The Home That Two Built review – watching cookery doesn’t get tougher than this

For the people (me) complaining about the dreariness of the current series of MasterChef: The Professionals, spare a thought for our poor parents. A clip of the BBC’s first attempt at something similar is shown here in The Home That Two Built (BBC2), which is looking back amusingly at the channel’s lifestyle output over the decades. Starting with the 1960s, and in front of a lucky live studio audience, three housewives – Mrs Godfrey, Mrs Horn and Mrs Reid – are given a piece of pickled beetroot to sample. Now for the fun part: they have to decide whether it has been prepared with a) cider vinegar, b) white vinegar, or c) white wine vinegar. (In the 60s the “h” in white is heard, at least when enunciated by a BBC2 presenter).

The correct answer is … a) cider vinegar! Identified by Housewife Number 2, Mrs Horn, I think. “It is television,” as Mel Giedroyc says, presenting today, “as bland as boiled cabbage.” It actually makes you look forward to Gregg Wallace, half a century down the line. That’s how bad it is.

And what about In Your Place, an early attempt at a home makeover show? In this thrilling episode, the Cooper family is thinking of doing up their Victorian house in Edgbaston. So presenter Eric gets in two designers who come and have a chat about what they would do, and … oh, that’s it. No actual work, no reveal. The Coopers don’t even get to say which they prefer, because that might upset the unfavoured designer.

Fanny Craddock stands the test of time, but she was sacked for being horrid. And Percy Thrower, perhaps the greatest TV gardener ever, was thrown out for appearing on an advert over on ITV.

To anyone who says television was better back then, shut up. It really wasn’t. And of course it was black-and-white, too, so the designs – even the beetroot – were grey. Beetroot probably really was grey then, all food was, says Esther Rantzen.

Small thought: if we’ve come from there to sweary kitchens, and tears, and wrecking people’s homes in the name of entertainment, where the hell are we going to be in another 50 years? Naked cooking? Almost certainly. Exciting times … except I’ll probably be dead.