CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: great jokes, but you need a BBC history degree to get them

The love box in the living room

Rating: ****

Lost Worlds With Ben Fogle

Rating: ****

Like a pre-war copy of Punch, Harry Enfield is bursting with brilliantly witty satire about things hardly anyone remembers.

A degree in BBC history was required to understand even half of the jokes in his one-off sketch show with Paul Whitehouse, The Love Box In The Living Room (BBC2).

Harry targeted the prime ministers of the 1930s, Stanley Baldrick and Ronald McDonald. Full marks if your brain has automatically translated those political puns about Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald.

You have to be of a certain age to recognize Captain Pugwash’s theme song, which accompanied a cartoon about Ted Heath, and to remember Yogi Bear, the inventor of television according to Harry (his pun on John Logie Baird).

Other current jokes mock the low-budget sci-fi series Blake’s 7 from the 1970s and Howards’ Way from the 1980s, “even more glamorous than Dallas.”

Perhaps all those digs at Play For Today, Muffin The Mule, and Dixon Of Dock Green camouflaged a few spoofs that cut much closer to the knuckle, mocking the Beeb’s diversity drive.

‘The more inclusive the BBC got,’ Harry said, ‘the more he worried it wasn’t inclusive enough. It had seen what had happened to JK Rowling…’

This, he said, explained the company’s enthusiasm for Ru Paul’s Drag Race, a blatant piece of political correctness from BBC executives desperate to be on the ‘right side of history’… whichever side that was.

Some one-liners would be funny in any era. I sniffed with laughter at the dalek who croaked at the director during a film break, “Do-I-have-time-to-pop-out-for-a-fag?”

And you don’t have to be a fan of Peaky Blinders or Downton Abbey to enjoy the skit in which the Shelby brothers stormed into the parlor and Carson struck the butler with seven bells.

Others demanded TV lore that was absolutely secretive — including a comparison of Robin Day and Brian Walden’s different interview styles.

Harry and Paul showed a genius at creating impressions of beloved characters, from Captain Mainwaring to Uncle Albert.

However, they must have known how obscure some of the references were, as the last two minutes consisted of a cheat sheet with clips from the shows they mocked.

I think I’ve seen about 70 percent of it. Is that enough to succeed?

Ben Fogle’s foray into history at Lost Worlds (C5) took dark turns as he explored the desolate heart of Detroit.

With an urban explorer named Bob, he climbed through windows in abandoned houses to sift through the trash left behind when families left, and broke into Cooley High—one of dozens of disused schools, now looted for their scrap. .

A retired police officer named Kerry took him on a tour of burnt-out buildings.

A tradition of arson has sprung up in Detroit: Once a year, on Devil’s Night (October 30), gangs set fire to hundreds of properties.

This marked a new phase in Ben’s growing obsession with America’s lawless, poverty-stricken fringes.

In Detroit, he was warned to assume everyone he saw was armed. It is a long way from his days as a castaway on an idyllic island in the Hebrides.

He met a woman, community worker Mama Shu, whose two sons and her stepson had all been murdered. “I just have to keep it moving,” she said, when Ben asked how she could go on. “I have nothing to lose.”