Having given the car a proper clean inside (of which it was sadly in need after a summer of wet, sandy, muddy, ice-cream and chip eating children and dogs) I was unable to continue by cleaning the outside of the car as it started to rain. I thus indulged myself with watching some daytime television - Elizabeth R, which was being repeated on UKTV History.

elizabethr1

How times have changed. Yes, you can see in some of the sets and in the costumes, that economies needed to be made, but they were made where they didn't matter. One dead horse, two dead humans and a crow pecking at one of them are quite sufficient to tell me that an uprising has taken place, and nothing would be added by taking the cast to Bulgaria to film a full scale battle sequence with hundreds of Bulgarian extras and a multi-national second unit. What they had instead was a superb cast of classically trained actors who knew their craft, and better than that they had a script where authentic utterances merged seamlessly into the new dialogue in a manner which would be as readily comprehensible to the generation which first saw Shakespeare's plays at the Globe or used the brand new Book of Common Prayer as to today's viewers.

It is always with some trepidation that one watches favourites from the past. Was I more easily impressed in those days? Will it be more redolent of the 1970s than the period in which it is set? Have things moved on technically so much as to make it seem pedestrian?

Well, not in this case: Elizabeth R is still a superb piece of television and a true classic. The comparison with today's costume romp The Tudors is a terrible indictment of the values of modern television.

By the way, I eventually managed to go some way to washing the outside of my car, but the rain started again, so I left the rinsing to God.