FRANCE has embarked on a collective nostalgia trip over the past two days as millions have made use of an internet facility to travel back in time and download television and radio from their youth.

The revolt of May 1968, newsreel footage of General de Gaulle, the confessions of Serge Gainsbourg and cult TV shows of the 1960s are among the hits that have been flooding screens in offices and homes since Thursday, when the Institut National de l’Audiovisual (INA) put online 100,000 broadcasts since the 1940s, most of which are free.

The state agency, the guardian of French broadcast and film heritage, holds a unique trove of about five million hours of programming that includes most broadcasts on air or cable since television began in 1948, prewar newsreels and seven decades of radio. All of it will eventually go online. In the first few hours six million people visited the www.ina.fr site in search of their television memories.

Especially popular is a feature in which you enter your date of birth and watch the television news of the day. Commentators are drawing the obvious conclusion that, in its present unhappy mood, France is seeking solace in a golden age, when life was supposedly better.

The leading search for personalities has not been for the young Brigitte Bardot, Françoise Hardy or other classic pinups. The favourite is Yannick Noah, whose victory in the 1983 French Open launched his career as tennis champion, pop singer and national darling. In second place is Gainsbourg, the late singer-composer whose bittersweet ballads are the musical and political soundtrack of the middle-aged.

Close behind is Claude François, the king of kitsch (and collaborator on Comme d’habitude, which is My Way in English), whose fame is greater now than when he was electrocuted by a lamp that fell into his bathtub in 1978. Among hugely popular shows are police series, such as Arsène Lupin, Nestor Burma, dé tective de choc and Les Shadoks, a quirky 1960s cartoon satire of late Gaullist France.

Four fifths of the broadcasts are free. The others, covered by copyright, require a small fee. Emmanuel Hoog, the president of the INA, which has spent years digitising its archives of magnetic tape and celluloid, said that the institute had expected a big appetite for old television but nothing like the opening feast, which was still jamming the site yesterday.

The online broadcast archives, which have no foreign rival, have a social function, M Hoog suggested. “Children will be able to discover how people dressed in their grandparents’ time and what music their parents listened to,” he said.

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