The Victorian Sex Explorer

Sir Richard F. Burton being an interest of mine, I feel duty bound to promote anything that makes the great man better known.

Thus, on Channel 4 at 9pm tonight:

Rupert Everett takes a revealing and witty journey following in the footsteps of one of his great heroes, the infamous Victorian explorer and sexual adventurer, Sir Richard Francis Burton.

Rupert Everett? God help us! But as a Burton completist I will have to watch it. (He may have been flawed, but at least Burton was sound on the Welsh.)

No doubt I will be rolling my eyes all the way through tonight's show. I predict for example that it will - as almost everyone from Swinburne on has done - present Burton's wife, the formidable and Catholic Lady Isabel, as some kind of hysterical bluestocking. This is nonsense. I take the Mary Lovell line.

Then again, perhaps it will be even handed and fine. A few short hours will tell.