Once upon a time, as the story goes, there lived a beautiful young woman of modest rank and excellent manners, but no significant income to speak of, and a handsome young man of great rank, haughty manners and an estate ‘ten miles round’. The beautiful young woman and the handsome young man meet, his haughty manners improve, they fall in love, he proposes marriage, and, in the concluding pages, her very modest means are joined to his very great estate in an event that surpasses even the wildest dreams of her ambitious mother.

It’s an irresistible story, so irresistible, in fact, that garbled accounts from the popular press fluttered readers for three years and more with rumours that Jane Austen’s text was not only being readied for television, but was going to feature a nude Mr Darcy – as if Austen’s economic romance were not more complex, shaded and, well, more passionate than mere flesh. If sex were all there were to it, we’ve seen it before. But when the BBC camera turns its yearning gaze on Britain’s historic houses, castles and gardens, their vast acres smiling in the sunshine, their sweeping Capability Brown parks, the splendid house presiding over it all, then the blood begins to pump in earnest.