Look back at nation's history
The Great British Story: A People's History BBC2, 9pm
THE 14th century was a tumultuous one in British history. There was the Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt, and the first recorded incident of a tap-dancing performance by Bruce Forsyth.
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Delving into the records, historian Michael Wood, right, tracks the plague from Little Cornard, in Suffolk, to Abergavenny, in the Welsh borders, and from St Andrews to Dublin.
Fear not – a new cure has just come out on the NHS.
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In the aftermath of the Black Death, with more than half the population dead, British work patterns changed. Women entered the workforce as brewsters and shopkeepers and an early Page 3 model was empowered to bring out her own turnip-based perfume.
The Peasants' Revolt, led by Wat Tyler, no relation to ITV football commentator Martin, was defeated but the revolt was a major hurdle in overcoming serfdom in medieval England.
Indeed, the next century saw the rise of a new middle-class and Wood visits the oldest primary school in Britain, dating from 1437, to see how education played a big part in changing the fortunes of ordinary people, although even then many were saying A-levels were too easy.
Moving on, letters from a Norfolk village give us a medieval woman's take on love, marriage, and men. Basically you're looking at a 15th century Dear Deirdre.
Finally, in Lavenham Wood, a man who knows how to live, crawls down a Tudor sewer for some hopefully not too hands-on history and sees how the Big Society was launched at the beginning of our modern world.
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