smelling rubbers) were easily outnumbered by those which fascinated and intrigued me. A necessary corrective to the slightly rose-tinted nostalgia elsewhere was a superb sequence on nuclear paranoia. Only a pedant would object to the clips from Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Two Tribes video and the BBC film Threads, which both date from 1984, because the sequence chilled and terrified me, even all these years on, totally destroying any suspicions that the early ’80s were lovely, innocent times. Far from it; it was absolutely necessary for the series to acknowledge that the entire “1981 generation” lived in fear of a nuclear attack, that the desperate nerves and unease of the time had a huge psychological impact on the programme’s core audience, and that this still resonates and disturbs today; for a 20-year-old like me, it is a necessary corrective to 2001′s rather empty hedonism that, within my lifetime and less than 20 years ago, it genuinely did feel like we were all going to die. Superb.

Really, a thoroughly entertaining programme all round; the series has been improved considerably by the extended length (were it still an hour, I suspect that the nuclear section would have been excluded, and therefore the picture of the era would have been far narrower and far less representative). It seems to me that the series really has found its form, perhaps more than it ever did while the ’70s were the decade in hand – and it will be fascinating to see the pop-cultural aesthetic gradually evolving and moving on as we go through the 1980s. We can be thankful that I Love the Eighties has a long, long way still to travel.

In the last few years before SM:TV began in August 1998, the very mention of ITV on Saturday mornings was a joke. Programmes like It’s Not Just Saturday and Teleganticmegavision would deserve inclusion in any notional chamber of horrors, to represent the very worst of children’s television. But it’s all behind them now.

SM:TV Live is brimming over with life, a sense of enjoyment, risk-taking, humour, irreverence, and brilliance. Ant and Dec clearly enjoy what they’re doing more than any other presenters on children’s TV at the moment, and there is not a trace of the rampant consumerism and unofficial advertising for pop groups, computer games, clothes and other products that has become almost inexorably associated with CITV (and, as we’ll see later, there is a reason for this). When pop acts perform live (this week, the self-parodic Vengaboys and the awful Atomic Kitten) they aren’t presented with the usual orgy of sycophancy and reverence for these giants of pop, they’re just introduced and then they’re off as soon as the song finishes – sometimes they’re even gently sent up.

The programme plays brilliantly with clichés; the “Ant and Duck” item is a spot-on destruction of a certain type of “down on the farm” Play School feature, which could shamelessly offend all the most precious and humourless sections of its non-metropolitan audience (one of the best things about Ant and Dec is their complete lack of influence from the restricting hands of political correctness, or at least its worst excesses). The songs and mock-raps (which seem to target more artists from the ’80s than today) similarly undermine the conventions of children’s TV from within. There’s a camp parody of the tabloid phenomenon of mock-superhero righters-of-wrongs (Captain Justice – “He always disappears with a puff”), a rampant mockery of agony uncles à la Phillip Hodson on Going Live! (“Dec Says”), and the national mythical idea of What School Used to be Like (the brilliant, epic, semi-surrealistic, genuinely weird Country Dancing sketch). When this was briefly interrupted by the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK”, it was almost as if the national cultural battle of the 1970s was being replayed in the most unlikely setting imaginable. Some sketches contain an astonishing pace and diversity of references that much adult TV comedy never manages. There seems to be no assumption that “the kids” won’t “get it”, and it’s wonderful to see the Saturday morning audience being treated with such respect. Still don’t get Pokémon or Sabrina the Teenage Witch, but neither of those should be our main concerns.

CD:UK, which follows, is – as its timeslot and audience requires – based around the pop that makes it to the upper ranks of the charts, but Ant, Dec, and Cat Deeley present it with such personality and vibrancy that it’s never dull. It’s easily the best programme of its type, currently. But this is where we must descend into the abyss, because Sunday morning’s S Club TV is quite literally unwatchable. This excruciating half-hour is introduced by a staggeringly poor opening theme song, which introduces us to seven gormless, vapid, grinning, inane models who laze around a hideous all-white set. In the absence of the actual S Club 7 (who nevertheless contribute a “video diary” and have their hits played in the background) we have a Surrogate 7 presenting the show, which is part of the S Club “media franchise”. The “Pop World” feature is laughably limp, almost Chris Morris-like in its insulting progression of images to explain every word mentioned. About three seconds of an old U2 video were shown to explain who Bono was when he was mentioned, and a brief reference to Harry Potter had to be telegraphed by flashing the cover of one of the books on screen. Westlife – quintessential examples of the MOR boyband genre which SM:TV can parody effectively when it wants to – were interviewed atrociously and with great reverence, the exact inverse of Ant and Dec’s healthy puncturing of pop’s bland promotional parade.

But this was as nothing next to the vile “First Kiss” feature, where the Surrogate 7 presenters didn’t just give their audience advice on how to handle their first kisses, they positively instructed the audience exactly what to do, what to think, and what to feel. With its obsessive pushing of its viewers to miniature adulthood, its blatant sexiness, and its air of thinly-disguised propaganda for the cause of personal and physical “perfection”, this sequence was not only embarrassing, but it was truly one of the most risible things it’s possible to see on CITV. Later in the show, a lengthy plug for what we should be buying (not “might” or “could”, notice, but should) informed us of £24.99 computerised puppies, £30 “truth machines”, and clothes costing up to £140 for one jacket and pair of trousers combined. These were shamelessly hyped up, their prices flashed ostentatiously and clearly onto the screen.

Other features – “Search for the Stars”, where a 14-year-old gymnast spoke in the usual terms of her ambitions for success, and a section where you are encouraged to form with a your friends a “human S Club logo” – are dully predictable. But one feature is truly hideous – the living fashion accessories giving members of the public banners reading “WATCH S CLUB TV” on one side and, on the other side which they can’t see, “I WET THE BED”. The sniggering new Beautiful People’s laughter is then filmed for the audience’s pleasure. Public humiliation on children’s TV; how much further can the S Club franchise sink?

That is not something I would care to predict, though S Club TV is almost certainly the worst thing on children’s TV right now. SM:TV Live, on the other hand, is one of the very, very best in recent years. How long they can keep this up remains to be seen, but Ant and Dec have undoubtedly restored to Saturday morning TV a sense of event, excitement and occasion it had previously lacked for far, far too long.

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).

Both could conceivably have happened had the Queen, in 1953, given into establishment pressure to ban the television cameras from her coronation – those against included Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who famously described TV as a “tuppenny Punch and Judy show”, and, initially, Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher and Earl Marshal the Duke of Norfolk, whose responsibility it was to organise the event.

But of course we know what happened when the cameras were let in – it not only ushered in the television age, but it created a period of absolute deference to the monarchy throughout British society. The original ITA regulations of 1955 declared that there had to be a two-minute interval between “any appearance by any member of the royal family” and an advertisement. In 1957, Malcolm Muggeridge was dropped from Panorama after he had dared to ask, in the US magazine the Saturday Evening Post, “Does England really need a Queen?” But as public interest in the royal family declined during the 1960s, and the reverence previously shown for them came to seem increasingly anachronistic, they hit, for the second but not the last time, on the idea that television could be their saviour. 1969′s Royal Family documentary showed them in an informal, day-to-day context for the first time, and this rebranding was, initially, very successful, with the programme itself being one of the first “big productions” in colour.

In retrospect the image-making of the royal family in the 1980s, again utilising television, is a classic example of that decade’s “marketing of the self”, which like that concept collapsed dramatically in the early 1990s. The royal weddings of 1981 and 1986 were surrounded by an extraordinary hype and hushed reverence which seems so much longer ago than it is, while It’s a Royal Knockout in 1987 appears as something of a nadir. It was essentially an attempt to engineer the young royals into fairy-tale families for the electronic age – and it crumbled almost overnight in 1992, as the marriages of Prince Charles and Prince Andrew collapsed. In this context, the documentary Elizabeth R, which followed the Queen through 1991 – and for which BBC1 portentously cleared their evening schedules on the day of the 40th anniversary of her succession, Thursday 6 February 1992, moving the Nine O’clock News to 9.50 pm, something hardly ever allowed for anything apart from major sports events – seemed old-fashioned and anachronistic in its quiet, calm, uncritical devotion to the monarch. The commemorations for the 40th anniversary of her coronation, on Wednesday 2 June 1993 – the original telerecording shown in the afternoon on BBC1 followed by a documentary called Coronation Day: As if it Were Yesterday in the evening, and ITV clearing aside two hours of peaktime to show an undistinguished effort entitled Days of Majesty - seemed even more so. In the context of 1993, they appeared as forelock-tugging throwbacks to a bygone era.

In 2000 royal coverage on television is the least reverent it has ever been, but traces of the old style remain – ITN have thankfully long since ceased their bland Sunday-afternoon summaries of royal tours (“The Duke and Duchess of York in Canada” and the like) although they continued until about 1989/90, but Jennie Bond remains the BBC’s “Court Correspondent” (“Court” itself being an absurd piece of medieval phraseology) with all her claims to speak for “the nation” and dismissal of Prince Philip’s neo-colonial “gaffes” as simply good-humoured quips. BBC2′s much-publicised Counterblast: Dear William - in which Liverpudlian 18-year-old Barry Hales suggested that the royal family itself is an outmoded institution and that Prince William would be happier and better off outside it – was still considered too sensitive to show on the actual day of the prince’s 18th birthday, 21 June, astonishingly because the claims it made were not exactly startling, unusual or particularly controversial.

The presentation was the downside, of course. Unnecessary interjections of Oasis songs over clichéd images of the city of Liverpool, ludicrous mock-graffiti writing for the results of polls among young people which appeared on the screen, and an interjection of the “… Baby One More Time” video when William’s much-vaunted “relationship” with Britney Spears was mentioned. There was an unintentionally amusing moment when a photographer was instructing students from Hales’s Liverpool comprehensive school to say “In your best Scouse accent, Paul McCaaaaaeeertney!” Hales’s argument against the royal family – that they present a timewarped, kitschified image – rings a little hollow in the context of this portrayal of Liverpool in the most clichéd sense imaginable, every bit as trapped by what it achieved in the past – specifically, the 1960s.

Nevertheless, Barry Hales’s persona was personable and likeable, and he convincingly brought forward an argument against the institution of the royal family, the way it traps those born into it, and prevents them from living anything like, in the much-vaunted phrase, “a normal life”. The film’s most effective moment was when Hales commented on how we’d been told, at Prince William’s birth, that he would live a very different, much less isolated, life from his predecessors, followed immediately by a news report of the prince going to his boarding prep school at the age of eight, with the voice of the BBC solemnly intoning that he would have to “make his own bed”. Most significantly, Barry Hales succeeded in giving the impression that, ultimately, Prince William himself would be happier removed from the institution in which he has grown up, however hard the decision might be for him to make.

As for The Real Queen Mother it didn’t actually tell us much new about this matriarchal figure, but it did reveal the sheer scale of her influence behind the scenes, much greater than has been public knowledge until very recently, and also the way she has successfully shrouded her past in mystery, even down to the confusion over where she was born. The early part of the programme was effectively atmospheric, with popular songs of the 1920s (especially Spread a Little Happiness) providing an appropriate background to scenes of her courtship and marriage to the then Duke of York, later George VI. But we got an early indication of her skilful rewriting of events with a recount of her only interview ever, given to The Star newspaper in 1923, where she insisted that there had been no failed attempts to propose to her. The truth is generally agreed to be somewhat different.

Some contributions to the programme were extraordinary in their outmoded reverence – Zara Cazalet observing that Wallis Simpson was “common … well, at least, she looked common”, and the Queen’s former chaplain, the plummy-voiced, caricaturishly “amiable” Rev Anthony Harbottle, bleating “Truly, the Queen Mother has a foot in heaven.” But the overriding impression was of the sheer iciness of her attitude when it worked to her convenience. Perceiving Mrs Simpson – brash, American, supposedly “classless” – as a threat to her values, she refused to acknowledge her marriage to the former Edward VIII in France in 1937, and when they were sent to the Bahamas (with the now Duke of Windsor as Governor-General) in 1940, she sent a telegram there insisting that nobody should curtsey to the Duchess. She met the Duchess of Windsor just once thereafter, in 1967, and her influence is still significant enough for her personal letters on the subject not to have been published with the other abdication papers this year. You begin to wonder just how and why she reached her “nation’s favourite granny” image.

I should imagine that it is common knowledge by now that she greatly admired Margaret Thatcher, and retains a colonial attitude to Britain’s black population, but, however often it is repeated (an entire C4 documentary on the subject just two weeks ago) there’s something uniquely harsh about her treatment of Marion Crawford – “Crawfie” – governess to the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, who was ostracised largely because of one observation about the low priority the then Queen gave to their education, and to whose funeral in 1988 neither the Queen Mother nor either of her daughters even sent flowers. And it gives a certain cheap laugh to reflect that she, allegedly, described Clarence House (when it was first suggested in 1952 that she should move there) as “a horrid little house”, a phrase which sounds like an Enid Blyton child describing a Manchester back street.

What a profoundly paradoxical character the Queen Mother is. An aristocrat from another age, who gave her daughters an even-then outmoded and limited home education, but who promoted herself as the first “modern” royal in the 1930s, being famously photographed by Cecil Beaton (though demanding that the pictures were touched up), being referred to as the “Queen of Hearts” by an American newspaper, and pioneering the royal walkabout. A woman who cynically publicized pictures of herself in the bombed wreckage of Buckingham Palace as a means of boosting her popularity when newsreels of the exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor were getting stronger responses in the cinemas than those of herself and the King, and yet has successfully ingratiated herself in the national psyche as a beloved, eternally compassionate figure who is somehow “above” all such practices. Most interestingly, her time warped vision of how the monarchy should be retains its massive influence on “The Firm”, and has been appropriated by Prince Charles, with the result that it will almost certainly outlive her. With the royal family’s popularity at an all-time low, especially among younger people, there’s a distinct possibility that her well-meaning concern to preserve it in aspic forever might have hastened and accelerated its demise. What an irony that would be – but it’s hard to resist the conclusion that the Queen Mother’s influence on Britain in recent years has been negative, especially during the D-Day and VE Day commemorations in the mid-’90s, and the endless referencing back to the World War II. Something in her nostalgic and sentimental appeal is certainly very similar to the mentality which held Britain back during the John Major governments of 1990-97. So perhaps an early demise for the monarchy, in a strange kind of way, would be the Queen Mother’s most appropriate legacy.

And I suspect Prince William would feel happier for it.

t’s a key part of Tony Blair’s obsessive modernity rhetoric that his government has removed all the old barriers, appointments simply because of an old school tie, and power of unelected peers to overpower what a democratically-elected government has done.

It is heavily promoted in high-profile rhetoric such as his “Forces of Conservatism” speech at last year’s Labour conference in Bournemouth. Unfortunately, like most aspects of the New Labour publicity machine, it doesn’t really stand up when you look inside it.

Nick Cohen is a superb writer in The Observer and The New Statesman, his tireless criticisms of the Millbank élite making him one of the most distinctive and iconoclastic voices on the Left. When Benjamin “Oofy” Wegg Prosser, erstwhile New Labour spin doctor, greeted Cohen with the words “I wouldn’t talk to you if you were the last man on earth”, we realised the contempt the New Establishment has for him. In some ways he is to them what a writer like Paul Foot (when his views were still strongly represented within the Labour Party) used to be to the old Conservative Establishment – a man whose power, though not given much expression in the mainstream media, is considerable and a matter of fear for those who would like to “rule” without question and forever.

The use of jaunty, cheery MOR music throughout this programme might have slightly jarred with the content, but it underlined Cohen’s talent for presenting his message in a witty and sarcastic way (rather than simply the Left talking to itself). The use of imagery, from the Houses of Parliament themselves, to the homes of various MPs and judges, concluding with a “tour” of the House of Lords at the end of the programme, worked perfectly. Names like Lord Simon, Lord Macdonald and Lord Sainsbury, loyal Blairites elevated to senior positions without any consultation of the electorate itself, appeared on the screen, and it became obvious for the first time how little the legal establishment has really changed, and how much the friend-of-a-friend mentality has survived, sometimes to the extent of full-scale corruption. Furthermore, we realised the extent of New Labour’s obsession with Task Forces, merely a replacement for the quangos of the Tory government they once claimed to despise. The fact that 98% of these task forces’ members are from private business, and only 2% are from trade unions (there was a sense of amazement and anger simultaneously in Cohen’s voice when he realised this) tells you all you need to know about how far Labour have moved from their past, and the Commissioner for Public Appointments, Renee Fritchee, seemed sadly aware of her impotence in this context.

Use of archive material was also superb – after a clip of Anthony Sampson on Tonight in 1965 referring to the heavy influence of Oxford University graduates on the then-new Harold Wilson government, we saw how unelected peers elevated to high places by New Labour have encouraged investment in Oxford, rather than in the North, because of their strong links with the city. The difference between Sampson’s plummy tones, now sounding very dated, and modern news presentation, is striking, but the fact that his comments can still be applied proves that less has changed than some would suspect. The juxtaposition of footage – Blair’s polemic of breaking down old divides and creating new freedoms next to this – was telling.

Personally, I happen to feel strongly that this programme revealed the depressing truth about the New Establishment – that it is simply the old one in deceptively youthful, fashionable clothing. But even those who show much more sympathy towards the New Labour machine than me will surely have felt themselves momentarily swayed by Cohen’s argument, even if they didn’t agree with it (which is surely the sign of success for any deliberately and proudly biased political programme such as this – to impress those who do not share its views). Cohen is a master at presenting a political point in this form (his style manages to be incredibly dynamic, often sarcastic, but without losing its authority), and Tony’s New Boy Network, in presentation if nothing else, was a classic of its kind.

Channel 4, not really feeling any responsibilities to suck up to establishment values, has always been able (especially in the Secret Lives series) to take a more ambivalent, more analytical view of old Establishment figures than the BBC tends to.

John Betjeman is the subject of a great love-hate relationship on my part – an admiration for his passion, his undeniable skill as a poet and his communication of his feelings, coupled with a deep antipathy for his inveterate conservatism, and the way his opinions (albeit in a simplified form) could be promoted as populist nostalgia by the Daily Mail, Telegraph and all the usual suspects, and used as a defence for their contempt for all modern architecture.

This was a good, solid C4 effort, albeit not as striking and iconoclastic as Saturday’s Guardian (which devoted the whole of page three to it) led us to believe. It needed more space and time to fully illustrate his complexities, and as an anthology of his life and achievements nothing will ever come close to 1983′s mercurial, although slightly rose-tinted, Time With Betjeman (which included lengthy extracts from just about every TV documentary and short film he ever made).

Gushing, embarrassing tributes from right-wing journalistic friends like Simon Jenkins and Auberon Waugh were irritating, but the scenes which reconstructed Betjeman’s sad childhood (boys at his prep school chanting “Betjeman’s a German spy”), the hazy films to accompany such poems as Hunter Trials, and the reflections on Betjeman’s melancholic last years, showed the main virtues of the main’s poetry (evocation of a certain type of “Englishness”, a sense of landscape, the loneliness of boarding-school childhood and the regret of old age). The much-talked-about revelation of his involvement as a press attaché for the British embassy in Dublin during World War II, when he came close to being killed by the IRA, did at least reveal the conviction with which Betjeman held his opinions (there have been many bumbling English gentlemen who use their facade to hide their ruthlessness of thought, and Betjeman in this case was definitely one of them). His support for Irish Premier Eamon de Valera (perceived as a traitor in Britain because of his strong neutrality following pressure from Churchill to join the Allies, and belief that Germany would win the war, leading to cartoons in the British press speculating that Ireland would join the German cause), and his incredibly brave letter to London saying that the only way to persuade the Irish into the war was to end partition and create a united Ireland, with his criticisms of Unionist leaders in the North, are thankfully very distant from the uncritical Unionist line still taken by most of the British establishment (compare Betjeman’s views in 1942 to a Telegraph editorial now …) His letters back to London actually reveal a profound understanding of the mentality that drove the IRA, and the similarities with the Nazi ideology of “purity”. Read now, they seem to grimly anticipate the actions of the IRA after 1969.

Extracts from his 1962 British Transport Film John Betjeman Goes By Train and 1956 Shell film Discovering Britain were welcome, and the latter had a musical intro which is the 1950s, somehow. But most interesting to me was the discussion of Betjeman’s disagreements with Nicolaus Pevsner – Betjeman the romantic idealist (whose vision of the Church of England had much less to do with Christianity than it had to do with a rose-tinted dream of rural English continuity) vs. Pevsner, with his much more rational and scientific view of architecture. I side with Pevsner here, and I don’t share Betjeman’s disdain (at the time) for the town planners of the early ’60s, for whom I have a deep retro-futurist affection.

Where has all that optimism gone? How have we gone from Telstar at number one to the tired revivalism of the last few years? Should Betjeman’s huge popularity and influence through TV in the ’60s and ’70s be implicated in this decline, and if so to what extent? My admiration for Betjeman is highly ambivalent, but it is admiration, nonetheless, and this programme, while nothing special, expressed it fairly well.

The Radio 1 series Blue Jam (1997-99) was Chris Morris’s timely abandonment of the tired formulae of “satire”. It had to happen.

Brass Eye would have been impossible to surpass on its own terms, the Tory government whose final desperate years had been so perfectly defined by On The Hour, The Day Today and the ‘Eye had fallen. At a time when Ol’ Dirty Bastard can cover Phil Collins’s Sussudio, you can understand Morris thinking that characters like Fur Q, with his gangsta-rap take on Easy Lover, would now seem tired and predictable.

So Blue Jam was created, 18 hour-long programmes where the soft, gentle music of Serge Gainsbourg, the Alessi Brothers, Stereolab, Plone and, brilliantly, John Lennon’s No. 9 Dream (among others) sucked you in, before sketches which seemed to normalise the most disturbing human impulses (doctors fighting their patients, a middle-aged couple burning their house down and talking calmly of killing their children, the infamous “fights” organised between babies). It was arguably the most disturbing of Morris’s projects, because with Brass Eye you somehow expected to be shocked, because of the ridiculously, parodically upfront, in-your-face presentation, and the amount of hype that had surrounded it beforehand. Blue Jam crept out with very little hype, and you’d listen to it, almost relaxing … then you’d hear some of the most chilling statements ever made on British radio.

So now it’s been transferred to TV, under the title of jam. Having already heard some of the music used (the instrumental version of, I think, Jim Reeves’ I Won’t Forget You and Morcheeba’s The Sea) on the radio show, and having heard some of the sketches in their audio form, the first two episodes were slightly predictable at times. The TV version of the “The car was four foot long … fucking Noddy!” sketch, from series one of the radio version, looked exactly as I’d imagined it would, which may show that Morris’s actions have become relatively easy to predict.

With each episode half the length of the radio show, extended sections of music have sadly disappeared. Which is a shame – the new Saint Etienne single, How We Used To Live, is perfect for such quiet subversion, and I’ve always wished he’d use Marshall Hain’s Dancing in the City (the line “… and steal your soul away” could be, if played over the right image in jam, as scary as anything ever recorded).

Things like “marrying yourself” and being “buried in your prime”, while still unsettling, are ultimately Morris-by-numbers (although the use of Abide With Me in the latter sketch has worked its way into my mind). But there have been great moments, especially in the superior episode two – the man leaving his wife giving birth and having sex with the midwife, the recurring use of the rude, incompetent doctor who gets away with it because of his reassuring, calm, quiet manner, and “The Gush”, with its loss of all sexual control. All quintessential and superior Morrisism, which makes up for the weaker moments and makes me realise why I’ve anticipated this series for so long.

It’s just important that we have what is almost Cubist television, which plays havoc with the rules of appearance, manners, shape and form. The use of Minnie Riperton’s Loving You in episode one, with the “squealing” middle eight sung over and over again by a grotesque-looking woman being continually beaten by a naked man in some kind of rainforest, was incredible. As a brutal recontextualisation, soiling and forever polluting every “innocence” we imagine in the past, it topped even his perversion and dirtying of the Alessi Brothers’ Oh Lori on the radio show.

Whatever my personal feelings might be (and I thought series three of the radio show was substandard, and quite predictable in places), I’m glad it exists, this anthology of weird normality, this compendium of universal pathology. It makes you think that there are other ways of being out there, that there are lives a million miles away from what most of us would regard as “normal”. And, however unpleasant the fact might be, the thought is, in the most twisted way imaginable, comforting.

As I may have said elsewhere, these are auspicious times.

The old order is dead. The new order is suffering a traumatic birth. In his book and TV series, Observer journalist Andrew Marr has captured a moment.

In programme one, recalling his middle-class Scottish childhood, Marr evoked the old sense of “Britishness” he was once taught, which has now faded into history. The whole programme was a fascinating journey of discovery, but a few moments stood out – the articulacy of Scottish football fans clearly surprised Marr, and showed the spread of anti-English feeling. The use of Catatonia’s howl of “Every day when I wake up, I thank the Lord I’m Welsh” over scenes of an Eisteddfod was a masterstroke – it underlined the way that Welshness is now defined simultaneously in ancient and modern terms, a nation more self-confident and at ease with itself than at any other time in living memory.

In programme two, mostly concerned with Britain’s integration in Europe, Marr dissected the essential difference between France and Britain – the French see themselves as Europeans and place great importance on “cultural identity” as a symbol of who they are, fearing globalisation and America, while the British love these standardising forces and continue to fear Europe. Its account of the effects of globalisation showed the impossibility of cultural isolation in the modern world, and, like Darcus Howe, Marr pointed out the irony that the Thatcher government, which promoted the restoration of old “British” values, introduced policies that brought on the now inevitable, unstoppable force of globalisation. In this context, right-wing voices like Peter Hitchens and Bernard Ingham seemed hopelessly out of time.

In programme three, Marr correctly identified the summer of 1977 as being one of the turning points in British history – a transitional period between the old monopoly Britishness and the current post-consensus age, as the celebrations for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee (an attempt to revive the universal self-confidence that had followed, and been encouraged by, her coronation in 1953) jarred badly with the punk movement, the decay of Callaghan’s Labour government and the rise of the National Front. As Billy Bragg said, it was then that the multi-cultural society we have now was painfully taking shape, and there was a succession of reactionary movements to prevent it – Thatcher being the last gasp of imperialism, desperately trying to throw a dead culture back into shape. Marr related modern-day rebellions, like the Poll Tax riots of 1990 which did so much to bring down Thatcher, back to peasant revolts, Chartism and the suffragettes, and currently identified the latter as the other great British tradition, a corrective to the vision of calm, quiet, “unchanging” rurality cherished by John Major. The scenes of environmental protest revealed the ever-strengthening backlash against big corporations, and the strength of anti-New Labour feeling among Britain’s rural tribes was revealed by scenes of a game fair in Yorkshire, and an interview with the organic farmer Robin Page, best known as presenter of One Man and His Dog, of all things.

Page may have seemed deeply intolerant, if not paranoid (he seemed convinced that New Labour had a gang of storm troopers who were waiting to kill him because he does not use the internet) but you only have to read about the hostile reception Blair received last week from certain West Country farmers, or scan the pro-hunting and anti-Blair editorials regularly published in the Telegraph and Mail, to realise that Page’s Britain retains its strength.

But, one suspects, it will not retain that strength forever. It was the scenes in Brick Lane which revealed most about the way this country is really going – where once we gave our culture to the world, now the world is giving its cultures to us, and changing us irrevocably. You feel that this Britain, with its ability to change and evolve, will outlast the Britain cherished by Page, which has developed an almost fetishistic attachment to its traditions, and now seems trapped by what it once was.

The Day Britain Died left no ultimate answers and plenty of questions – but that’s where Britain is at the moment. It presented an ultimate collision soon to come between two completely different ideas of “identity”. In years to come, I think people will look back to this programme as a snapshot of Britain at a crucial stage of transition.

Children’s drama is reborn.

It feels such a relief to be able to say those words, especially after the recent false dawns – the global gloss of The Magician’s House, the multi-national nothingness of See How They Run, and (shudder) the slapstick abortion of The Ghost Hunter. But this 13-part series, with its bleak vision of a Britain 25 years hence where the very existence of human life is under threat, is the rebirth we’ve anticipated for years.

In Life Force, the polar icecaps have melted, the planet is flooded, much of Britain is under water, science is illegal, and both scientists and senders (people with telepathic gifts created by genetic engineering) are illegal – they are taken away and “disappear”, to use the euphemistic terminology of Communist regimes. It is the senders – Mai-Li, Ash, Greg and Karen – who are the figures of identification, the programme’s greatest strength. This background where crisis, if not apocalypse, is eternally possible, and the basis of “humanity” as most of us know it has been brutally, forcibly altered, has made the first four episodes almost continually on edge, as if they literally have to do this to live.

Episode four was a masterpiece – visceral, thrilling, emotional and challenging in equal measures. This really was drama, a concept which barely exists in most children’s TV now, killed by the crossover with comedy and the soapification of long-running series. Individual scenes – especially the ferocious guard dog and its “taming” by one of the senders – stick in the memory and won’t leave. It’s exactly the push, exactly the stimulus our anaesthetised children’s TV needs.

Unfortunately, the ratings-obsessed CITV executives have pulled Life Force from its prime slot, and confined it to the obscurity of Sunday mornings, plus Tuesday afternoons on ITV2 (not in Scotland). You must see it there, and experience the rebirth they don’t want you to see.