Last Night's TV: If Walls Could Talk: the History of the Home/BBC4<br />Life of Riley/BBC1

There was a funny and telling moment in the middle of If Walls Could Talk: the History of the Home, a new popular-history series about domestic interiors. The location was the saloon at Kedleston Hall, a vast circular Georgian ballroom. The personae were Dr Lucy Worsley, a gamine young historian with something of a young Celia Imrie about her, and Richard Hewlings, an architectural historian of somewhat gloomy mien. After talking briefly about the grandeur of the saloon, Worsley bounced Tiggerishly on the balls of her feet to draw attention to the sprung floor and proposed that they take a turn or two. Richard Hewlings looked as if she'd just invited him to submit to a cavity search. "I don't think I can do this," he said nervously as she seized his hand. "You can, you can!" she said brightly, tugging him round behind her. "I can't, I can't," he replied with an increasing note of certainty in his voice. So, I wonder if you can guess, without knowing a thing about their respective academic qualifications, which was the presenter and which the expert contributor? A little hint – wallflowers don't get their own series.

Gameness is all in a certain kind of history programme and Dr Worsley – chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces – is nothing if not game (I'd guess first team lacrosse, or something like that). I can't say for sure but I somehow doubt that Richard Hewlings would have been willing to don Georgian bathing gear and plunge into the sea or be filmed reclining in a bubble bath while sipping at a cocktail. Dr Worsley is though, a process she describes as "experiential archaeology" on her blog but which will be more familiar to most of us as "mucking about in fancy dress". It isn't enough anymore to gather a small group of historians around a silver kettle to discuss the rituals of taking tea in a Georgian parlour; Dr Worsley will be fully rigged in Georgian silks as well.

Her purpose is to chart the history of British domestic life by concentrating on the evolution of four important rooms – the bathroom, the bedroom, the kitchen and the living room – and she began with the most socially accessible space, the one that any visitor to your house might expect to see. At the beginning, of course, that was the only room there was anyway – the luxury of demarcated and private space only arriving piecemeal. It even took a while for the chimneybreast to become a standard fitting, a lung-saving amenity that tended to automatically divide even the humblest home into a space for preparing the gruel, and a space where you went to sit and attempt to digest it.

It isn't exactly challenging in its method, a kind of open buffet of domestic curiosities that is light on scholarly detail. Worsley noted that Kedleston's saloon made her feel dizzy, for example, but nobody mentioned that Robert Adam had modelled it on the Pantheon in Rome, a Grand Tour bit of flash that would have helped to explain its oddity. On the other hand, if you don't know the origins of the phrase "burning the candle at both ends" or why a parlour is called a parlour (it's from the French parler, a place to talk) then this will tell you in perfectly sprightly fashion. It was intriguing to discover that our current aesthetic anxieties over the replacement of incandescent bulbs (so glowy and dimmable) with their low-energy replacements (so cold and unflattering) had its equivalent in Victorian England, when gas lights began to throw a much harsher light on those cluttered interiors than oil lamps had done.

I liked some of her experts too. Who knew that there was such a thing as a "lighting historian" (very knowledgeable about varieties of tallow)? Or that the "largest private collection of lightbulbs in the world", owned by a man called Ray, could be as fascinatingly multifarious as it proved, including Royal Jubilee lightbulbs decorated with a portrait of the King Emperor. As Ray twirled his rheostat and Edward VII slowly increased in luminosity, Dr Worsley glowed too, a mint-condition, working example of a television producer's lightbulb moment.

I think some enterprising media student should do some work on the centrality of the live-in kitchen in the contemporary sitcom. Think how often you see them in domestic comedies (My Family, Outnumbered, Absolutely Fabulous, Lead Balloon), in part, I guess, because they provide a reasonably plausible intersection for every generation of a family. The sitting room, intriguingly, is more frequently used for quieter scenes between just a couple of characters, suggesting that it has taken on the role of an Elizabethan "withdrawing room" (which, as Dr Worsley explained, was the origin of the drawing room). Beyond that, I'm not sure I have a lot to say about Life of Riley, a blended-family comedy that stars Caroline Quentin and Neil Dudgeon. It offers some funny moments and a masterclass in comic acting from Marcia Warren, but it too often goes for retreads of over-familiar jokes, such as a daughter-mother reversal in respect of sexual censoriousness. It's the opposite of Marmite. If you like it I reckon you're going to like it in a take-it-or-leave-it kind of way. And if you don't, you're going to find it tricky to get heated about the fact. It does include a rather sweet baby, though, greeted with a collective crooning "Aahhh!" by the studio audience every time she appears. Which tells you quite a lot about the programme, actually.