Black-and-white archive footage of the mid twentieth century, still within living memory for so many, makes the past seem both eerily near and strangely far away. Britain’s Nuclear Bomb: The Inside Story (3 May), a documentary on the post-Second World War development in Britain of the country’s atom then hydrogen bombs at the Atomic Weapons’ Establishment (AWE) made good use of grainy films from the 1950s, many of which had never been seen before.

But what made the programme particularly fascinating were interviews with many of the chief protagonists in the Cold War race to secure Britain’s nuclear weapon capacity, their memories still sharp on events 60 years ago. Most had never before spoken publicly of those experiences: there was the theoretical physicist Bryan Taylor, “the father of the H-Bomb”; a chemist who worked at a secret wartime site in rural Wales; Ken Johnston, chief scientist at Aldermaston; the co-pilot and navigator of the plane that dropped the first British atomic bomb in the Pacific.