IT TURNS out that London during the Blitz wasn’t full of chirpy Cockneys thumbing their noses at the Germans, uncomplainingly eking out their rations, making clothes out of curtains, standing to attention whenever Churchill was on the wireless and, when they had a spare minute, popping off to make an Ealing comedy to keep everyone’s spirits up. At least not according to Bad Boys of the Blitz: Revealed (Five), which suggests that Britain during the war was a place that wouldn’t have been unrecognisable to Don Corleone (even if horses’ heads were rationed).

So is the legend of bouncy wartime morale fake or genuine? Though he called his study The Myth of the Blitz, Angus Calder argued that while the stereotypical clichés of chirpy Cockneys may initially have been confected for purposes of government propaganda, these clichés became the yardstick of how people thought they ought to behave, so they did behave that way.

Philip Ziegler, in London at War, says revisionist historians have seized on the title of Calder’s work to portray Londoners as a bunch of grumbling, snobbish, panicky, grasping cowards. Ziegler thinks that dirt was, indeed, swept under the carpet by propagandists in order to lend London a rosier glow, but that the quantity of such dirt was relatively modest, “that few Londoners behaved badly, many more conspicuously well; and that the population of London as a whole endured the Blitz with dignity, courage, resolution and astonishing good humour”.

Bad Boys of the Blitz, though, takes a rather grimmer view, suggesting that behind the jaunty bulldog-Britain façade cultivated by the Government’s propaganda machine, crime rates almost doubled as looting, black marketeering and armed robbery spiralled out of control.

The programme’s chief witness was the mobster Mad Frankie Fraser — whose telephone number must now feature on the Rolodex of every documentary director considering making a film on any aspect of violent crime in the past half-century. Fraser tells us that, as far as crime goes, the war “was the most exciting and profitable time there’s ever been . . . It breaks my heart to think that Hitler surrendered, because the war was a criminal ’s paradise.”

Fraser was an early deserter. So were many Borstal boys, young offenders who had been released by the Government to fight for their country, but quickly found the strict discipline of army life intolerable. They joined the 20,000 or so other deserters who made ends meet through the war by turning their hand to crime.

Air raids proved to be a boon for thievery. Robbers ransacked empty houses, or just looted shops whose windows had been blown out, often disguised as aid raid wardens to enable them to wander unimpeded out of bombed shops loaded up with furs and jewellery.

Prostitution also, it seems, enjoyed a wartime boom. Percy Burgess, a Scotland Yard Flying Squad officer during the war, remembered raiding an upscale brothel staffed by “respectable married women”, earning “about £20 a time”. Their clientele was “service officers, no civilians were entertained”. The women’s names, details and photographs were stored by the brothel’s madam in two thick volumes, from which customers would choose a companion. “A week afterwards,” Burgess recalled, “we were ordered to take the two volumes to the basement of Scotland Yard, where they were burnt in the furnace. I never heard another word about it.”

So what’s the true story of the Blitz? What we know, what we don’t know, what we know we don’t know, and what we don’t know we don’t know about what really happened — these are the grid references for historians navigating the past. But the stakes become higher when trying to identify the knowns and unknowns of the present. Iran’s Nuclear Secrets: This World (BBC Two) mentioned a few things we know about Tehran’s nuclear capabilities; a few things we don’t know; a few things we know we don’t know; and, obviously, none that we don’t know we don’t know.

It could all be as benign as the Iranian officials kept insisting; or as malign as the men from Washington fear. But you did notice that nobody, whichever side of the argument they were on, was looking chirpy or optimistic; which didn’t fill you with a warm feeling about how things might turn out. Couldn’t these diplomats feign a smile, just to keep our spirits up?

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