Colin Hogg: Sex, drugs, rock'n'roll 40 years on

Cilla Black admitted she loved being famous as a 19-year-old in the 1960s.

Nostalgia rules when 60s singers such as Cilla Black and Tom Jones revisit their past selves.

What a strange time the 1960s must have been - on the one hand, the most loved of all those interesting decades the 20th century served up and, on the other, perhaps the most misrepresented.

I wouldn't know the truth because, of course, having lived through the 60s, I don't really remember them properly.

But not to worry, television is stepping up to fill the gaps, though, as usual, not in an entirely useful way.

The last week saw the launch of two new series with eyes on that famous decade, both bearing titles promising a little more than they delivered.

First, starting last Wednesday on Prime was Sex, Drugs and Rock'n'Roll: The 60s Revealed which turned out to be a little less breathlessly exciting than it promised.

Running as three episodes within the channel's music-devoted Prime Rocks slot, this particular trip back to the 60s certainly has an interesting angle on it.

Back then, in 1967 and 1968, as London swings about him, a famous, serious sort of TV interviewer called Bernard Braden filmed encounters with dozens of the big, mostly young stars of the time, intending to revisit them three years later to interview them again and combine both ends for a trend-setting series.

But Braden lost his job before the 60s were out and he died in the late 70s, leaving his project incomplete until 2008, when Sex, Drugs Rock'n'Roll: The 60s Revealed was finally made, complete with the matched-up interviews with many of the stars, now more than 40 years on.

"It reminds me of my grandson," said Tom Jones, looking in wonder at his younger self - and the more the two Toms spoke, the more they seemed not that different from each other.

Lulu cried when she saw her 19-year-old self and Cilla Black squawked like an old red crow.

"I lurved being famous," she said, under the considerable weight of her theatrical Liverpudlian accent.

On being pals with the Beatles, she went so far as to claim, "Your last resort was Ringo", which might have been a trifle unkind. She looked crazy and sounded unreliable, but not in an entirely bad way.

In one of the few moments the show actually lived up to its promise and even mentioned drugs, she said she never went near them. "I was sceered," she screeched.

Davy Jones from the Monkees was as big a little jerk then as 40 years later (though he has died since) and an oily old DJ called Simon Dee was alarmingly taken with the "young handsome chap" he saw before him.

But there were fashion people interviewed then and now too, along with loads of pop-tastic swinging London archive and though it didn't even come close to delivering on that breathless title, Sex, Drugs and Rock'n'Roll is a terrific little series.

Tomorrow night's episode, for instance, looks like featuring Sean Connery with and without hair.

On the subject of breathless titles, there's no beating the other new 60s-set series, which is in fact called Breathless (TV One, Sunday, 9.30pm).

It's a very good-looking soap opera set in a London hospital and swirling around the lives of the doctors and nurses and their inevitable loves and intrigues.

The intrigues do look intriguing - as does the show itself, art-directed and dressed and drinked and smoked up to the nth degree, like Mad Men but with posh accents and different cars.

And perhaps not quite breathless.