What A Performance! Pioneers of Popular Entertainment, TV review: The good old days weren't that good after all

Frank Skinner and Suzi Klein present the BBC's three-parter on the showbiz giants of Gladstone's time

Pedal power: BBC presenter Suzy Klein chauffeurs colleague Frank Skinner on a rickshaw in ‘What a performance! Pioneers of Popular Entertainment’ (BBC)

Imagine, if you will, a magnificent building, seating a couple of thousand folk, where you could hang out of an evening with friends and strangers; where all classes, and women and men, caroused together; and where the most varied of entertainments, in every sense, could be enjoyed, and where you could enjoy a meal with waiter service. And have change from half-a-crown. That, my lords, ladies and gentlemen, was the British music hall, which was, still within living memory, our dominant form of mass entertainment, and of which today there is scarcely a trace. The few fragments that can be found were thoroughly interrogated by Frank Skinner and Suzi Klein, in the first of this BBC three-parter on the showbiz giants of Gladstone's time, What A Performance.

Perhaps unwittingly, double act Skinner and Klein showed us why this form of popular culture has indeed passed into history: it wasn't all that good. It was in its time, for sure. The likes of comic Dan Leno, impersonated with some panache by Skinner and Marie Lloyd, revivified saucily by Klein, were megastar celebs in their time. Why, one of Marie's songs even references an encounter with the Daily Mirror (pre-hacking, obvs). Nowadays, most of the songs and gags sound hopelessly limp and remote, making even the most obscure Shakespearean pun sound almost hip. Of course some of those old tunes are still catchy; "Champagne Charlie", as sung by Victorian superstar George Leybourne, and "The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery", Lloyd's first, and cleanest, "hit single".

The truth, not quite acknowledged by Skinner and Klein, is that " variety" – the idea of a succession of singers, comedians, ventroloquists, performing animals, child actors and so-called speciality acts (such as "The Mexican Boneless Wonders") – never quite died as a concept. It just transmogrified. Apart from its strange lingering afterlife in the 1970s series The Good Old Days, plenty of Saturday evening light entertainment television shows have unfathomably offered up puppetry and magicians, and it remains so now. What, after all, is Britain's Got Talent or The X Factor other than a radically modern version of the music hall, with you parked there watching some dancing collies as you quaff your red wine and Dominos pizza? All Simon Cowell needs is a boneless wonder and we'd be back to 1860.

By the way, a much better evocation of the heyday of the music hall can be found in the 1946 Ealing movie Champagne Charlie, which is showing as part of our sister channel London Live's Ealing Studios season. If you live in the capital, you'll find Tommy Trinder does a better chirpy cockney than Skinner.

Detectorists, as I have mentioned before, moves at a pace that makes Last of the Summer Wine resemble a Bond caper. Not until the very last moments of this last episode in the second series do we witness Lance, played by Toby Jones, following his sixth sense and digging up the medieval amulet thing that, we viewers know, has been resting in the middle of an Essex field for, well, about a millennium. If Jones and co-star/director Mackenzie Crook can bring themselves to "get their coil on the soil" again, a third series would be just as welcome to me as Lance's remarkable discovery was to him and his fellow members of the Danebury Metal Detecting Club. A much happier exhumation than Skinner and Klein's, I must say.