Most people by now are aware the only really decent time in human history to be alive was a short period in England from somewhere in the 1800s to the early 1900s.
Everybody in those days had the sort of lifestyle Evelyn Waugh would have penned, while repartee at their parties sounded like a series of Oscar Wilde quips.
People lived upstairs in large London houses, as their servants, struck misty-eyed and infatuated with the love of duty to their betters, stood waiting at their beck and call downstairs.
They spent their weekends at Brideshead Castle or similar where their amusements were alcoholism, adultery and homosexuality.
The worst that could happen was a romantic descent into alcoholism in Morocco, or a romantic death in the trenches.
Nobody got sick but the poor.
Those, my friends, were the days.
The latest BBC drama to bring tears to the eyes of a nostalgia learnt on television is the most stunning and exceptional Parade's End - Sir Tom Stoppard's adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's story of love, betrayal and trench warfare.
Oh, and oh, but it is good.
Rebecca Hall is the beautiful but poisonous Sylvia Tietjens, a woman we meet as the camera floats above the chandelier, looking down on the silken white stockings and gold-tipped fan as the maid packs hairbrushes and other detritus of beauty in a travelling case.
Benedict Cumberbatch is Christopher Tietjens.
Cumberbatch, of course, is an actor who reeks of quality, if only for his turn as Peter Guillam in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
Christopher Tietjens is very intelligent but a little stuffy - at home he entertains himself by making corrections in the margin of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
But then he meets the then Sylvia Satterthwaite on a train and becomes entangled in an activity surely frowned on by British Rail at any point in history.
His elder half-brother Mark (Rupert Everett) puts the resulting wedding bluntly: ''So - you get yourself trapped by a Papist bitch carrying a baby - ha!''The wonderfully evil and shallow Sylvia gets bored quickly with a husband who doesn`t show the requisite jealousy.
''I'm bored,'' she says.
''There's no point in a fling if your husband doesn't notice.''
He does, of course, and as we warm to the cuckolded civil servant, he heads north and falls in love with young suffragette Valentine Wannop (Adelaide Clemens) on a long journey through the fog.
The five-part mini-series begins on UKTV on May 5.
Episode one ends with Christopher weeping with frustration and love as the monogamous man of duty loses his heart.
Parade's End is civilisation at its peak.
Unspeakably fabulous.
- Charles Loughrey
