TV reviews: The Love Box in Your Living Room (BBC1), Made in the 80s (C4), Jimmy Carr Destroys Art (C4), Kids' TV: the Surprising Story (BBC1)

I know what’s wrong with the BBC – there’s not enough Adam Adamant on it.

OK, so he was a time-travelling adventurer in Edwardian garb, which was basically Doctor Who’s schtick, but I was too innocent to know that and too excited to care. And so it seems were Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse.

The bold Adamant figures feature at least twice in the funster duo’s The Love Box in Your Living Room (BBC1), a fantastic half-celebration, half-send-up of the Beeb and its 100 years of improving influence on our lives. Auntie stopped us saying “serviette” and “toilet”, replacing them with “napkin” and “lavatory”. Did you know that?

I say “at least twice” because there’s so much going on here. Another Adam – Curtis, the documentary-maker with the hip-hop sampler’s style for mad mosaics – is an influence on the programme and the sharp-eyed will spot the lettered bricks in the Jackanory spoof spelling out “ADAMADAMANTCURTIS”.

Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse spoof Downton Abbey being invaded by Peaky Blinders

What isn’t spoofed? Not much. Dixon of Dock Green and Camberwick Green. Play for Today and Howard’s Way. Robin Day and Nuts in May. The scenery in the Blake’s 7 sketch looks to be held together with Sellotape. Actually, back in the day you weren’t allowed to say Sellotape pre-watershed – it had to be sticky-back plastic.

Similarly, Harry and Paul’s Doctor Who scenery falls apart. Paul dresses up as William Hartnell and Harry tells us, in this alternative history of the idiot-lantern, that junior viewers can’t possibly have hid from the Daleks behind sofas because 1960s houses were tiny and furniture had to be backed up against the walls. “So for lying, these children were taken to the Blue Peter garden and exterminated,” he says.

Our goggle-box guides acknowledge TV’s Scottish pioneers – John Reith and, er, John Yogi Bear. We learn a lot – “inform”, along with “entertain” and “educate”, making up the mission statement for the Beeb and this spiffing show. There’s the revelation it was The Beatles who appointed Harold Wilson as prime minister. The revelation that when the entire population realised it couldn’t gain membership to The Beatles, massive industrial unrest resulted. The revelation that Edward Heath – the only person in the country who preferred sailing to drugs – disbanded The Beatles.

Heath took Britain into Europe, but when we lost the Eurovision Song Contest to the Netherlands entry, “Bingy Boingy”, the miners went on strike. Then Heath was booted out of office, but car plant workers couldn’t be mollified and, possibly worse than downing tools, continued to make Austin Allegros.

Konnie Huq gallops through a history of kids' TV

Harry and Paul have the most tremendous fun recreating a sleazy edition of Top of the Pops, reviving the Sue Lawley rumour and having the Peaky Blinders mob burst into Downton Abbey to demand: “We’ve come for your ratings.”

Just as enjoyable are the wee digs. At Ricky Gervais, Michael McIntyre, diversity, Nadine Dorries, Rupert Murdoch, Gordon Ramsay and former prime minister Tony Blair for his “modernisation” of the Labour Party. “He took something great and made it crap,” says Harry, a bit like how Barry Bucknall would slap plywood panels on perfectly fine doors. What, you don’t remember Adamant or Bucknall? You poor thing!

The BBC isn’t alone in being in anniversary mode. Channel 4 is 40 and the Truth & Dare season is confirming the medium’s truculent teen still hasn’t really grown up. A good thing, too.

But I’m not going to discuss the documentary My Massive C*ck. This is a family newspaper and, besides, there are more pressing matters, like the chilling resonances with Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threat to be found in Made in the 80s: the Decade that Shaped our World.

The first of this three-parter is a chunk of Cold War nostalgia that could have been called My Massive Cruise Missile. Not mine, though, and certainly not the women of the Greenham Common peace camp who, in protest at our imported American mass destruction hardware, scaled the barbed wire with ladders and blankets and danced on the nuclear silos. As camp veteran Femi Otitoju puts it: “Fearless women – wonderful things.”

Eighties movers and groovers give good quotes, including Lynne Franks, Paul Morley, the Saatchi & Saatchi boys, who sloganeered for Margaret Thatcher and Katherine Hamnett. The fashion designer turned up for a No. 10 soiree in one of her voluminous T-shirts: “58 per cent Don’t Want Pershing.” Thatch quipped: “No no, dear, we’ve got Cruise – maybe you’re at the wrong party.”

The best soundbite, though, in a tale of double agents and “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood comes from Lord Raymond Asquith, head of the Secret Intelligence Service, who remembers surveying the invite list for the government bunker in the event of Armageddon – lots of Tory men and one woman in the PM who was beyond child-bearing age – and musing: “For the future population of the country, it doesn’t look terribly promising.”

Also under the banner of Truth & Dare, Jimmy Carr Destroys Art is C4 at its most daring. If you had to take a flamethrower to a painting by Rolf Harris or Myra Hindley created from children’s handprints, which would it be? I don’t think I want any art destroyed, but the arguments for and against are provocative and often pretty persuasive.

It’s back to the Beeb for Kids’ TV: the Surprising Story (BBC1), Konnie Huq’s history of shows for children, although surprisingly she omits The Singing, Ringing Tree, a terror-filled fable from old East Germany and the cause of a tsunami of bed-wetting among my generation. I know that Paul Whitehouse was a fellow sufferer, so he’ll be irked by that.