How remarkable that John Noakes still has the power to affect me so

Even in a country that is cleaved to its past with the desperation of a befuddled and irrelevant post-imperial power, there can have been few weeks for nostalgia like this one. Since you need to be of a certain age to appreciate the poignancy, readers aged below 45 are excused and given permission to move on. But for those who recall the year with special affection (however misplaced that has come to seem), it felt for a while as if Britain slipped through the space-time continuum and stumbled into 1976.

The broiling weather so reminiscent of that summer’s drought played its part. So did the sight of Dustin Brown, the dramatically dreadlocked German-Jamaican, deploying a timewarp kamikaze serve-and-volley game to dismantle Rafa Nadal on Centre Court. The more powerful turbo thrusters on this journey down memory lane, however, were a pair of literal deaths and the revelation of a kind of psychological death.

In 1976, Patrick Macnee, who has died aged 93, reprised his role as John Steed in the first series of The New Avengers, which made the pre-Gurkha-championing Joanna Lumley a feminist icon of sorts (an unlikely one, perhaps, since her fame rested as much on her “Purdey” haircut as her practised ease with a firearm).

Val Doonican, who died in Buckinghamshire at 88, was another venerable fixture of the TV schedules. The very best of British explaining this to anyone reared on X Factor. But for an hour each Saturday evening, a sweet-natured Bing Crosby impersonator with a gentle Irish brogue attracted 19 million viewers to BBC1 with his cosy ramblings and such folksily, bucolic ballads from the Old Country as “Delaney’s Donkey” and “Paddy McGinty’s Goat”.

Possibly most affecting of all, despite the lack of a death certificate, was the news from Spain about John Noakes. Learning that Noakes is now an octogenarian was a shock in itself. Just as Doonican seemed 20 years older than his biological age, almost everyone’s favourite Blue Peter presenter seemed at least 20 years younger than his. His appeal lay largely in his unalterable status as a wide-eyed, relentlessly adventurous teenage boy. In 1976, already in his forties though still seemingly unreconciled to long trousers, he was asking Shep to get down, and leaping out of planes with neither safety paraphernalia nor (so he irritably believed) insurance.

The thought of him as an 81-year-old Alzheimer’s victim slipping down a storm drain (thankfully rescued hours later without much damage done) after wandering confusedly from his Majorcan home is viciously depressing. Without wishing to romanticise dementia, it is comforting to picture him leaping fearlessly down that drain in a bid to reprise his world record for the highest free-falling dive from a plane.

Three times within a few days, millions reacted to a report with an instinctive “Oh no, not him”, in a collective response of a kind today’s children and teenagers will never know for a television-created personality. There are so few shared TV experiences now. The power of colossal viewing figures in the three-channel era to create unlikely giants in the national consciousness is long outmoded.

All three performers were outdated themselves in 1976, and, in the world capital of heritage culture, that was the core of their charm. Macnee’s Steed was a brolly-twirling, self-consciously chivalrous toff archetype of a kind unseen in real life since late Edwardian times. Doonican, with his arrestably hideous golfing sweaters, belonged firmly to the mid-1950s; though less to our mid-1950s than those of the United States in its Hi-honey-I’m-home, suburban glory days when Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Perry Como crooned.

As for John Noakes, his unquenchable laddish zest for derring-do – so redolent of Royal Tournaments, Boy’s Own annuals and ging-gang-gooleying around the camp fire – is harder to place precisely. But it carbon-dates him to long before 1963, when the contraceptive pill allowed sexual intercourse to begin (as Philip Larkin had it) between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.

In the context of the 1970s, the idea of innocence has acquired a wickedly ironical taint. While Noakes was entertaining children alongside Shep and an incontinent pachyderm, Sir James Savile OBE was doing the same, in his bespoke way, with Jim’ll Fix It a few hours before Doonican’s Saturday-night slot. The curious, when-worlds-collide fact that Doonican contributed to the backing vocals on Led Zeppelin’s Gaelic-influenced “The Battle of Evermore” reminds you that Rolf Harris, another BBC1 Saturday-evening stalwart, covered (in so far as “covered” is a synonym for “slaughtered”) “Stairway to Heaven”.

We were misguided, of course, to reflect on the summer of 1976 as the last dregs of a lamented age of innocence, just before the countercultural time bomb of punk shattered the smugly deferential certainties of a country struggling with the phantom limb pain of Empire. The Seventies, if it needs restating, was a decade of brutal violence, unrestrained racism and sexism, and rampant paedophilia hidden with impunity in plain sight.

But it had its good guys, too, whose innocence was entirely genuine, and whom the horror stories cannot besmirch. It is impossible to resist a swell of fondness for that other country that is the past when it took such relish in an Old Etonian character actor who used an umbrella as a lethal weapon, an Irish crooner already in his anecdotage by the time he turned 40, and an eternal Boy Scout from Yorkshire who is frozen in time in the middle-aged minds of his audience even though, sadly, his own memory has gone.