THE brilliantly bleak comedy The League of Gentlemen is coming back for a special episode, so I watched the previous series on Netflix, to reacquaint myself with the appalling residents of Royston Vasey. I’d almost forgotten how wondrously vile it could be. With nasty sex, mass nosebleeds and exploding tortoises, and with constant jokes concerning masturbation, disability, lesbianism and botched sex change operations, I flinched and squirmed and felt like a delicate old spinster clutching her lace handkerchief to her chest and gasping, “Ooh! How do they get away with it?”

Spluttering and squirming – but always, always laughing – my partner said this proves nothing should be off-limits in comedy. If it’s funny then we should be free to laugh, without being labelled cruel by some self-righteous snowflake.

But I clutched that metaphorical hankie to my chest again and told him solemnly that there’s one thing which is never funny: nuclear war. It cannot permit a chink of light nor twinkle of humour.

When I had stopped sermonising, he reminded me of Dr Strangelove, and of the sad comic moments of When The Wind Blows. He also recalled periods of my own research where I’ve burst into aggravated laughter at the absurdity of protecting yourself against the nuclear flash by painting your windows white, or of the kind ladies from the WRVS who planned to bring you jigsaws after the holocaust.

So maybe there is room for the blackest of black humour when talking of nuclear war – although that black humour would have to be painted white to deflect the heat. (See, I made a gentle joke there about nuclear war?) There was room for such gentle humour in Britain’s Nuclear Bomb: The Inside Story (BBC4, Wednesday). It told the tale of how Britain built its own nuclear bombs despite being left bankrupt by the Second World War and then frozen out of the atomic programme by the Americans.

After the war, Britain was keen to build its “new Jerusalem”. That took a mighty amount of money, yet there was still enough left over to build nuclear weapons. The British establishment felt they had no choice: they were losing their Empire and their influence in the world, and the only way to claw back some clout was to have a nuclear bomb “with a bloody Union Jack on top of it”.

That’s as far as the programme went in explaining why Britain built the Bomb. There was little discussion of strategy and none about morality. It was simply done to keep a seat at “the top table”. With these weighty issues pushed to the side, the documentary was able to relax into simple story-telling and it did this very well.

As long as the viewer didn’t bristle about the rights and wrongs of Britain becoming a nuclear power, they’d be able to enjoy this as a series of strange and oddly charming anecdotes with an occasional bit of science thrown in.

Much was made of the popular image of the British scientist as an eccentric. During the war, while the Americans worked with endless money and technology at their disposal, the down-at-heel British boffins were splitting the atom in a cupboard made of old tea chests. The two countries quickly decided to collaborate on building an atomic bomb as both feared the Nazis beating them to it. So the British scientists went off to sunny Los Alamos in New Mexico to join the Manhattan Project and together they created the Trinity bomb. Soon afterwards, we had Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It was then that any international co-operation ended. The Americans soon refused to share their atomic secrets, being worried the Soviets would manage to pinch some juicy equations or fancy diagrams. The British donned their dingy brown coats and went off home to dreary post-war Britain, to a country losing her place in the world where it seemed the only hope was for her to have the Bomb.

Here the documentary wallowed lovingly in humorous anecdotes with a very quaint British flavour. There were jolly mishaps and funny mistakes and astonishing stories.

One old chap recalled being asked to scoop up radioactive material with a shovel, and two nuclear bomber pilots, looking strangely like RAF old boys from the Second World War, with their charming manners and curling moustaches, remembered worries that the British Bomb might fall upwards rather than down.

The finished bombs were lighter than the usual payload and there was a fear that the sudden inrush of air when the bomb bay doors opened would push the bomb up and back into the plane.

Again we had the feeling of jolly British eccentricity as the boffins scratched their heads and wondered how to make their bombs go down rather than up. We also heard of the plutonium core of the bomb being transported to Aldermaston in a battered old Vauxhall which, naturally, broke down, so the plutonium had to sit on the back seat by the side of the road waiting for the breakdown truck. Oh how very British! And, oh yes, a nuclear bomb was accidentally released over Dorking. (Thankfully, it was a dummy).

With so many funny little stories, and with a parade of charming old gentlemen on screen, there was absolutely no menace in this programme which, given the subject matter, was quite remarkable. I do believe I even chuckled a few times.

This was the story of Britain’s Bomb as written by Monty Python – but I don’t mean that as an insult. We should remark on the absurd and illogical aspects of nuclear weapons. Their existence has created a mad world, and perhaps the human response is to laugh or go mad with it.