For a real Victorian history lesson, turn off the TV and read Dickens

What was the point of

(BBC2)? It recreates the atrocious housing conditions of 19th- century London, without everything that made them atrocious — the disease, the rats, the smog, the overcrowding, the crime or the constant threat of the workhouse.

Clearly, there are elf & safety concerns about cramming 16 people into a bare room with snow blowing through the window frame, feeding them on bread made from sawdust and waiting for them to get rickets.

But that’s what the slums were like — not the disinfected, rodent-free rooms of this East End facsimile.

all this revealed the limitations of TV as a time machine. the producers wanted to reimagine the era of cholera, child pickpockets and transportation, but it’s impossible to do that in reality, not without killing people.

the only real way to travel back in time is the original, low- tech method, using printed paper. If you want to experience Dickensian London, read Charles Dickens.

the Victorian Slum has been conceived as a companion piece to the excellent Back In time For Dinner, which plunged families into the Sixties and Seventies with all the lurid decor and dire dining of those decades.

But millions of BBC2 viewers remember the Sixties, and we loved the nostalgic rush of sights and sounds evoked by that show. there are only three people in the world who can prove they were alive in Queen Victoria’s reign — a man in Japan, a lady in Jamaica and, oldest of them all, the 116-year-old Emma Morano, of Piedmont, Italy, born in 1899. None of them, obviously, was ever a Cockney slum-dweller.

the illusion of time travel broke down further whenever the four families living in sanitised poverty stepped into the outside world. the children went selling watercress in Covent Garden, and were fussed over by the tourists. the tailor and his wife sold cloth caps and neckties to delighted hipsters from the nearby trendy Shoreditch.

they even paid in decimal money, not old-fashioned half-crowns and shillings. It all looked less like a serious historical experiment, and more like a craft fair in costume.

Everyone tried hard to convince us this was real. Within half an hour most of them were in tears, sobbing because their hands were blistered, and they were hungry.

One poor woman got all emotional when she realised she would never meet her great-great-grandparents, to tell them how sad she was that they had such tough lives.

She should dry her eyes. Great-great-gran would look at this set-up and tell her to stop sniffling — by her standards, these fake slum-folk are living in luxury.

a proper touch of Victorian life was brought to the screen by Martha Kearney, presenter of Radio 4’s World at One, who was waving a butterfly net around like a true 19th-century naturalist.

Martha has been besotted with butterflies for a couple of years, ever since a bee sting allergy forced her to give up her honey hives. The

Great Butterfly Adventure (BBC4) saw her following Painted Ladies on their 2,000-mile trek from their Moroccan breeding grounds to the gardens of England.

It’s the longest migration of any insect in the world.

Incredibly, with a steady wind beneath their wings, some Painted Ladies can make the journey in just a day and a half, though they prefer to do it in stages: one batch stops in Spain, to lay its eggs, and the next generation carries on to France, resting before the next lot crosses the Channel — the grandchildren of the original african emigres.

When they’ve come so far, it seems only fair to give them dinner. Martha told us what to plant for food — not only buddleia, which every gardener knows as the Butterfly Bush, but thistles, nettles, wildflowers and ivy.

So put your feet up and let the back yard go wild, because the Painted Ladies will thank you for it. Laziness and a clear conscience, the perfect combination.

this excellent documentary lasted 90 minutes, but the time seemed to flit by. Like a butterfly.