Brain Box: Amanda Vickery on BBC2

Amanda Vickery’s new series on the 18th-century home is part of an enlightened new strategy from the BBC, writes Paul Lay.

Amanda Vickery on the set of At Home with the Georgians

The new buzz word at the BBC is ‘braining up’. It was coined by Janice Hadlow, the controller of BBC2, as an antidote to ‘dumbing down’, two words thrown regularly at the BBC by its more trenchant critics. Hadlow, a historian by training, has an exemplary record in history broadcasting, making stars of heavyweight scholars such as David Starkey and Simon Schama (she commissioned the latter’s idiosyncratic but very watchable A History of Britain).

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