Perry made a similar post-referendum tour in 2017, and more recently explored the American continent on a motorbike. Both programmes were characterised by a cheerful yet attentive curiosity, which treated the political divisions of each country with subtlety and respect. Much of his recent works, in ceramic and tapestry, have formed social narratives and surveys, such as his “Divided Nation” Brexit vases.

So he should have been well suited to this task. Like Orwell exploring the North with both an Etonian accent and a tramp-like dress sense, Sir Grayson has roots within and without the metropole. He is Essex-born, the product, he has said, of a violent and tempestuous home. But he is also the avatar of a different aristocracy, one which attends Tate openings, prizes its coffee table tomes and will sagely admire Perry’s work for its fluid and colourful interest in form, gender and sexuality. 

But the opportunity to treat English identity with the nuance it deserves has been wasted here. Much of Perry’s analysis, delivered through punchy narration, makes too straightforward a contrast between the multicultural Englishness of the present, and the nostalgic leftovers of the past. There is little recognition that the future will have to involve a synthesis of these perspectives. The climax of the programme sees Perry join “Right to Roam” protesters dressed in animal onesies at Richard Benyon’s Englefield estate: another “national” perspective which is laughably fringe. 

Over his career, Perry has made a successful transition from artist’s artist to aspiring public intellectual and applicant “national treasure”: Turner Prized, Reith-lectured and, as of 2023, knighted by the King. But perhaps making a modern, national appraisal of England will often wind up this way. The kaleidoscope is shattered, the argument goes. Any attempt to inspect its shards will feel incomplete.

This was the assumption of Defoe, Cobbett, Priestley and Orwell in their own times, but they still had the confidence to grapple empathetically with Englishness in a representative, universal sense. Despite his aspiration to be a modern Hogarth or Gillray, in this series, Perry is a poor substitute. The product of his travels will not be something true, but something vivid and two-dimensional — something that looks good on a vase.