Parallels with home by war’

and music, and on the other hand there was this real sense of history that I had, and I didn’t know it was called history. It wasn’t until I was about 10 I think that I realised that it was a thing called ‘history’ that you can get marks for, and I remember thinking how stupid that teachers can give you marks for something everyone would want to know about.”

He adds: “I really am the epitome of the post-war child. I was brought up in a welfare state but all of my parents’ influences were from that wartime period.”

The film reveals that most people didn’t believe the war had ended until Churchill actually announced it really was all over at 3pm.

SAYS ROBINSON, a former member of Labour’s NEC executive: “I was brought up in Churchill’s constituency, and I have very vivid memories of him as an old man coming and making speeches.

“When he died, he was buried in Westminster Hall and we went, and because we were constituents we could cut the queue, and the queue went on for miles, all the way down Parliament Square, then down by the side of the river, it was absolutely huge.and I remember just seeing this old dead geezer, and he was always a part of my life.”

Was Churchill a genuine cross-party leader? “In a sense he was, but it has always fascinated me that after the war, he didn’t get back in even though he was the hero of the war.

“It was only later that I understood that the war was now over, everything associated with the war was over, and people wanted to get right away from that and have something new. Mostly people wanted a change, like the Brexit vote.”

The Royals’ numerous visits to that famous balcony were crucially important on the day.

“When I was in the original cast of Oliver! there were 25 curtain calls on the first night. I had no idea that was a big deal, as I’d never experienced that before, so I loved the idea that the King and Queen just kept on coming back and back and back on to the balcony.

“It’s also interesting that it was politically and emotionally astute for a royal family to stay in London through the war. It gave them a sense of permanence, they represented Britishness, and I think that image of the two young girls who were both gorgeous, Elizabeth in her uniform, you can quite understand how everybody warmed to that as a providence of a new dawn.”

The seriousness of the coronavirus has cast the VE Day anniversary into a new light, he says. “Up until a few months ago,ve day would have just passed by as a historical curiosity. But it’s only really been in the last six weeks as we’ve begun to realise the parallels with the way people were kept at home, the way the lights went out every night and people had deprivation and difficulty in getting food.

“One of the most interesting things I think is that nobody back then was quite sure of what they were allowed to do and what they weren’t, which is the epitome of lockdown. So in the morning of May 8, 1945, everyone knew it’d be a public holiday but no one knew if they were supposed to go into work or not, so you had traffic jams and people going into work then, at the same time, other people being sent home.

“It wasn’t until about 11 o’clock when everyone said, ‘Oh sod it, let’s have a holiday!’”

● VE Day: Minute By Minute, Discovery HD, Thursday, 8pm