Parents at a Merseyside school were admonished this week for keeping their children at home after the half-term holiday because… it was windy. “I have to say I find this staggering, not least because most live in very close proximity to the school,” the headteacher wrote in a letter to all parents. One mother told the Liverpool Echo that the letter was “disgusting” and had reduced her to tears.

One wonders what these parents would have done in the winter of 1963, when Britain spent 10 weeks in the grip of freezing temperatures and snow. Far from grinding to a halt, the country simply got on with it, as we were reminded in The Big Freeze: Winter ’63 (Channel 5). The freak conditions were “what you’d probably call these days a ‘climate change Armageddon’,” said weatherman John Kettley.

This was a well-edited programme, put together by ITN, featuring archive footage and reminiscences from various talking heads. At first, I did wonder why they had assembled such a random selection of contributors, but they all added lovely bits of colour. Record producer Pete Waterman brought his knowledge of the railways and homes with outside loos. Joanna Lumley was at her most Lumley-esque, recalling life at boarding school where the girls were encouraged to keep the dorm windows open even as temperatures plummeted far below freezing: “Flannels would freeze rigid.”