Last night's TV reviewed: Ringing all the changes

The writer Evelyn Waugh had a great dislike of the radio, calling it ‘a detestable toy’ and refusing to allow one in his house. 

Dial ‘B’ For Britain: The Story Of the Landline (BBC4) included footage of a similarly jowly and furious man describing the telephone as a thundering nuisance. 

Lord knows what they would make of the ringtone and automated checkout. 

Before it enraged people – so last night’s wittily enlightening film told us – the telephone troubled them. In the early years of the landline, only the well-off could afford them, yet who was supposed to answer this high-status device? The butler? A mere maid? 

Would the lady of the house not be demeaned by picking up this tube that gave the outside world direct access to her inner ear? What things might improper gentlemen speak into it? 

Fortunately, doubts gave way to straightforward fury with a very early case from 1907 concerning a man who had paid for his call and not got one. 

These were the days, incredibly, of manned telephone booths – but you could still part with your coin and not get connected. 

In the absence of any sympathy from the attendant, one disgruntled customer smashed up the kiosk, occasioning 19s worth of damage. 

Sympathising with his pain, the magistrates fined him just one bob. The theme of this potted history was of a phone service never quite ringing all the bells until its time was all but over. 

In the early years, they could not persuade enough people to pay for phone lines. 

Then they could not persuade them to make calls – hence the invention of the Speaking Clock. 

A deluge of new custom in the Seventies, drawn by cheap rates and groovy-looking trim phones, meant the network fried and even kids show Trumpton poked fun at the failing system. 

A chatty cartoon bird called Buzby, voiced by Sir Bernard Cribbins, came to the rescue and by the late Eighties the phone had finally become as much a part of the British household as the kettle and the cat. 

At which point, of course, a new, portable ringtone sounded its death knell. 

Then again, the landline is not exactly dead in the internet age, more haunting us with monthly bills for a handful of calls. 

Amid the deluge of ‘true crime’ on screen at the moment, The Detectives: Inside the major crimes team (ITV) is a solid tribute to the work of Lancashire Constabulary’s MCT. 

“I’ve been doing this long enough to know when something doesn’t add up,” said DS Stuart Upton, as he investigated what looked like the armed robbery of a sub post office. 

Upton and his colleagues were all experienced, dedicated professionals but were strikingly unlike the old-school coppers of the TV drama world – they were young, fit, healthy, sharply dressed and deadly earnest. 

The armed robbery at the Post Office was so obviously an inside job and so obviously the work of very stupid men that I would have sent them to primary school rather than prison. 

Meanwhile, after a town centre stabbing, one of the perpetrators got in a taxi, told the driver his address and then ran off before paying the fare. 

Did he not see how that was going to work out? Last night’s batch of cases made you worry for the Lancashire detectives. 

So fast, so smart, so well trained – and so stuck, shooting fish in a barrel.