After Auntie’s nannyish booze warnings, I need a big drink!

The latest Government guidelines on alcohol allow us no more than a pint of beer a day, or a bottle-and-a-half of wine each week. And that’s the maximum — the only healthy limit, says Nanny Whitehall, is nothing at all.

But without booze, we could not have had the incendiary cinema performances of Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole. The scintillating novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the sublime poetry of Dylan Thomas, would not have existed.

Ban the demon drink, and you lose the hallucinogenic colours of Vincent Van Gogh. You’d never hear the whiskey-soaked croon of Frank Sinatra.

There’s more. If the Beatles hadn’t spent years carousing in hamburg nightclubs, the greatest pop songs in the world could not have been written. And if Sir Winston Churchill had obeyed his doctor and gone teetotal, Britain might have lost World War II.

That’s what the Government’s chief medical officer, Professor Dame Sally Davies, would prefer. Better a world without The Great Gatsby, without My Way and Please Please Me, if it means we can all live a couple of years longer . . . bored and abstemious.

(BBC1) was a public information broadcast on behalf of Dame Sally, who began the programme with an insincere disclaimer: ‘It is not for me to say: “You Must Not Drink!” ’

But that’s exactly what she was saying. There is, we were told repeatedly, no safe level of alcohol consumption — except for, funnily enough, Professor Dame Sally herself. Women in her age bracket, 55 and over, will actually benefit, she said, from a couple of glasses of vino. That’s convenient, isn’t it?

Dr Javid Abdelmoneim, who presented the show, did his mortal best to put us off drinking by making it look as unpleasant as possible.

First, he donned a plastic leg shackle, like a prisoner’s tag, to monitor the amount of alcohol he consumed. Most of us do that by counting drinks, but he had to do it by analysing his sweat.

‘I like a drink,’ he claimed, but Dr Javid’s idea of a fun night out was to have one glass of chardonnay, then blow into a breathalyser every 20 minutes.

The more the wine wore off, the more he enjoyed himself. What a hoot — I can’t wait to try it.

Then he showed us hangover cures, including a full english breakfast that looked like it had been congealing in its own cold fat for three days.

After that, he staged the most joyless drinking session ever devised, with the staff of Arkell’s ale factory in Swindon lined up on a wooden bench, glumly downing halves of bitter like it was hemlock.

It’s official: the BBC truly cannot organise the proverbial p***-up in a brewery.

Limo driver Terry, a braggart with a nasty streak in Jo Brand’s sitcom Going Forward (BBC4), won’t be falling for any elf & safety blather.

he reckons he never listens to health warnings — when he went on safari in South Africa last year, he not only got out of the tourist Jeep, but he walked up to a lion and stroked it. So says Terry.

It’s hard to guess whether that gag was dreamed up by Jo, who stars as nurse Kim Wilde, and also wrote this three-part show — or ad-libbed by actor Tom Davis, who plays Terry and is also the incompetent Inspector Sleet in the improvised crime comedy, Murder In Successville.

Going Forward sounds as though the cast are making up their lines as they go along. They stumble over words, they repeat themselves, and sometimes they seem to be holding back splutters of laughter.

The camera work is no more professional, with light flaring through every window and characters drifting in and out of shot.

But underneath all that, there’s a tightly engineered plot pulsing away. Beset by money worries, the characters have backed themselves into a double disaster.

Going Forward is that rare phenomenon, a show that’s much cleverer than it looks.