Grantchester: Sin simmers below the surface in this endearing vision of an eternal England

The song Earth Angel, by The Penguins, appears in Back to the Future and is now viewed as a classic of doo-wop. It’s in the musical Jersey Boys.

The New York Times suggested it “evokes a glittering, timeless vision of proms, sock hops and impossibly young love”. It’s an odd tune to find in a drama about a sleuthing vicar in Fifties Cambridgeshire, except the nostalgic allure of the show has a time-travel feel about it.

At times, the fantasy of Grantchester seems almost Brechtian in its set-up.

Those street scenes, with their washing lines and bicycles and synchronised urchins in flat caps, are arranged with such deliberation that they become obviously false, which only highlights the way the stories have been manipulated to provide a sanitised reflection on contemporary mores.

It’s like the manicured memories of John Major, misunderstanding Orwell as he celebrated an eternal England of old maids bicycling to communion in the morning mist. But here, the mis-remembered England has complications and moral quandaries that can be sorted by a tenacious vicar, Sidney Chambers (James Norton), and a Geordie copper, Keating (Robson Green).

Call him old-fashioned but Keating can spot a brothel when he sees it. “Call me a cynic,” he says, after speaking to a number of good-hearted tarts for a long time, “but those girls weren’t running up dresses on a sewing machine.”

In Grantchester terms, this is a big episode. The travails of the Reverend Sidney are not easing, and something drastic is threatened. Sid is viciously drunk. There is booze everywhere, and cigarettes, and kind-hearted women in bars. With jazz music! The highway to hell couldn’t be more obviously signposted if the vicar was hitchhiking to the village to get a Beelzebub tattoo.

“This is your life,” Geordie tells him, vicariously. “It’s an endless merry-go-round. Sin. Feel bad. Drink. Sin. Feel bad. Drink.” Today, that would be the advertising slogan for a Balearic holiday. In half-remembered Fifties Cambridgeshire it’s a dire prophecy.

Happily for Sidney there’s a righteous woman around to make sure his moral compass is pointing North. The American Violet (Simona Brown) seems to have dropped in from the civil rights movement, and even issues a prescient lecture in which Sidney is invited to check his privilege. “You have everything at your disposal,” she says. “You’re a man. You’re white. You could recite a grocery list and people would listen.”

It’s all very endearing. You can’t fault a drama where golf is used as a shorthand for evil, and the immoral golfers wear complacent cardigans. There is a murder, but never mind. The wallpaper is flock, the pubs wood-panelled, Robson Green has a light Mac, and the characters speak as if they are writing lyrics for Arctic Monkeys. What’s not to like, as the seamstress never said to the vicar.

Speaking of repression and white men reciting grocery lists, that cabinet of curiosities, Clarkson, Hammond and May, are back with the not-Top-Gear. Thanks to Amazon technology, The Grand Tour has dispensed with its studio interviews, because statistics showed that’s when viewers turned off.

What remains is a car chase in which three supercharged men are outrun by a dead horse, flogging itself.