BBC's A Very British Romance with Lucy Worsley, TV review: the British notion of romantic love

Digging up the past, to a quite remarkable degree, was BBC Four, where you could have spent the night exploring every period from the Middle Ages to the 1930s, like finding yourself locked inside a history faculty library. Thus, the Detectorists carried on with their amateur archaeology; Servants: The True Story of Life below Stairs went through the drudgery of life below stairs in the Downton era, and Chivalry and Betrayal: The Hundred Years War gave the opportunity for you to “do” the battle of Crécy (1346).

Pick of the olden days stuff was A Very British Romance with Lucy Worsley, who was at least exhuming something jolly, which is to say the British notion of romantic love, at its Georgian climactic. The learned Ms Worsley has an intimate style of story-telling, and when she got to the inevitable Jane Austen bit I wondered whether her description of an early edition of Sense and Sensibility (1811) as “a tiny little thing, genteel, petite and with no indication of the dynamite that lies within” might not be equally well applied to her. Such is the power of television (2015).