The flash fishermen in pink suits who knew how to catch the girls

THE DANDY fisherboys of Lowestoft, known to locals in the Sixties as the Millionaire Weekenders, spent ten days at a time in stinking oilskins on North Sea trawlers, gutting fish by the ton and braving gales.

When the teenage fishermen came ashore with bulging wage packets, they wanted to look like God’s gift to the Suffolk girls. They wore stylised suits of their own devising in peacock hues, dazzling in lime green or rose pink with velvet trim.

Heads turned. Lasses swooned. Older folk were scandalised. And yet, though this was only 50 years ago, not a scrap of cine film survives to show how the boys looked in their flash gear.

Telling their story, Coast (BBC2) was reduced to displaying the few black-and-white snaps that exist, and adding splashes of unconvincing digital colour.

These days, the fisherboys would be tweeting selfies and starring in viral videos. It’s a shame that faded memories are all that remain of their plumage, but they have fared better than the forgotten genius Hugh Evans.

Evans was harbourmaster at Holyhead on Anglesey, 200 years ago. Today, there’s not so much as a pencil sketch of him. But his painted maps, charting the dozens of shipwrecks around the Welsh island’s treacherous coast, captured the public’s attention and forced the government of the day into action.

Thanks to Evans, there’s a lighthouse on the Anglesey rocks known as South Stack. Spectacular aerial footage, the kind that Coast does so well, revealed just how inaccessible and rugged the landscape is.

But with so much historical evidence missing, presenter Nick Crane had to rely on the viewers’ imagination.

There wasn’t much left either of Captain Leonard Plugge and his pre-war International Broadcasting Company, the first commercial radio station to challenge the BBC.

Visiting his base i n Fecamp, Normandy, Tessa Dunlop could find only a sepia photograph and a few recorded snatches, including the sound of a young Roy Plomley, the veteran Desert Island Discs presenter, learning his craft.

Yet Radio Normandy, which broadcast across the Channel to southern England throughout the Thirties, introduced Britain to the concept of broadcast ads. The Captain even bequeathed them his name — that’s why we still refer to adverts as ‘plugs’.

All that history has evaporated, as ephemeral as radio waves. So it was utterly weird to watch Britain Sees Red: Caught On Camera (ITV) and realise that nothing we do now is unseen or can ever be forgotten — however meaningless or tawdry.

Much of this show was culled from security cameras — not official CCTV, but the videocams that so many cyclists and busybodies wear on their clothes today.

Some, like a professional pillock called Charlie, promote themselves as ‘videobloggers’: their self-appointed role is to go around filming the rest of us, provoking reactions and posting the results on YouTube.

This attenti on- s e e ki ng is obviously working for Charlie — we saw the same clips of his confrontation with a burly jobsworth on a film set featured on a near-identical ‘caught on camera’ compilation on Channel Five just a few weeks ago.

Another segment was filmed by traffic warden Steve, who patrols with a video lens on his moped helmet. He got dog’s abuse from the drivers he ticketed, and he seemed to relish it.

‘I do feel like a knight on a white horse — I spear the dragons and fight the bad guys,’ he said.

Sir Lancelot, though, didn’t record every grumpy peasant he encountered onto everlasting digital memory-sticks.

Some footage might serve a practical purpose. Dustbin lorries now feature 360-degree cameras, to counter the dangerous drivers who kill three binmen every year.

But grainy footage of rush hour traffic bumping over pavements to get past rubbish carts makes very dull viewing. Other clips, like the club-goers using an alley in East London as a public convenience, were simply trivial and unpleasant.

Just because everything happens on camera today, that doesn’t make it important. It is not worthy of the name ‘history’ . . . and most of it ought to be deleted.