Blitz Street, Out of the Frying Pan and Coronation Street

The blitz was no laboratory experiment – and its victims were not rats
Tony Robinson presents Blitz Street,
Tony Robinson presents Blitz Street. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod Murdo MacLeod/Murdo MacLeod

Inevitably, Health and Safety poked its nose into Blitz Street (Channel 4), a recreation of wartime bombing. That human mongoose, Tony Robinson, was kept on a tight leash by the project manager. ("I don't think anyone should walk down that street. That front wall doesn't look very safe.") Hold me back someone or I'll hit him.

The London blitz started 70 years ago. Blitz Street treated it like a laboratory experiment, measuring precisely what happens when 250kg of high explosive TNT hits a house. (Not in a bomb casing, naturally. The shrapnel might hurt someone.) In slow motion a shop window bowed and all the goods leaped out together as if the owner were saying "Here, take it. Take the lot!" Rats, housed in a blast-proof casing, stood in for Londoners. We heard no more about these reluctant conscripts.

So much for the bricks and mortar. Far and away more effective was the testimony of the children. It had to be the children because they are the only living witnesses. Waiting for the bombs to go off, even Robin Hiley, chief scientist at the Defence, Science and Technology Laboratory, said: "Whatever happens is new to me."

Nine-year-old Brian James in Barking overheard his aunt and uncle discussing how to shoot him if the Germans landed. When his mother came to take him home after a raid – and not a moment too soon, from the sound of it – the street was lined with black, bundled bodies. Brian said: "I'm walking with my mother holding my hand, and she started to cry." Hazel Hacking was 11 and, evidently, a neat little girl. She remembered that "everything in the place was wrecked. Lovely cushions just shreds, hanging shreds."

Derek Millan was eight when a bus was caught in blast outside his house. "When my sister saw it she said: 'I thought they were all sitting there waiting, but they were all dead.' And the policeman said 'Blast killed them all.'" Patrick Child stared hard through his spectacles, as if they showed him an eight-year-old cowering under a kitchen table, and said: "Utter, utter terror. It's hard to describe the horror, to give it enough reality. I don't know how long people could stand living like that." London was hit 57 nights in a row, but Londoners were not rats.

This is a series and other cities were blitzed in their turn. When Liverpool burned in the night sky, my parents drove there to rescue a bombed-out friend called Ivy. She went to work in a munitions factory, coming home sprinkled, I thought, with gold dust. It was probably TNT.

Have you considered adding Marmite to your venison sausage? Oh, you hadn't even considered venison sausage? James and Ali, runners up in The Restaurant, have gone into business as flying caterers and in Out of the Frying Pan (BBC2) they were cooking for a party of upper-class carnivores. If it breathed, the Andersons had bred it, shot it, snared it, stalked it, plucked it and gnawed it from the bone. As Frankie Boyle said, there is a vegetarian option. You can fuck off.

James took instruction from the head chef at Rules ("King Edward used to come here with his mistress") and Ali took tips from a butler trainer ("You have got to be invisible"). The Andersons and their guests were impeccably polite, even when spitting feathers ("I have to say I'm a bit upset"). Happily, the dogs adored the Marmite sausage and the Andersons appreciated James's contemporary cooking ("The chocolate contrasted really well with the venison blood"). Ali spent the day with his right hand glued to his bottom, palm out, as a butler should.

As Raymond Blanc, who trained them, said: "It was a joy to watch."

Last night's Coronation Street (ITV1) will have done little for the reputation of Kevin Webster's ramshackle garage. He forgot to fix the brakes on Tyrone's car and, strewing nuts and bolts with a lavish hand, it cartwheeled down a snow-strewn slope and landed on its roof. Inside, Tyrone and his pregnant wife Molly nestled together like sleeping babes. In Kevin's defence, he was distracted by women shouting and sobbing and stuff. He'll need a better defence than that.