CHRISTOPHER STEVENS on the weekend’s TV: Oh dear Auntie, you’ve only gone and annoyed the Queen Mum

How the BBC started

Rating: *****

Antique Roadshow: 100 Years of BBC

Rating: ****

Talk about history on the hoof. Strictly Come Dancing celebrated the Beeb’s centenary with a sequence of dances to favorite TV themed tunes – a paso doble for The Apprentice, a tango for Casualty.

Quirky as they looked, the routines reflected the reality of the BBC’s early decades. . . completely done on the hoof, broadcast live and apparently made up along the way.

How the BBC started (BBC2) painted an amusingly candid portrait of an institution that half the time had no idea what it was doing.

Last month, David Dimbleby’s pompous series, Days That Shook The BBC, suggested that wise minds making momentous decisions ruled the Corporation with impeccable moral judgment. This two-part story began with a series of confessional anecdotes and exposed it as fiction. Our quirky aunt is fueled by a mixture of gambling, guesswork and incompetence.

Veteran science presenter James Burke, now 85, recalled how his live program following the Apollo 8 moon recording in 1968 was taken off the air before tea, because it was time for Jackanory.

Minutes later, he and Patrick Moore were back on screen. The Queen Mother, who was watching the spaceship, sent a short message from the palace to the BBC, demanding to know the fate of the astronauts.

More chaotic than that was the TV editors’ response to the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. Unsure of the real Dallas story, producers chose to suspend the broadcasts. The spinning globe logo played for 19 minutes, punctuated by occasional news flashes. Then, to fill the time, comedy sketches of Harry Worth were shown.

In fairness to the BBC, there was no live footage from the States. Sending two minutes of footage over the transatlantic cable, frame by frame, took an hour.

If that doesn’t prove how much the world has changed since the BBC’s inception, a bit of commentary from the 1928 FA Cup final will do the trick. When Blackburn Rovers scored in the first minute, the sports reporter muttered: ‘Jove, what a sensational start.’

Women were mostly limited to administrative jobs, although they had revenge. A secretary recalled the scarred face of her boss, Lord Reith, who had been wounded by a World War I sniper bullet: “If you saw him on a dark night,” she said, “you’d be quite scared.” Another secretary had to keep all his newspaper clippings. ‘Reith,’ she chuckled, ‘was extremely vain. Bless him!’

The documentary ended with Huw Wheldon’s recollections of filming Winston Churchill’s only live television broadcast, on his 80th birthday in 1954. His speech, delivered without rehearsal or notes, was a masterpiece of sincerity and emotion. Tears rolled down the old man’s cheeks—probably invisible to viewers on primitive black-and-white sets, but very evident today. After the cameras stopped rolling, Churchill seemed to deflate. “He shuffled off like an old tortoise,” Wheldon said. The Beeb’s warehouses have also been raided for its centenary, with many props ending up on Antique Roadshow: 100 Years of BBC (BBC1).

Kate Adie made the “dog tags” she wore during the first Gulf War to identify her body in case she was killed. She also has the bullet that bounced off her leg in Beirut: “It tells you to be careful.”

Presenter Fiona Bruce’s accent ran through Sarf Lahndan as she watched Del Boy’s lime green Ford Capri from Only Fools And Horses.

“Um, Rodders—you don’t think she’ll be whipping all that stuff in the back of New Broadcasting House, do you? . .