Demystifying The Grand Tour

“Brian Sewell’s new series for TV Five, is a travelogue in which he examines ‘the dark underbelly’ of the supposedly educational journeys that were undertaken in the 18th century by young Englishmen from wealthy families. Sewell emits a winsome sigh. ‘The Grand Tour is mostly portrayed as young aristocrats who went off and came back with fine paintings. I wanted to indicate that they caught chicken pox, mumps and venereal disease. No one could distinguish between syphilis and gonorrhoea. There was no treatment’.”