The Hardacres review: This new Channel 5 heritage drama is a sanitised, laughably silly show that would have schoolkids squirming

Imagine it – there is a frisson around the class as the cumbersome TV and VCR combo is wheeled in, turned on and the ITV Schools clock gradually ticks round – bonus points if you manage to hold your breath for the entire minute.

This being a history lesson, How We Used to Live starts to spool out, and we are taken back to the fictional town of Bradley, West Yorkshire, and the lives of the Hodgkins family.

This being a schools programme, the drama is never hard-hitting, but there was plenty of ‘ee by gumming’ and ‘well, I'll go to the foot of our stairs-ing’.

Which brings us, joltingly, back to the present and The Hardacres, “a family saga about the rags-to riches lives of a working-class family in 1890s Yorkshire”, according to the Channel 5 publicity blurb.

Not literally rags, you understand, because this is a peculiarly sanitised vision of late-Victorian Yorkshire - a world in which everyone has been freshly scrubbed with a donkey stone, the temperance movement has taken a firm grip and the fishermen's sweaters have been sourced from the turn-of-the-century equivalent of the Boden catalogue.

The Hardacres are a working class family living in a Yorkshire fishing village in 1891, all working in the herring industry.

It's all rosy-cheeked banter and hitching up the pinafores until patriarch Sam is injured in a workplace accident when a dockside crane fails.

This being the Victorian era, Sam has warned the boss about the shonky equipment, but the boss is your typical uncaring monster and fails to fix it, falling millimetres short of twirling his moustache and cackling as he tells Sam to get back to work.

Sam's plucky wife Mary reckons they can get work at 'the big house' while Sam recuperates, but she, her daughter and her mum are turned away by a snooty housekeeper – an incident which, given the ultra-simplistic nature of the drama, you know will come back to bite her.

So, Mary uses the last of their cash to buy a barrel of herring, heads off to the local races with a Primus stove and sells the happy gamblers some fried fish.

Despite a small hiccup, when the first day's takings are stolen, the business takes off, and by the second ad break the Hardacres have got themselves a fishmonger's and are on the verge of joining the local Rotary club.

By the final ad break, they've improbably invested their fishy takings in a South African gold mine, which strikes a rich seam and makes them wealthy beyond a plucky herring-gutter's dreams.

If this sounds insultingly improbable, that's because it is. Nothing is subtle in The Hardacres, nothing is subtext and everything is painted with the broadest brush possible.

The characters are never anything more than stereotypes, from the villainous, venal herring fishery boss Mr Shaw, to the strong-willed daughter to matriarch Ma Hardacre (Julie Graham) who apparently was big in the smuggling community back in the day, and says what she likes and likes what she bloody well says.

“The rich are bigger criminals than anyone you’d meet in my line of trade,” she fumes to her grand-daughter.

In fact, the class distinctions aren't so much finely-drawn as grafftitied all over the place with day-glo paint, setting up the rest of the series as the newly-rich Hardacres move into – you guessed it – the same big house they were turned away from earlier.

Cue much cartoonish mouth-pursing from the housekeeper.

If this was shown to a class of Year Nine kids, they'd be laughing up their sleeves within the first five minutes.

Those kids wouldn’t have the chance to turn it off, but one of the perks of being a grown-up and leaving the cumbersome TV/VCR combo behind is that we have the remote within easy reach.