Blitzing the 7/7 bombings

While the BBC examined the days leading up to the London bombings last July and spoke to survivors of the bus bombing, Channel 4 superbly recreated the terror of one night of the Blitz

This time last year, the cliché most over-used to keep Londoners' spirits afloat in the wake of the 7/7 bombings was that of the "the Blitz spirit". Londoners have a long history of carrying on with their lives amid the dangers of bombs, like during the IRA's campaign during the 1970s. In reality, neither the IRA nor the 7/7 bombers deserve mentioning in the same breath as the nightly terror which descended from the skies in 1940.

Nine Days that Shook London (BBC2, Thursday, 11.20pm) examined the days leading up to the 7/7 bombings, when – with the vote on London's 2012 Olympic bid looming – the attention of the world's press was being carefully nudged towards the city, with the seemingly radical protests of the G8 open-air concert being carefully coordinated by British authorities to show how that city's infrastructure could deal with large-scale crowds. As one commentator remarked, protests that have the implicit blessing and approval of the prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer always lead themselves to the question of who exactly was manipulating who?

The feel good factor created by the G8 concert and the successful Olympic bid lasted only a few days, until the morning of 7/7. That atrocity was recalled in Real Story: Terror on the Number 30 (BBC1, Friday, 7.30) where Fiona Bruce interviewed survivors of the bus bombing. But the bigger story of the real Blitz was brilliantly evoked in Blitz: London's Firestorm (Channel 4, Saturday, 7pm). This drama-documentary recreated just one night of Luftwaffe's bombing campaign, 29 December 1940, when hundreds of children who returned home for Christmas had not yet been re-evacuated to the country, and a concerted attempt was made to destroy St Paul's cathedral.

The story was narrated mainly by old men who had been 17- and 18-year-old volunteer firemen, or by the children of people who fought the flames when a strong wind aided the thousands of incendiary bombs that had fallen in advance of the main bombings. Flames were so intense that when the power failed in one hospital, surgeons removed the blackout blinds and continued emergency operations by the light of the fires outside. Old men stood on the roofs of modern buildings and recalled holding hoses on buildings that had started to self-combust because of the heat around them. An American correspondent recalled passing through the Savoy hotel where the fag-ends of the aristocracy continued to stoically sip their brandies and ignore the fires outside. An elderly woman recalled being pulled from the rubble where most of her family died. Archive film was intermixed with dramatic recreations to conjure the sheer horror of being caught up in that single night and knowing that every night to come could be as bad.

It shows that Channel 4 are still capable of making great television, even if they do their best most of the time to hide it. Its bastard offspring, E4, that same evening offered lingering footage of a man in a pair of underpants, tied to a playground slide with clingfilm and with a candle sticking from his anus.

Possibly he was a performance art refugee from a 1975 Rosc exhibition, or perhaps E4 have taken up the challenge that Ferdinand VII of Spain set the Inquisition when re-establishing them in 1823 to crush "the dangerous mania for thinking".