Who would have thought that Netflix would score so sumptuously with a Regency soap that flaunts colourblind casting like a form of rampant amnesia and takes off from Jane Austen the way that Game of Thrones might be said to take off from Shakespeare’s romances.

The gap between that Mozart of novelists who invented the romantic comedy in novelistic form and this exorbitant, ahistorical sex-fest is monumental, though the derivation is obvious enough.