England is founded on class-division, oppression, subjugation and exploitation; our culture is built on the tortured backs of the rural & urban working-class and this continues to be the case today. The other day in Liverpool we took shelter from the downpour in St Georges Hall, this noble edifice of a particularly English take on Classicism wherein the sumptuous banqueting hall is built over the prison cells below; a testimony to the pre-requisites of mass squalor, poverty, crime and human depravity which is truly England's Glory. This is the country I was born into and I am under no illusions about our Heritage, nor of the evil represented by the pictures on The Chocolate Box, much less the tooth-rotting folksie twee faux-pourri Country House / Cathedral horrors it contains by way of marketing a myth however so comforting that myth might be. Personally, I've always preferred Jonathan Meades to Alan Titchmarch anyway.

Otherwise...

I see in the advert box opposite this thread a DVD of England My England in which Michael Ball plays Henry Purcell and Simon Callow and Lucy Speed play intriguing double roles which contrasts the England of today (or the sixties?) with Purcell's time. Ball is remarkably good as I recall though I haven't seen the film in a while; I taped it on VHS when it first shown on CH4 back in the Purcell Tercentenary year (how long ago that feels!) and I don't think it's been shown again.