"The good old days." What a pile of bobbins. Slow media, slower transport, exams that were so hard that some children actually failed them (and what's the point of that?), all manner of funness being illegal, some carrying a punishment of death, terror of anything more exotic than Bognor and a general and terrifying over-reliance on books, board games and conversation. And worse. Depends how far back you want to go; the Black Death, Nixon, window tax, Tory governments, death by mammoth? - Were those in the good old days too? Oh, the nostalgia!
Still, we will keep having television programmes where the olde worlde way of doing things is painfully recreated for modern folk, resulting in endless recorded hours of modern folk whinging. Which are then edited together into slightly fewer hours of modern people whinging, seemingly engineered to make the poor blighters look ungrateful for not enjoying the Good Old Days as much as they should. Which, of course they shouldn't, because it's all been arranged to be as awful as possible: otherwise it wouldn't be good television.
But all the same, unless you like psychic detectives, sober, moving and earnest documentaries - which to be fair look very good, I should start liking those instead - a little bit of Location, Location, Locationing with the incredible Kirsty and Phil, or being socially theorised at by Rosie Boycott, that's what's on television tonight, as apparent in our picks from this week's Guide and today's Guardian.
Wakey Wakey Campers
9pm, Channel 4
In retrospect it's astounding that no one thought of this sooner - a reality series in which 50 "modern holidaymakers" spend two weeks in a 1960s-style holiday camp. The place in question is Sunshine Camp on the Isle of Wight, where the participants endure a fun-crammed schedule in which inappropriate modern-day behaviour, foul language or vulgarity are not tolerated. The hectic schedule meets with some resistance from the likes of genteel sisters Fiona and Rebecca. "The first 48 hours in any holiday should be about unwinding from work," complains Fiona. Then why did she agree to take part? and they don't have tellies or contact with the outside world. Instead they have a glee club of beblazered entertainers and the illicit thrill of sneaking in and out of each other's chalets at night. How will they cope with one Moroccan-style bar, a stinky old ballroom and an unheated outdoor pool? Quite badly.
Julia Raeside
Don't Get Me Started!
7.15pm, Five
In the second of this series, Rosie Boycott examines the modern phenomenon of "false grief" which she defines as the public grieving over deaths of people such as Princess Diana and James Bulger. Boycott argues that, while we feel we are being humane and sympathetic by weeping in public and lighting candles for people we have never met, the process is more akin to therapeutic "acting out". It's a view echoed by clinical psychiatrist Oliver James, who believes that many of us live vicariously through media icons and over-identify with others' grief instead of fully engaging with our own lives. The result, he says, is a kind of "emotional pornography".
Children of Beslan
9pm, BBC2
In September last year, terrorists took control of a school in the north Ossetian town of Beslan. The resulting siege lasted for 53 hours and ended in the deaths of 330 people, most of them children. This moving documentary follows the story of the children who survived. Here, they recall the siege, the weeks that followed and share their thoughts on the politics, religion and the war on terror that has shaped their lives. "I was hoping that Harry Potter would come," says one of the children when recounting the terrifying siege. "I remembered he had a cloak that made him invisible, and hoped he would come and wrap me in it and we'd be invisible and would escape."
Storyville: Shake Hands With the Devil 11.20pm, BBC2 In 1994, Canadian Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire was commander of a small UN mission in Rwanda. The world ignored his warnings of impending genocide, and he was rendered an impotent witness as at least 800,000 people were murdered, largely with machetes, in 100 days. Accompanying Dallaire on his return to Rwanda for commemorations of the 10th anniversary of the slaughter, this finds him an articulate, haunting guide to this unforgivable failure by the international community. Essential.
Andrew Mueller
The Psychic Detective 10.30pm, LivingTV Tony Stockwell, a man whose accent certainly does not belong to this world, is a psychic and, in this series, he brings his eyebrow-furrowing skills to bear on a number of unsolved mysteries, including Brian Jones's death. Tonight, he investigates the disappearance of a man aboard the trawler Gaul, which vanished 26 years ago. His vague and open "conclusion" could have been arrived at by anyone with a knowledge of the facts and context of the case. Viewing for the weak-minded only.
David Stubbs
The Smoking Room 9.30pm, BBC3 It's a great premise - to base a sitcom entirely in the smoking room of a big company, so that the onus is entirely on sparkling dialogue - but unfortunately the dialogue is nowhere near sparkling enough to make this episode work. There is a visit from a man dressed as a giant cigarette who is working for Cigzowt, a new scheme that aims to make quitting fun. He has one major problem on his hands, though: nobody really wants to give up smoking. Which makes the first stage of giving up, which is to light a cigarette, very welcome indeed. It's downhill from then on.
Will Hodgkinson
Six Feet Under 10pm, E4 Relations between George and Ruth are getting increasingly tragic. This week's opening death is that of George's mother, who killed herself in drug-addled loneliness and despair in front of her son when he was a little boy. Now the guilt he feels about his failure to save her comes back to haunt him - quite literally - and Ruth isn't helping matters by making her martyr status as pronounced as possible. Meanwhile Clare and Billy's plans of living a bohemian life in Spain are scuppered by the fact that her assets have been frozen because she has left education, Brenda meets a lovely family, and Rico gets his rocks off. The result is an episode that, despite George's torments, offers more hope than most.
Will Hodgkinson
And still thinking about those happy campers, you know what the best thing is? The people that choose to participate in these kind of things - the holiday camp and any other of these gool old days recreations - are normal, ordinary people, with jobs, presumably, who have to book time from their normal, ordinary jobs and lives to do the series.
So when they say "this isn't the kind of activity I would like to do on holiday", the great thing is that it is what they're doing on holiday. And, what's more, they chose to do it, leaving little room for doing anything else with their holidays for the year, one supposes. The good old days? Hmm. Unless the good old days were the days before we became a culture that could persuade otherwise reasonable people to spend two weeks in the good old days, then I'm not sure I'm quite clear on the concept.
