TV preview, John Noakes: TV Hero (BBC2, today 5.30pm): a wholesome tribute to the greatest ever ‘Blue Peter’ presenter

I’ve no hesitation in recommending John Noakes: TV Hero as a must-view this week. Cliche though it may be, for anyone born before, say 1975 (and thus, shall we say, a “pre-millennial”) he really was a “TV hero”, a national celebrity as famous as anyone else in the land. Every kid in every schoolyard in the land could do a passable imitation of Noakes saying “Blue Peter badge” in his West Riding brogue. He seemed lovable, and, by all accounts, he was.

Noakes died this year from Alzheimer’s, as is well known an especially cruel disease, and I’d prefer to remember him in his prime as the greatest of all Blue Peter presenters, climbing up Nelson’s Column, slipping in elephant droppings and wandering around the country with his co-star (“Get Down”) Shep the Border Collie. Anyone born after about 1975 might be intrigued to see “the way we were” in a world of wholesome telly, where the F-word was unknown at any time of the day or night, where there was no broadcasting in the mornings or through the night, and we were restricted to two or three channels. That can help, I hope, make a decision about intergenerational fairness in British television, and, I am sure, the millennials will let me know their views about whether children’s television, or television generally, was better in the old days or, in fact, worse, in quality as well as quality. No doubt if they think it was better in the Seventies my generation will be sent a bill for reparations for ruining proper TV by allowing Channel 4, breakfast TV, foul-mouthed stand-up comics, late-night porn chat channels, Fox News, Keith Chegwin’s naked shame on Naked Jungle, phone-in scandals, celebrity TV, reality TV, The National Lottery Live, It’s a Royal Knockout and Katie Hopkins onto our screens.

Royal marriages, in the news again now of course, have enjoyed a mixed record of success over the centuries, but there is one royal marriage that, at the moment, is going through an especially vibrant and fruitful phase – the partnership between royalty and celebrity, as epitomised in the sumptuously filmed and, mostly, historically meticulous The Crown. Given that most of what we know about the Queen’s life and times is a mixture of gossip, other peoples memoirs (reliable or not) and the extremely limited glimpses into her views that she has allowed to seep into the public domain, the writers of The Crown have done about as much as they can to make their project “respectable”, with the higher affairs of state mixed in with the lower affairs of the family, frail and all-too-human as they were and are.

The latest takes us from Suez to the Profumo affair, with the travails of Prince Philip and Princess Margaret comprising the spicy stuff. One day I hope they’ll have a look at the making of the ground-breaking – and never since shown – 1969 BBC fly-on-the-wall documentary Royal Family, which showed the Queen and her family enjoying a barbecue, nipping down the corner shop and dressing a Christmas tree, as far as I can recall. It couldn’t be removed from the BBC archives without the special say-so of the director-general, and seems to have been regarded as a gigantic mistake, the moment when daylight was disastrously let in on the magic of monarchy.

Anyway you can gorge as you wish on Netflix’s The Crown, though I’d also recommend picking up Andrew Marr’s excellent Diamond Queen, for another perspective on the Queen’s modest constitutional interventions and family dramas; and Professor Vernon Bogdanor’s various Gresham lectures about the House of Windsor, straight, thoughtful history made extraordinarily vivid and, available via the Gresham College website and YouTube. All gems.

As a personal indulgence – well they all are I guess – I’d also suggest a look at the antidote to the current Jane Austen craze. Every time I pick a tenner out of pocket I say to myself “I Hate Jane Austen” and, as if to offer some long-overdue support, Giles Coren presents an essay precisely with that point of view on Sky Arts. As I say, someone has to put the case against Austen. Overdue.

I don’t know why I’m mentioning the return of Top Gear, sorry, The Grand Tour, because Jeremy Clarkson’s ads for the new Amazon series are running non-stop on every commercial channel. As someone who loves cars, I have to say I hardly ever watched the Clarkson-era Top Gear, and feel even less desire to ask Alexa to fetch me an episode to view on demand. Mostly, that’s because I’m more interested in cars than personalities such as Clarkson. But, mostly, it’s about him.

There’s a delightful Twitter account called Accidental Partridge which, I confess, works best if you’re what might be called an “Alanist” (careful how you spell that one), or a “Patridgean” – a dedicated student of the presenter’s work, as I like to think myself. Every so often a real-life TV show comes along with a title that heavily echoes one of the rubbish TV formats Alan once pitched to the controller of BBC Television, Tony Hayers (memorably played by David Schneider, who wound up as a populariser of 1950s Soviet politics in recent film The Death of Stalin). You may recall Alan’s ideas – “Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank” (which I think might have got commissioned in reality); “Inner-City Sumo” (“We take fat people from the inner cities, put them in big nappies, and then get them to throw each other out of a circle that we draw with chalk on the ground…Very cheap to make. Do it in a pub car park”; and, of course, “Monkey Tennis”.

As you’d expect, then, the apparently randomly designed format of Coastal Railways with Julie Walters does feature, rightly, on the Accidental Partridge feed. Fond as I am of Dame Julie, I can’t see that her natural charm and brilliance as an actor would suddenly endow coastal railways with an attraction that has hitherto evaded me (trainspotting being a vice in my opinion). But Inner-City Sumo with Julie Walters? – now, that I would watch. What are the chances? C’mon Channel 4: Make television great again.

Last, I should point out Roy Orbison: Love Hurts, where his three sons will help re-tell an extraordinary story about an extraordinary artiste, a man that Elvis Presley believed possessed the best voice in the business. I’ll be crying.