I can scarcely remember a time before tea: I started drinking it at around four, at home in Belfast, as a reward after school. Before long I was as fiercely protective of my right to a brew as the workers of British Leyland’s Birmingham car plant, who were famously spurred to strike action in 1981 when the management proposed cutting tea breaks by 11 minutes. Decades on, my passion is undiminished. There is no problem to which tea is not at least a partial solution: it restores flagging spirits, calms the over-excited, warms in winter and refreshes in summer.

Sathnam Sanghera’s recollections in his Radio 4 five-parter Empire of Tea suggest a similarly close relationship with the beverage, except that his childhood version in Wolverhampton was Punjabi ‘cha’: tea boiled up with milk and spices. Here he traces tea’s fascinating story across centuries, continents and class boundaries. When researching his history of the British Empire, Empireland, he said, ‘tea kept cropping up…like this Forrest Gump character’. It arrived in England from China in the 1660s, an exotic, expensive product dispensed by wealthy show-offs. The wife of diarist Samuel Pepys sampled it, the podcast tells us; Pepys himself, an enthusiastic coffee-drinker, seemed lukewarm about the new ‘China drink’.

As the market grew, and tea fell in price, Chinese teapots were replaced by ‘English-looking’ Wedgwood ones. The British branding of tea was beginning, and it succeeded beyond any advertiser’s wildest dreams. When Sanghera interviews staff today in Wolverhampton’s New Cross hospital, they discuss their tea-break tastes with the note of precisely recalled pleasure that others might reserve for romantic trysts. ‘I like a good strong cup of builder’s tea,’ muses a nurse; ‘Assam for preference,’ adds a doctor. The more hard-pressed someone is at work, the more intensely tea matters. The malnourished, stunted 19th-century factory workers of the industrial revolution ran on a heavily sugared brew that supplied them with necessary bursts of energy but very little nutrition. Sanghera gamely samples a cup approximating to their daily fuel. I thought he might say it was horrible. ‘Oh my god!’ he exclaims, ‘It’s intense but it’s also… delicious.’

Further episodes address topics such as tea’s historic role in British bust-ups with America and China; Britain’s establishment of tea plantations in India; and exploitative conditions for tea workers today. On a more trivial note, tea-lovers among us are assailed by crimes of taste against the infusion itself. Indian chai, for example, is a glorious, flavoursome drink, outdoing even builder’s tea in its powers of consolation. But the ‘chai latte’ parody sold in Starbucks tastes like a jug of sugar dissolved in a pint of cinnamon-laced baby formula. Then there’s the abomination known as ‘tea granules’, and those anaemic teabags, oozing their weak tint, that so often crop up in European cafés. So much to discuss. I’ll get the kettle on.

One of the most riveting, and occasionally moving, podcasts of this year was Jonathan Menjivar’s Classy, a witty exploratory tour of the unease and shame provoked by differences in social status. Menjivar has ‘some hang ups about class’ himself, he admits. He grew up in a working-class Latino family in Southern California, where his parents worked in factories and liked to dance: his father Carlos proudly displayed a trophy from a local club’s ‘Hot Bod’ contest. Part of Menjivar still relishes the milieu of his childhood: ‘I like all the gold chains and sweat and immigrant hustle.’

But now he lives on the East Coast, has a job in media, owns his own home and is fussy about tasteful, expensive clothes. The cultural water in which he swims has changed. ‘I’m clearly something else now,’ he says. ‘I mean, I own multiple cardigans.’ He enjoys wearing cashmere socks, too, but worries that this ‘sweater on my foot’ makes him seem like a ‘rich asshole’.

Every so often something still hits a class nerve, such as when his dental hygienist comments that ‘the crowding isn’t helping’ her to clean his stained teeth. It’s true, he says, his teeth are ‘huddled together’ because his parents couldn’t afford to prioritise braces: he resents ‘this literal emblem of my class status stamped right on my face’. To which all I can say is, move to Britain, where such concerns will speedily fall away as he finds he blends in beautifully with senior members of our aristocracy.

Still, as Menjivar observes, ‘class discomfort goes in all kinds of directions’. Both the rich and poor expend energy on evading negative judgments. A wealthy woman hides the price tag on her expensive loaf of bread from her cleaner; a debt-ridden comedian with a new, well-paid job prematurely declares success by buying a pricey car. Jarvis Cocker of Pulp, who skewered posh people slumming it in his song ‘Common People’, pops up from the UK – a different class landscape to the US – to talk with endearing honesty about the culture shock of transforming from unemployed Sheffield songwriter to London pop star. Often, the series becomes about much more than class, whatever the word means: it’s about how we struggle to fit in, hide our fears, reinvent ourselves without appearing foolish. Perhaps that’s why it remains so compelling.