A Very British Renaissance, BBC Two

The miscellany, a varied collection of works on different topics, was originally a Renaissance concept, an opportunity to bulk up a single volume with a diverse assortment of topics. The concept kept coming back to me, watching this peculiar programme, in places coherent and persuasive, in others curiously perverse, as if form and content had been devised by different people.

The programme began predictably enough, like the Renaissance, in Italy, with a Lonely Planet-style recapitulation of Michelangelo's David and the Florence Duomo. It was when we got back to Britain that the weirdness began. As Fox trudged through the coastal mud, imagining himself to be one of the continental intellectuals arriving in isolated, backwoods Britain, the soundtracked twanged cowboy-style steel guitar riffs. It was spectacularly crass, and any viewer still dreaming of polyphony and the Duomo will have felt utterly disoriented. Perhaps the cowboys just hid them well, but the wild west was always believed to be rather short of perpendicular Gothic cathedrals and the works of Chaucer.

Unlike the programme’s other European immigrants, Damian was no great intellectual

Fox’s historical scene-setting was also rather hit and miss. “The Renaissance is supposed to have passed Britain by,” Fox assured us. Who supposes that? Fox didn’t say. Broadly understood, the Renaissance is inseparable from the Reformation, which (among other things) depended on the reinvigorated scholarship kicked off by the Renaissance, and led to the Protestant Church, Cranmer’s Bible, the language of Shakespeare, and quite a lot of other things most people who are at all concerned about the Renaissance will be familiar with.

Eventually, when Fox had a sensible story to tell, the programme improved a lot. He began with the stories of a few expert, cultured European arrivals in Britain, who sowed the Renaissance seed. Some of these, such as the painter Hans Holbein, are indisputably important, and Fox’s portrait of the great Swiss-German was expertly sketched. Others, like the section on German sundial craftsman Nicolaus Kratzer, were a curiosity; while the story of John Damian, an Italian alchemist at the court of James IV of Scotland, was simply bizarre.

Unlike the programme’s other European immigrants, Damian was no great intellectual. His place in history now mostly rests on his attempt in 1507 to fly from the ramparts of Stirling Castle wearing wings improvised from chicken feathers. He broke his leg. The fact that he wasn’t killed (it’s a long way down) was interpreted by Fox as evidence that his wings must have had some effect, and his leap, the cause of widespread hilarity among his contemporaries, therefore an important event in the history of human flight. (At this point a fat pig also leaped from the ramparts, managing to stay airborne longer than Damian, before declaring the episode a shabby and transparent attempt at Scottish tokenism to justify the “British” in the programme’s title.)

After that, things could only get better. Fox was amusing and engaging on Holbein, Thomas Tallis and the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt. The exploration of the stunning Elizabethan house Longleat, the first built following continental models was fascinating, only spoiled - again - by ridiculous choice of music. Why, in a programme arguing for a more accurate understanding of cultural influence, would you play a 19th-century Viennese waltz to illuminate a 16th-century English house in the Italian style?

Let’s hope next week Fox has edited his script better, and set about his audio effects assistant with one of the gruesome instruments of torture that the Renaissance religious community - due a higher profile in weeks to come - spent such ingenuity devising.