Vivid, truthful ... this was like a time machine back to the 1950s

HOWEVEr closely they recreate the clothes and hairstyles of bygone decades, most period dramas retain a whiff of the dressing-up box. Characters display modern sentiments, or use current jargon.

Downton Abbey was notorious for letting scraps of 21st-century idiom slip into the script, with talk of ‘relationships’ and ‘sucking it up’. Even the sublime Mad Men, with vast budgets lavished on costumes and decor, always felt archly stylised.

In Plain Sight (iTV), based on a real-life murder inquiry in Lanarkshire, Scotland, achieved the remarkable feat of transporting us back to the mid-Fifties as vividly as a time machine. The period detail was eerily accurate, but the real magic lay in the performances, from Martin Compston as the swaggering killer and Douglas Henshall as the detective pledged to catch him.

The story did not feel at all farfetched, largely because it was true: a resentful local man, who has served nine years for a series of sex attacks, returns home to resume his crimes, and to taunt the detective who sent him to jail. The police know what he intends to do, but to stop him they have to catch him.

For an audience used to forensic scientists, psychological traumas, DNA evidence and nationwide manhunts, this story could have seemed pedestrian. instead it felt shockingly truthful and recent, despite being a testimony to how much British life has changed in less than a lifetime.

Peter Manuel, the 30-year-old rewarded by dogged attention to duty and the other is undone by his deluded self-confidence.

But that’s not the attraction of the drama. it’s the way it conjures a Britain we’ve left behind, one that is still so close we can feel its breath on the back of our necks.

Lucy Worsley was using costume to retell the well-worn saga of King Henry Viii’s marriages, in Six Wives (BBC1). Of all the telly historians, Dr Lucy is the one who can’t resist a ruff and a velvet bodice, so it was no surprise that within minutes she was dressed as a Tudor servant, sidling next to the actors in the recreations of royal spats and peeping through keyholes into the palace bedrooms.

The cast didn’t notice her, probably because they were all acting in Wolf Hall gloom with a single candle to light castle chambers. Every now and then, a courtier would sweep across her and when Dr Lucy reappeared she was back in her designer blue dress with the three-inch scarlet heels.

When the play-acting stopped, there were moments of interest. She travelled to rome, where the original love letters from Henry to Anne Boleyn are kept in the Vatican library.

But she can never resist those odd, theatrical flourishes, such as driving round with portraits of the king and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, on the back seat, like children being ferried to a music lesson.

in the end, we learned little new. But Dr Lucy had a lovely time in her fancy-dress.