Radio review: Alchohol and the State

As so often happens on Radio 4, I was expecting one thing from Alcohol and the State (weekdays, 3.45pm) and got something totally different, and much better. This is not more people from Nice arguing with people from Tesco about price per unit: it's historical boozing. In fact, the first episode on Monday was the funnier of the two so far: a description of the court of James I, where a lady doing a masque dance actually fell over while she was trying to hand a present to the king of Denmark – and James (right) , rising to help her, also fell over and had to go to bed. I have never laughed out loud at anything that happened in James I's court, and I've only a couple of times laughed out loud at a drunk falling over. Tuesday's episode covered the better-known territory of 18th-century boozing, starting in Hogarth's Gin Lane. At the height of the gin crisis, the average consumption was two pints a week (I thought, well, two pints . . . it's only, like, 140ml a day – that's only five-and-a-bit units . . . it's not the end of the world. Ha. It was actually two pints for every man, woman and child). Mutatis mutandis ; when the court was doing it, it was hilarious; when the poor were doing it, it was tragic. Nurses were so drunk they were accidentally putting babies on fires, having mistaken them for logs. Well, one baby. But still . . .