Season 1

Ian Hislop explores perhaps the most distinctive, peculiar and deep-seated trait of the British, our obsession with the past. Over three films he reveals how and why, throughout our history, we have continually plundered 'the olden days' to make sense of and shape the present.

Ian Hislop travels back to the era of the Industrial Revolution and Victorian Britain. This was a time of some of the greatest progress and modernisation the country had ever seen - and yet, throughout these decades, writers, artists and politicians were trying to make sense of this new world by retreating into a very old world indeed: the Middle Ages.

Ian Hislop explores the rural olden days - an idealised vision of the countryside - in this concluding film of his series exploring Britain's obsession with the past.