Thanks to the BBC, this is The Golden Age of Art History Programmes - and nobody seems to have noticed!

Maybe age is blunting my critical faculties, but I’m increasingly mystified that nobody is jumping up and down in praise of the number of rivetting, diverting, amusing, informative and visually stunning art history programmes the BBC has been regularly pumping out on BBC Two and BBC Four over the last few years. The reaction to this feast of cultural riches – the BBC doing exactly what it should be doing – has mainly been vaguely dismissive, hoity-toity reviews and regular cuts to BBC Four’s already minuscule budget. How very odd!

The first part of Dr James Fox’s new series, A Very British Renaissance, was shown on BBC Two last night. Its aim is to tell the story of how foreigners brought the Renaissance to England from the early 16th century onwards, and how British artists, poets, composers and architects grabbed the baton from the likes of Holbein and Pietro Torrigiano and developed extraordinarily impressive and original work in their various fields.

In the Telegraph this morning, Jake Wallis Simons twitted Dr. Fox for assuming cultural ignorance on the part of his audience – apparently we were all supposed to already know most of what he was telling us. Well, I, for one, learned a great deal. I'd never heard of Torrigiano. I’ve known Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poignant poem, “They flee from me that sometime did me seek” for decades, but I knew nothing about the man himself and his role in the development of English poetry before Dr. Fox told me. And when Fox was dealing with Thomas Tallis’s glorious “Spem in Alium” – whose history and significance I’m well aware of – he brought it alive by cleverly showing how the 40 voices join in as the piece goes along. (Dr. Fox's 2011 BBC4 three-parter, British Masters, was also superb.)

Earlier this year, I thoroughly enjoyed the second series of art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon and chef Gorgio Locatelli’s bromantic food-and-art tour of the less celebrated (at least, by television culture vultures) regions of Italy, in which Locatelli prepared local dishes and Graham-Dixon acted as tour-guide to the areas’ artistic delights. It was extremely watchable, and, again, I learned a huge amount. Vulgar? A bit. So what? (I also enjoyed Graham-Dixon’s recent Culture Show special on Viking Art – he doesn’t half get about, that lad: Airmiles Andy or what.)

The other TV art history highlight of 2014 so far was Waldemar Januszczak’s Rococo: Travel, Pleasure, Madness, a three-part series on BBC4, in which the portly little Polish womble waddled splay-footedly around most of Europe in a follow-up to his splendid 2009 series, Baroque!, also on BBC4 (best channel in the history of the universe - God bless it!). I can imagine Januszczak’s somewhat populist, blokeish approach getting right up some viewer’s’ noses – but, for instance, his decision to discuss the paintings of Boucher while reclining bum-up on a chaise-longue in the same pose as the artist’s famous erotic portrait of Louise O’Murphy made me burst out laughing - there are many aspects of the Rococo that simply demand to be sniggered at.

While I’m on the subject, I’d also like to mention Alastair Sook, another art historian who understands television, whose 2011 series, Romancing the Stone: The Golden Ages of British Sculpture was one of the best programmes of its type I’ve ever seen. As for wider cultural history, Jonathan Meades is (as I wrote here) wonderfully entertaining in an unapologetically pseudish and unlevelling manner (his recent BBC4 series on Brutalism had me snarling at the screen in disagreement, but, as always, I enjoyed every minute).

Not all BBC culture coverage is of an equally high standard (almost anything fronted by Alan Yentob is patronisingly dire), just as not all of its art history is brilliant – but it is undoubtedly the genre in which the BBC justifies the licence fee by bringing Britain and Europe’s glorious cultural history alive for middle and upper-middlebrow viewers such as myself. When it comes to art history, as with nature programmes, no other broadcaster in the world – let alone Britain – is in the same league as my old employer. Because of its terror of appearing too educated or highbrow, the BBC doesn’t tend to shout about the sort of shamelessly upmarket programmes mentioned in this article – but it really should be swaggering about them.

And before you ask me why the average license-fee payer should be expected to subsidise programming designed to appeal to an educated elite, well, (a) my license-fee subsidises commercial rubbish like Eastenders and The Voice, which any competent broadcaster could churn out and (b) if the license fee were to be abolished, I’d happily pay £145.50 to subscribe to a selection of top-grade art history programmes, nature series, Radio 4 Extra, Top Gear and the occasional (very occasional) dramatic triumph such as Line of Duty. The rest, you can keep – please!