Tony Robinson's Crime And Punishment, Channel 4, Sunday
How TV Changed Britain, Channel 4, Friday
Occasionally, anti-TV campaigners will solemnly point out that the average person will see however many thousand violent acts if they watch for a certain length of time (and doubtless just as many boring Big Brother 'scandals'), thus warping us all into sociopaths. But at least the violence is mostly fake: in the late-18th century, the average person could see, in their lifetime, some 1,200 people actually killed right in front of them at the hugely popular public executions.
That grisly fact was relayed by Tony Robinson in the last part of his Crime And Punishment series, which took the story of the development of the rule of British law up to the start of the system as we know it today. In the Georgian era, judges were "dishing out death sentences like there was no tomorrow" for almost all crimes, large and small.
To read the full review, click here:
The Scotsman.
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