Old stamping ground

If I tell you that on Monday there was an hour-long documentary about the history of stamp-collecting, then you probably don’t need this column’s usual bit in brackets saying which channel it was on. Indeed, at times Timeshift: Penny Blacks and Twopenny Blues seemed determined to be the most BBC4-like programme in the history of BBC4: cheerfully niche, heroically indifferent to all notions of cool and so old-school in its production style that any mention of France was introduced with a blast of accordion music. Above all — and unlike so many other documentaries elsewhere — it was wholly confident that its viewers would be interested in interesting things without having to be shrilly reminded every few minutes of how interesting they are.

Admittedly, presenter Andrew Martin did permit himself the odd modest flourish when offering us a particularly fascinating fact: that the word ‘philately’ comes from the Greek for ‘a love of the exemption from tax’, for example; or that the first-ever commemorative stamp was issued in 1871 to mark the 20th anniversary of the Peruvian railway.