The Rotters' Club (BBC2): Cast your mind back to 1974 when there were no mobiles, laptops, Princess Diana or Tony Blair.

TV viewers had only three channels from which to choose and the powerful unions were capable of bringing the country to a halt.

The opening part of this skilful adaptation by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais of Jonathan Coe's novel allows those of us around at the time to wallow in nostalgia. Younger viewers will probably just laugh at the tank tops, patterned wallpaper, Yorkie adverts and admiration of James Last's music.

How different life was then. Your brother could be bribed with a tube of Smarties, dieting involved no more than eating Nimble bread and Blue Nun was the drink of choice at suburban dinner parties.

Although the focus is on three schoolfriends growing up in 1970s Birmingham, there's an awful lot going on elsewhere with half a dozen or so storylines intricately interwoven into the narrative.

The youthful trio have adolescent obsessions, such as dreaming of sex with schoolgirl Cicely Boyd and wondering if Shakespeare "might have been a bit of a shirtlifter".

Teachers threw pieces of chalk at unruly pupils and hit them round the head with text books in those days. Forgetting your swimming trunks led to traumatic visions of the horrors inflicted by the sports master for such a misdemeanor.

And the young lads didn't miss the chance to watch "a mucky film" on BBC2. It was, one of them explained, about amour fou.

"What does that mean?," asked his friend.

"I don't know but there's bound to be breasts in it," he said, a reminder in those pre-Jerry Springer The Opera days just how innocent and censored our entertainment was.

It was also a time when Nixon, Watergate and Labour getting in with a majority of three didn't really concern young folk. As one of them explained: "Music transcends all of that".

While the boys could only think about it, the adults were actually doing it under the stars and in a graveyard. I bet it won't be long before Barbara Chase is enjoying herself with artist Nigel Plumb. Don't be fooled by the fact that his velvet suit causes him to be nicknamed the Sugar Plumb Fairy.

I also warmed to Sam Chase with his confident prediction that "the Irish business will be over and done with two years from now".

The series cleverly sets the personal stories against real life events, with the Birmingham pub bombing providing an explosive finale to the first episode.

Sarah Lancashire, Hugo Speer and Mark Williams are the best-known faces among the large cast, but this is an ensemble piece not a star vehicle. Besides, the younger, unknown actors playing the schoolboys are at the core of the story as their hopes and dreams are played out against the background of the turbulent Seventies.

Published: 27/01/2005