BBC journalists are best when reporting from oppressive regimes. They spent much time in a dark one last night, a land where the death penalty was in regular use, homosexuality illegal, where jobs and housing were banned to people of the wrong ethnic origin and thousands of women every year were forced to seek illegal abortions. This foreign land was Britain in the 1960s.

BBC Parliament, which is not half so dull a channel as people think, celebrated the Bank Holiday by digging through the BBC archives and fishing from them programmes that answered to the theme of permissiveness. It was a lead up, I suppose, to BBC Two's much-awaited drama, Filth: the Mary Whitehouse Story, tomorrow night.

The night began with a Panorama from December 1964 broadcast hours before MPs would vote to abolish hanging. The studio debate was led by Robin Day. It was calm, responsible, lively. A man from the Police Federation pointed to the madness of the law as it stood: man kills girlfriend and gets nine years; man kills girlfriend and steals a penny and he gets the rope.

A Man Alive sent Jeremy James on an anthropological mission. “For many of us this is revolting - men dancing with men,” he pronounced over some innocuous footage of non-contact prancing. “This man is a hairdresser,” he went on. “His clients and colleagues wouldn't resent him being so.” He told a bluff old doctor that “some people might be appalled by having a homosexual doctor, especially if small sons were involved.” This was 1967, a decade after Wolfenden.

A telling debate on the Race Relations Act was chaired by Michael Barrett on 24 Hours on the very day of Martin Luther King's funeral 40 years ago. It seems obvious now that society should make illegal prejudice that kept people from work or lodgings but on this panel an unholy alliance sprang up between a Tory, Ronald Bell, who said the Act would be a “gross infringement of civil liberties”, and Obi Egbuna, a black revolutionary who wanted to smash everything and said you might as well legislate “against syphilis or illiteracy”.

But perhaps the most extraordinary reporting came from the back streets as Julian Pettifer of 24 Hours interviewed women who had undergone illegal abortions and two housewife abortionists, neither of whom much resembled Mike Leigh's beloved Vera Drake. In a mask that barely concealed her identity, one of them confessed calmly that sooner or later she would probably kill one of her clients. More psycho than saint, I would say.

What impressed was the quality of journalism from the old Lime Grovers. Panorama was a magazine back then, fronted by Richard Dimbleby, who brimmed with authority as he introduced, after the abolition debate, items on Christmas party games and doubtful charities and then did what in America they call a “desk piece” about the odd Christmas cards the office had received. Studio debates had time to develop in those days, just as interviewees were allowed to talk uninterrupted for minutes at a time. The soundbite had not been invented. There was still plenty of rhetoric.

On the debit side, everyone save Michael Barrett sounded as if they were from Oxbridge, and women were massively outnumbered as panellists and hardly existed at all as interviewers. The first of the few, the iconic Joan Bakewell, introduced the night by declaring herself to believe the 1960s created “a more tolerant society”. At 11.30pm she wound things up with a Late Night Line-Up, the first for 36 years. The panellist Peter Hitchens argued that Britain had exchanged one set of intolerances for another: an opinion about homosexuality was now, for example, pathologised as “homophobia”.

Robert Winston recalled that at his private school in the 1950s no one had been afraid of being “queer”. Even Margaret Drabble admitted that pre-1960s Britain had been much more tolerant about, well, drinking and smoking. Then a real shocker: Winston said race relations legislation now meant that better qualified British medical graduates were being passed over for hospital posts in favour of foreigners. You would need several episodes of 24 Hours, Panorama and Man Alive to explore that allegation, but you do wonder if, now or then, the BBC would have the nerve to commission them.

Out of the Box

The Line Up discussion ended with Michael Howard suggesting the most dangerous consequence of the permissive era may have been violence on television. Last night's BBC One thriller Kiss of Death was a case in point, not bad as these things go, but incredibly dark, gory and explicit. The 1960s opened a creative Pandora's box. Who knew it would lead to a primetime cop opening in her hallway a box containing a severed head from which maggots crawled for our entertainment?

Of all the lamented programmes on Permissive Night the most missed is Late Night Line Up which discussed, live, that night's television. Off air, last night, Bakewell suggested to her guests why it had to end. They would review a play, she explained, and next day the producer would ring saying his lead actress was still in tears and his writer was vowing never to work for the BBC again.

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