Few documentaries would be brave enough to feature ‘He’s just a pig. He’s just a greedy bastard pig, and look at him!’ amongst its opening lines, but this sets the tone nicely for the first hour of BBC4’s Rude Britannia. (If you’re wondering, this particular ‘pig’ is, unsurprisingly, the future George IV, then Prince of Wales.)

The first episode of this three-part series explores ‘rudeness’ in our nation’s visual and literary arts from the formation of Great Britain in 1707 to the rise of censorship in the 1820s. It is – as one might expect – a carnival of filth, fornication and other, four-letter words, as well as serving as an interesting introduction to High Art’s fascination with low life during the eighteenth century.

This largely chronological journey takes the form of a tour of Georgian London, giving a taste of the lively humour found in its streets, theatres, and the flourishing world of print. Although the underlying theme dictates that we open with the Act of Union, we launch immediately into the work of Hogarth and follow the progress of the satirical tradition through Fielding, Sterne, Gillray, and Byron, amongst others. The attention afforded to anonymous street performers, namely bawdy ballad singers quite willing to raise their skirts to attract an audience, is fleeting but offers something more original nonetheless.

The programme can be visually engrossing, especially in its discussion of comic art. Here the format gives centre-stage to the minute detail of the work itself – close and almost interactive readings of works by Hogarth, Gillray, Rowlandson and George Cruikshank go some way to evoking the spirit of ribaldry or visceral horror that prints once aroused in audiences unacquainted with 3D cinema. Alongside prominent contemporary cartoonists, an impressive panel of academics including Jenny Uglow, Vic Gattrell, and Tim Hitchcock offers the context and their personal reactions to the works, but it is a shame that scholarly inquiry generally is overshadowed by televisual frippery; the Carry On- and Python-esque effects somewhat undermine attempts to emphasise the striking artistic innovations made, or the vicious edge to seemingly infantile humour. The sharp critiques of now-obscure public figures have inevitably lost their vitriol with the distance of time, and while modern satire’s debt to the eighteenth century is implied (Gillray’s caricature of Pitt the Younger as a fungus brings to mind Steve Bell’s depictions of David Cameron as a human condom) the fact that it is not deeply investigated misses an opportunity to draw potentially enlightening comparisons. But perhaps that is something for a future episode.

For me, two other issues hang over the programme, which could perhaps have been resolved quite easily. The first is the lack of any reference to earlier satirical tradition. This could have been more understandably glossed over if the premise of beginning with 1707 didn’t seem quite so arbitrary, but for a survey of the ‘bawdy’ a passing tribute to the infant but already remarkably debauched print culture of the Restoration seemed notable by its absence.
Second is a slight struggle with the admittedly immense and unwieldy concept of ‘rudeness’. Despite nods towards the lewd, the silence on the subject of early erotic literature such as Fanny Hill (the narrative of the mid-century novel began and ended with the tame exploits of Tristram Shandy) belied the programme’s subtitle somewhat – the focus seems confined to satirical bawdiness, with its tongue firmly in its cheek, and pornography is bypassed entirely.

All of that said, it is of course inevitable that any survey of the era’s rich stock of rudeness could not be reduced to less than 60 minutes. Rude Britannia is an entertaining romp through the eighteenth-century social and political scene as imagined by both its artists and, to a lesser extent, the common people themselves. As a celebration rather than a critical examination, it provides a lively introduction to the great satirical artists of the period, and will offer something for specialists too – even if it is only the chance to hear performances of contemporary ballads, or (for me) Mary Wortley Montagu gleefully casting aspersions on Jonathan Swift’s skills in the bedroom. While it could have benefited from an injection of the scholarly expertise it clearly had to hand, it is an exuberant and colourful evocation of the Georgian licentious spirit before it was trampled by the nineteenth-century ‘March of Morality’.

Episodes of Rude Britannia are not currently available on BBC iPlayer. It was originally broadcast in 2010 accompanying an exhibition at Tate Britain. It was repeated in May 2015.