The most moving episode in the bio-prog on Florence Nightingale (BBC1, Sunday) was when her father confronted her, as she tortured herself on her failures in the Crimea, and disputed with her on the nature of God. Reasserting the core message of Anglicanism – best expressed in Talleyrand’s cynical injunction “surtout pas trop de zèle” (“not too much enthusiasm, above all”) – he brought her down to earth with the observation that “God is in charge, not you”. It was moving, and powerful, because it was a rare reminder of how central God could be to moral disputes before the modern period, and how he could aid the business of thinking through dilemmas.

The rest of the programme was uneven, but in a good way. Its darting between periods in Nightingale’s life and its intercutting of music hall turns celebrating her achievements were a little confusing – but stopped you settling back into a kind of easy narrative doze. If the treatment of Queen Victoria and her prime minister (presumably Palmerston, though played too young for the real man’s 70-plus years) verged on the stereotypical, their performances contrasted nicely with the self-lacerating energy of a woman who did much more for the treatment of the sick poor in the half century after her epiphany as the Lady of the Lamp than in her time in the charnel house of Scutari.