It would be easy to make us cringe with a live-action Wind in the Willows but, mirabile dictu, the BBC One New Year’s Day film did not. One key to its success was Lee Hall’s script, which didn’t muck about with Kenneth Grahame’s prose and sought no clever meanings in the Piper at the Gates of Dawn stuff. Another was a well-cast Toad, who has to be monstrously egocentric, gloriously reckless, grotesquely rich, bombastically boastful and yet remain loveable: Matt Lucas proved to be all of these. He was terrific, clearly enjoying himself hugely. Mark Gatiss played Ratty as a lovely debonair David Niven toff; Bob Hoskins as Badger was gruff and gravelly and worldly-wise.

And the scenery! Having identified several Thames riverside scenes as being recognisably Marlow, Wargrave etc, I remembered that this production was shot on location in Romania. A sylvan Arcadia, a pastoral paradise of dipping willows and wooded, watery wildness, as English as could be, complete with a stately Toad Hall. Bliss.

I did once, in 1983, sit glued to a TV set in Vancouver watching 24 hours of wall-to-wall Monty Python. But even the most dedicated fan might regard Channel 4’s orgy of Python retrospection excessive (five hours of Michael Palin, if you include A Private Function). But Will Yapp’s pacy documentary The Secret Life of Brian recalled a slice of social history that has extra relevance today.

What began life as Jesus Christ: A Lust for Glory, the Pythons’ parody of biblical epics was never intended to outrage the citizenry. But 1977 was the year of the James Kirkup poem and the Gay News trial, the apogee of Mary Whitehouse’s litigious scourging of all blasphemers. Denis Lemon, the editor of Gay News, went to jail and the Pythons, having cast off their public school choirboy backgrounds, knew that displaying “irreverence, scurrility, profanity, vilification or licentious abuse of the Christian religion” was exactly what they did. When Bernard Delfont saw their script, he withdrew EMI’s millions in funding, until “St George of Harrison” rescued them. The shoot was in Monastir, with the crowd of Arab extras parroting the words: “Yes! We are all individuals!” – try filming that today, eh?

Spike Milligan came by and did a cameo, making Life of Brian a historic link between Goonery and Pythonry. Then Mrs W saw a script, and John Mortimer, QC, had to be sent for.

Meanwhile in the US, a rabbi’s indignation at the use of a prayer shawl in the stoning scene got the film banned in the Bible Belt; instantly the film took $20 million. The BBC got together a spluttering Malcolm Muggeridge and the supercilious Bishop Mervyn Stockwood to denounce Cleese (the picture of rational sang-froid) and Palin (a smouldering volcano).

Looking back, Cleese concluded that the hoo-hah reflected the madness of all religions. “I’m 66 now,” said Cleese, “and the world’s a madhouse, and most people are operating in fantasy anyway.”

Mortimer said: “I don’t want to accept a world of thin-skinned paranoia, where religion can’t be made fun of and causing offence is the greatest crime you can do to anyone.”

But that’s even more so now than 30 years ago. After seeing Life of Brian, voted funniest film yet by the public, one simply did not need What the Pythons Did Next to tell us which of them got richest.

I was grateful to Arena for its history of The Archers (BBC Four.) For a period in the 1960s I followed Ambridge events, my ear having been hooked by the ineffable line: “Look, I’m Polly Mead, Frank Mead’s daughter. And if I marry anyone it will be you, Syd Perks, not Gregory Salt!” But I stopped being a votary, and now listen only when there’s a much heralded event — sex in the shower, paternity revelations, gay weddings and Stephen Fry’s celebrity visitation in 2005. Fry (as so often) narrated: “Foot and mouth? Breast cancer? A nasty badger-shooting episode? Could their 18-year marriage really be about to end?”, his almost tongue-in-cheek delivery making Tony Hancock’s Dan Bowman spoof seem restrained. It was quite touching to watch cowman Sam and Ruth recording their moment of non-consummation; and there was a graphic glimpse of yesterday’s hit-and-run drama, starting the new year with a bang.

Dead Clever (ITV) was a horribly watchable piece of hokum, a sub-Life and Loves of a She-Devil drama of revenge by wronged wife. Suranne Jones has gorgeous teeth and a dazzling smile, shots of which were in plentiful supply. It ended with Grand Guignol in an Oxford college. Hokum!

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