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. Nancy Mitford, for example, was honoured for helping to overthrow the class system. Diana Dors got the nod for services to feminism, by being ‘in control’ after she ‘created the template for a certain kind of female star’ (the blonde and curvy kind).

But, you may be thinking, did Dors really create that template — or did she simply import it from the States? My own money would be on importation, yet the programme left America’s huge cultural influence on post-war Britain unmentioned, presumably because it didn’t fit Marr’s resolutely insular hymn of praise to the British for having come so far.

More British people have heard the music of Eric Spear than almost any other composer’s

Another inconvenient aspect of the story left aside was the central role of grammar schools in liberating non-posh talent. While Marr’s individual biographies of his nominated ‘game-changers’ didn’t hide the fact that many of them went to grammars, he never drew any wider conclusions — by, say, noting that between 1964 and 1997 Britain didn’t have a single privately educated prime minister.