1974 . . . warm memories of cold soup, candlelight and power cuts

BLITZ spirit, as we discovered during the pandemic, is more myth than memory now. When Covid struck, a nation that defied the Luftwaffe’s bombs stayed indoors, baked sourdough . . . and even now is reluctant to come out.

Instead, we’ve become a country that harks back to the power cuts and the miners’ strikes of the 1970s. ‘If you think this is bad,’ we say, ‘you should have been around 50 years ago — the three-day week, cold soup for supper, and homework by candlelight.’

Small wonder we’ve become so defeatist. What it’ll be like in another half a century, when Generation Z are collecting their pensions and getting nostalgic about the 2020 lockdown, I don’t like to think.

A broad range of celebs and former politicians were musing on The Blackouts Of ’74: When Britain Went Dark (Ch5). They included a few heavyweights, including Neil Kinnock and Michael Heseltine, who were junior MPs in the Ted Heath era.

Some remembered it fondly: ‘The camaraderie was just wonderful,’ said Pete Waterman, regaling us with tales of the Mecca disco in Coventry, where he was club DJ.

Others were more critical. Fern Britton was still upset that electricity stoppages prevented her from drooling over David Bowie on

Top Of The Pops. Toyah Willcox, who’d be on TOTP herself before too long, had the toughest time of it. When she got glammed up, taxi drivers and scaffolders would yell at her, ‘Oi! What are you then, an effing clown?’

That wasn’t the half of it. Her family were so worried about her dress sense that, fearing she was possessed, they had her baptised, christened and confirmed.

Much of the archive footage in this 90-minute retrospective was being shown for the first time in decades. It included a wonderful clip of val Singleton and Peter Purves, showing us on Blue Peter how to stay warm during the costof-living crisis, by slipping sheets of newspaper between bed blankets.

Just think of the outcry now if a BBC children’s programme advised that. The editors couldn’t resist including another forgotten Blue Peter moment, with John Noakes doing his bit to save electricity by shinning up a floodlight pylon at Queens Park Rangers’ Loftus Road stadium to check the lightbulbs. Was he wearing safety gear? Of course he wasn’t. This was Noakesy, and that was the 1970s.

Scottish comedian Janey Godley had the best one-liners. Admiring Pan’s People, she said, ‘I imagined they lived in a mansion in London and they all dated George Best at the same time.’ As for the rest of the population, she knew what the folk round her way were doing in the blackouts: ‘People were taking advantage. They were either robbing or shagging.’

There wasn’t one laugh half as good as that in White House Plumbers (Sky Atlantic), a comedy drama that tries to reinvent the Watergate scandal as high farce.

Laboured, repetitive and devoid of clever dialogue, it treats the central figures as cartoon characters. Woody Harrelson plays E.

Howard Hunt like Marlon Brando, with his lower jaw protruding and his speech muffled.

Justin Theroux is his bickering fellow secret serviceman G. Gordon Liddy, who hero-worships Hitler and selected his wife for ‘her intelligence and her Teutonic genes’.

Harrelson on form can be mesmerising, as he showed in True Detective. Here, he’s just hamming it, though he had one good moment on a private plane, murdering a jazz standard on the electric organ.

How did two government agents get to fly on a chartered jet with an electric organ aboard? Even the spoilt billionaires of Succession didn’t have that.

PALE IMITATION OF THE NIGHT: Robin the caveman has been replaced by Thor the Viking in Ghosts U.S. (BBC1), an American remake of the terribly British sitcom. And the prim Edwardian spook is now Hetty, not Fanny. Somehow, it’s just not quite as charming, or funny.