Love Rob’s dam passion

DESPITE its clumsy and somewhat ambiguous title, BRITISH PLANES THAT WON THE WAR WITH ROB BELL (I’m pretty sure we’ve never been at war with Rob Bell; they’d have taught us that at school if we had) continues to be an absorbing watch.And isn’t it refreshing, given TV’s preference for pap, that someone with a passion for history has been allocated such a generous portion of airtime, tonight’s being the third of four fascinating hour-long episodes?

In that sense, it’s a bit like that wonderful show I like to watch on the Yesterday channel, where the train aficionado chappy and that lady from Iceland, which it turns out is also a country, are forever stumbling upon spooky old London Underground tunnels.

Mind you, Rob’s got some distance to cover before he catches up with those two, who’ve clocked up something like 16 hours.

In tonight’s episode (C5, 9pm), we hear about the Lancaster bomber and the vital role it played in defeating Hitler. The key, explains this extraordinarily excitable fellow (Rob, that is, not Hitler), was this aircraft’s hugely powerful engines, allowing it to carry the biggest bombs the RAF had ever deployed.

In strategic terms, it meant the approach the Allies could take from now on could be more “proactive”, even though nobody talked like that back then.

Most famous, of course, was the part Lancasters played in Operation Chastise, more snappily known as the Dambusters raid of May 1943. Led by Wing Commander Guy Gibson, the RAF’s 617 Squadron breached dams in the Ruhr valley that were key to Germany’s production capability, having unleashed the revolutionary bouncing bombs designed by engineer Barnes Wallis.

But we also hear how the Lancaster was, in many respects, the living, flying embodiment of Britain’s all-round war effort. More than 7,000 of them were built in 10 different factories, with women playing the key role in their construction.

As with his previous episodes (on the Sopwith Camel and the Spitfire, both still available on My5), Bell puts as much emphasis on the human side of the story as on the military and the mechanical. It’s that, along with his infectious enthusiasm, that makes this series so compelling.

Elsewhere, Claudia Winkleman hosts another episode of ONE QUESTION (C4, 8pm), the programme where choosing the right answer from 20 options can win you £100,000.

The question with which she starts tonight is: “What happened in 2000?”

One of the contestants immediately pulls a face.

“History’s not my strong point,” she sighs.