I missed this episode of Tonight on Friday, so I caught up with it yesterday on ITV Player, and if you’re the sort of person who just loves a handy cost-cutting tip or three, then you’ll love this show.

It was presented by Martin Lewis, the often hyper financial whizzkid who appears on GMTV to share money saving ideas with the nation, and for this show, he met one especially super-thrifty granny who lives and breathes the wartime adage, ‘make-do-and-mend’.

“Green Granny Barbara” showed us how to reuse that odd shoe that’s been in the hallway for ten years, or utilise the cat’s poo from the litter tray – well, not really, but you get the gist – and what a lovely lady she is.

In fact, Barbara is brill, and that’s official. She not only has a use for everything, she knows where all the bargains are at and she even does podcasts to share her extensive knowledge of all things frugal with the rest of us.

And she has a Kim and Aggie like wealth of cleaning tips too, so in order to help one family cut their spending, Barbara went along to show them what they can cut back on. The multitude of tips was just too extensive to go into here, but as well as Barbara’s tips, we had dozens from various parsimonious sorts around the UK…

These included using your old microwave plate as a TV “swivel”, repainting furniture rather than chucking it out – though the demo of that included a toddler and gloss paint; ill advised – and using the waxy paper out of cereal boxes as sandwich bags.

In short, it was both amusing and informative and I have to say, some of the money saving/stretching stuff was actually pretty handy to know. But overall, my favourite segments were the old cinema reels about how “gals” in wartime knew how to make a five course dinner out of one egg and a square of chocolate.

I absolutely love those old films where the narrator is always super-posh and the women wear nothing but ‘housecoats’ and grin like village idiots while they’re sweeping the floors or something. Brilliant.

If you too missed it on TV, you can watch it here on ITV Player and even better, you can watch Green Granny Barbara in action here.