Watch Andrew Marr stare at places where stuff happened: New Elizabethans reviewed

Congratulations, everyone! It turns out we’re much better than those bigoted old Brits of the 1950s. After all, they were ‘class-obsessed, overwhelmingly white and Christian, and deeply conservative about the role of women’ — whereas we ‘accept difference and diversity in a way that would have been almost unthinkable in 1953’.

This was the reassuring message in the first episode of New Elizabethans by Andrew Marr, where Marr surveyed Britain’s changing social attitudes since the Queen came to the throne, and liked what he saw. These days, needless to say, the ‘great man theory’ of history has rather fallen out of fashion — so instead Marr brought us a sort of ‘great activist’ version. Over the course of the programme, he identified a number of people who ‘made us all New Elizabethans’: from Darcus Howe to Tracey Emin by way of Monty Python’s unapologetically gay Graham Chapman. Not that all the chosen ones might have considered themselves activists.