What fun struggling with three carbon copies and a faded typewriter ribbon in a room thick with the smoke that gave the walls their unique yellow colour, hearing through the fug and tension an occasional howl as a sub-editor slamming rejected copy on to the spike in a fury skewered his hand.

How we talk as if we loved it when it's the people we miss, not the primitive equipment; we know that word processors and computers are more efficient and a smoke-free office more pleasant. And 10 minutes with old cuttings confounds memory to remind us that misprints and mistakes were as common then as now.

I guess that former workers in many trades – such as the almost extinct ship building and coal mining – and present workers still lucky enough to be in one, also wear rose-tinted glasses when looking back to rivet burns, lost fingers, suffocating narrow tunnels and seam collapses.

But for severe cases of "the good old days" go to farming and the countryside where there has always been a ready market for rosy-glow reminiscing about a happier world when work was done by horses and squads of happy, sun-burned – or apple cheeked, it's optional – workers, who paused only to doff hats to the local laird.

It's easy to see how this happens. Old photographs and film, not to mention songs, can beguile as I found out again recently when a packed local village hall was treated to two hours of This Farming Life.

It was mainly farming up to the middle of last century in south-west England, with songs – yes, join in the chorus – including the centuries-old one with a moral (she can do his job, he can't do hers), 'The Farmer And His Wife'.

But most of the work on film and photograph was familiar to many survivors in the audience, such as potato picking, a horse-drawn reaper cutting grass to make hay, a horse-drawn binder making sheaves, ploughing with a small Ferguson tractor, a threshing day with a dozen workers risking limbs among unguarded drive belts and myriad moving parts and dust and chaff, feeding livestock outdoors in all weathers, moving hen huts, lifting turnips from frozen ground.

We occasionally looked across at each other and nodded knowingly. Been there, done that, don't particularly want to do it again.

But most revealing for me was a film of Peter and Ruby. Although made in the early 1970s, it showed 80-year-old Peter as a throwback. He was also unwashed with ragged clothes and I was pleased we couldn't smell either him or his house as Ruby pottered about with the cat, the dog, the hens in the mucky yard and the equally mucky kitchen. Add an outside dry toilet, no electricity, the endless physical labour and low wages and Peter and Ruby brought some realism to those good old days we tend to remember through a filter, like school holidays when the sun always shone.