By and large, I respect the TV editor greatly. He looks like a hot rock Jesus, corrects my spelling and displays a Teutonic efficiency in putting a documentary on rats, a drama starring David Jason and the new Hustle in a Jiffy bag for me every Wednesday. Yesterday, however, he said an uncharacteristically odd thing.

“There’s this tribute to ’Allo ’Allo! coming up,” he mused, browsing through the schedules. “ ’Allo ’Allo! I dunno. Isn’t that all a bit old-fashioned? Gay Nazis, the Madonna with the Big Boobies, ‘It is I — LeClerc!’ Haven’t we moved on from that?”

I was unable to answer him straight-away, as I was laughing too much. To be honest, he had me on “Gay Nazis”. I hadn’t watched ’Allo ’Allo! since I was 12 years old, and it suddenly seemed to be almost unbearably funny — a one-show golden age. The British spy who is posing as a French policeman with the bad accent (“I was pissing by the door when I heard two shats.

You are holding in your hind a smoking goon.”) “Listen carefully — I will say this only once.” “What-a mistake-a to make-a.” Herr Flick!

Should you subsequently watch a couple of episodes, you could louchely posit that the show was ahead of its time. The show isn’t about the French Resistance at all — it’s all about Britishness. A knowing parody of our vision of history. How we see the war — a jolly romp we were always destined to win. How we see the French — a bunch of sex-mad accordion-playing lushes. How we see the Nazis — a bunch of camp, uptight drama-queens with silly walks. How we see the Italians — they just put an “a” on the end of every word. And, of course, it has the joyous energy of classic farce, blah blah blah, slapstick of Keaton, yadda yadda yadda.

Alas, then, that The Return of ’Allo ’Allo! is one of those pointless exercises in TV nostalgia that actually deflates the thing it seeks to celebrate. Rather than leaving the show to float, perfectly preserved, in the aspic of our memories, a wrongheaded “update” has been shot, showing us the 66-year-old Gorden Kaye, and the 56-year-old Vicki Michelle, reprising their roles as the barkeeper René and sexy waitress Yvette. In between their frankly disconcerting scenes, we get the usual stuff (talking heads, classic clips) plus, slightly unusually, cutaway shots to the audience watching the update, who are all dressed up either as tarts or Nazis. For one giddy moment, I wondered whether it was a “specially invited” celebrity audience, and we were going to see Vanessa Feltz and Gillian McKeith dressed up as an SS officer and a prostitute. But, alas, no.

A far better use of your time comes with The Lie of the Land, a documentary on how, to paraphrase Captain Jack from Torchwood, the 21st century is where it all changes — if you’re a farmer. The award-winning director Molly Dineen will probably bag another award for this — a beautifully illustrated documentary, shot around a couple of villages in the West Country. Here, as elsewhere in the UK, every country road is lined with gates rusted closed, as another farm goes out of business. Mirroring the subject matter, Dineen delicately interweaves her narrative — from the huntsmen to the dairy-farmers to the man on the “flesh run”, collecting dead calves for the hunt-dogs — as she shows how all life in the country is interwoven, too. Between the EU and the ban on hunting, farmland has effectively been “nationalised under our feet”, as the weary and impoverished Ian explains, wrestling with a pile of paperwork.

“Hunting, shooting, farming — we are splitting hairs. It’s all the same thing, really. The cow, the fox, the peewit, the skylark, the hare — we’re all in it together, getting on together, and we’ve got on very well for a very long time,” he says later. Then he gives out an odd yodel, and a herd of cows pours over a distant hill, and runs to him, like a pack of dogs. A very, very good documentary.

Finally, in The Beckhams Go to Hollywood, a pair of Posh & Becks lookalikes go to LA and blag all they can. Iain Lee, the presenter, looks embarrassed by the blagging, Posh & Becks look embarrassed by Lee. Avoid.

The Return of ’Allo ’Allo!, Sat, BBC Two, 9pm; The Lie of the Land, Thur, C4, 9pm; The Beckhams Go to Hollywood, Thur, Sky 1, 8pm

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