Why most four-year-olds deserve to be sectioned

The first episode of Let Us Entertain You (BBC2, Wednesday) definitely couldn’t be accused of lacking a central thesis. Presenter Dominic Sandbrook began by arguing that, since its industrial heyday, Britain has changed from a country that manufactures and exports things into one that, just as successfully, manufactures and exports popular culture. He then continued to argue it, approximately every five minutes, for the rest of the programme.

By way of proof, Sandbrook presented a fairly random collection of postwar Britain’s greatest hits, which served both as examples and as opportunities for some nifty wordplay designed to hammer the point home still further. The fact that Black Sabbath, for instance, emerged from late-Sixties Birmingham just as many of the steelworks were closing allowed Sandbrook to declare with a flourish that ‘Birmingham began to forge a very different kind of metal’. He also compared J. Arthur Rank to James Watt, the creators of the video game Elite to Richard Arkwright and, more generically, Andrew Lloyd Webber to a classic Victorian entrepreneur.

At one stage, the historical parallels went back further, when Sandbrook visited the Bodleian Library to show us ‘a document that arguably shaped modern Britain as much as the Magna Carta’ — and which turned out to be the first issue of the Sunday Times magazine. On the whole, however, he stuck to comparisons with people from the Industrial Revolution, whose entrepreneur-ial spirit can apparently be seen in everything from Jean Shrimpton’s mini skirts to Damien Hirst’s shark. As for the Beatles, they may have written some decent songs, but ‘perhaps the best way to understand them’ is as ‘an immaculately packaged product’ that exported Britishness to the world.