Where was Ruth when I got an 'E' for history?

Published: 17:00 EST, 23 November 2013 | Updated: 17:11 EST, 23 November 2013

Tudor Monastery Farm

Wednesday, BBC2                                   ★★★★★

Last Tango in Halifax
Tuesday, BBC1                                        ★★★★★

If you are planning on herding your geese to market, either now or any time in the future, please remember to protect their feet.

They are made for water, and not for being driven across land, so you should either paint them with tar or tuck them into little cloth boots.

I learned this from Tudor Monastery Farm, just as I also learned, for example, that you can make a candle by soaking a rush in boiled pig fat.

The programme is packed with this kind of fascinating information, which isn’t useless fascinating information, as who is to say I won’t have to herd my geese to market one day?

Or what if I’m sitting there, with a rush and some pig fat, but don’t know how to make a candle from them, so just have to carry on in the dark? I’d be kicking myself then.

Having watched all of Victorian Farm and Edwardian Farm and Wartime Farm, it seemed unlikely I would miss Tudor Monastery Farm, and I have been proved right.

This is the ‘living history’ series in which the presenters go about as ordinary people from different historical periods, and now we are in 1500, when monasteries owned most of the land, religion suffused everything, and pigs were not allowed to run free, as they were less domesticated and would attack people.

This is one of  the other important things I learned: keep your pigs within a coppiced hazel enclosure, or they’ll break your legs.

The latest series has been filmed at Weald and Downland Open Air Museum, Chichester, so you know there is a gift shop somewhere, and a tea room, but you must simply forget all that.

You can, if you put your mind to it.

I actually visited Acton Scott, in Shropshire, where Victorian Farm was filmed, and there were all those things there, but I also got to stroke Clumper, the carthorse, so I was happy.

This time out, the trio of cheerful presenters are not the usual trio of cheerful presenters, which is discombobulating.

Historian Ruth Goodman is still on board, as is archaeologist Peter Ginn, but archaeologist Alex Langlands has gone, for some reason.

He has been replaced  by Tom Pinfold, who has taken something of a back seat so far, but did try to shoe  a goose. The goose hissed violently and then instantly divested itself of its footwear.

One more thing I learned: there is no pleasing some geese. And it’s not as  if the little cloth boots weren’t stylish, because they were. (I was minded of Vivienne Westwood, in fact.)

The star, as ever, is Ms Goodman. Ms Goodman is not 24 years old and she does not look like Tess Daly or Holly Willoughby.

She is an older woman who knows stuff and it is a pleasure to see an older woman who knows stuff on primetime television.

Plus, she is not embarrassed to go around wearing what appears to be a tea towel on her head, is a fantastic enthusiast, and has more elbow grease than is proper.

Probably, she buys some of it in. (Robert Dyas sells good elbow grease, apparently, as does John Lewis, although it is more expensive.)

She made cheese from sheep’s milk and lit the fire with just  a flint and wove cloth, which she then hung  on ‘tenterhooks’.

There is, I suppose, something a bit BBC Schools about the whole …Farm endeavour, but had I been taught history like this, I might not have come away with an ‘E’ at O level.

Also, I would have always known that a globe filled with water makes an excellent magnifying glass.

The first series of the comedy drama Last Tango In Halifax has been described as a ‘surprise hit’, but why the ‘surprise’?

Because it’s a romance starring septuagenarians? What does anyone have against older people? I’m an older person, and I’m adorable.

This isn’t a drama about age anyway. It’s about love. Or was about love. Anne Reid and Derek Jacobi play Celia and Alan, childhood sweethearts who rediscovered each other via Facebook and began courting again.

At the opening of the new series, Alan was recovering in hospital from a heart attack, with Celia at his bedside.

Reid and Jacobi have proper chemistry. Reid and Jacobi are what you want to see.

Reid and Jacobi do that switch from gravity to levity, and levity to gravity, as if it were easy, which it is not.

But there was so much else going on. Alan has a daughter, Gillian. Celia has a daughter, Caroline. Gillian has slept with Caroline’s husband, John. John is also seeing a woman called Judith.

And Caroline has a gay lover, Kate, who has now moved in with Caroline. And John.

OK, so here is my worry: now …Halifax has lost its main narrative purpose, now it no longer has to bring Celia and Alan back together, is it about to become just another soapy family melodrama?

Can’t answer that yet, but one thing  I forgot to mention earlier, but should have as it’s important, is this: you do need to shear your sheep at just the right time of year.

Too late, and maggots will set up home in their bums.