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I must say, I was expecting Inside Britain’s National Parks to feel a bit less like school. The new documentary series looks at four of our 15 national parks and the people who live and work in them. So you would expect the usual barely disguised tourism ads – wall-to-wall shots of beautiful landscapes, scored with beautiful music, breaking off only for lovely, gentle interviews with lovely, gentle people. An hour’s escapism before you go back to your stress-bound, office-bound, mortgage-bound life instead of roaming the wilds of Wales noting new nesting sites for choughs or checking peatlands for sundews, or … Well, we’ll talk more about what else we could be doing later on. But it’s a lot.

We do get plenty of the expected stuff but its traditional soft edge is whetted by an oddly dry script (despite being delivered by Alex Jennings, who could customarily talk me into a burning car) that prevents you disappearing into these wonderful worlds as fully as you might have been hoping.

Still – learning’s good, right? So sit up straight and get ready to wrap your ears around a lot of facts about the New Forest in the first episode, with the Pembrokeshire coast, Dartmoor and Northumberland still to come. Once you’ve rejigged your expectations, you’ll enjoy them all very much.

The first national park, the Peak District, was established in 1951. The New Forest was one of the later ones. It is called New but it is actually Old, a remnant of the wood that once covered southern England and northern France until the sea rose and turned part of it into the Channel.

William the Conqueror turned our bit into a hunting forest in 1079 and it still contains five of the six deer species living wild in the UK: roe, red, fallow, sika and muntjac. (The missing guys are Chinese water deer, in case you are wondering. I don’t know if the Normans had something against them or Hampshire is just not wet enough, but a quick skim of the internet tells me a) that you can see them at Woburn Abbey and Whipsnade zoo, both in Bedfordshire, and b) that I could happily read about deer – both native and introduced! – for the rest of the day and probably for the rest of my life. I will talk to my mortgage provider and see what they say about letting my bank account lie – ahem – fallow for a while).

Timber from the New Forest was used to build the ships that fought at the Battle of Trafalgar.

The silver-studded blue butterfly cannot cope with too much shade, so do not let your open heathland be overwhelmed by conifers, who will colonise a place overnight if you let them.

The facts are fascinating, even if the tone is weird. I would happily binge-watch a four-part series on the history of the New Forest alone (Dartmoor, too, because of the ponies, and Northumberland because it’s got Hadrian’s Wall, and look, just do the rest of the 15 while you’re about it, because the past is great and the future is looking increasingly not). But it is the interviews with the people who live there that make your heart truly sing.

There are the Commoners, who have forest rights and duties established 1,000 years ago, including turning out their animals to pasture there and rounding up the horses once a year for checkups in a tradition known as “the drift”, and who still have disputes settled in the Verderers’ court. I’ll take a four-part series on that too, ta. There is forest keeper Lee Knight, one of nine who take the job pretty much for life, and manage the place so the entirety can thrive. He shows us antlers deer have shed, marvelling that they grow in just three months. He pats a dead oak tree in the deepest part of the forest: it is at least 600 and probably 900 years old, but it will provide a home for bats and many other species for another two or three centuries. He smiles. “The time that I’m here is tiny.” There is guitar-maker Alex Potter, who uses local wood and his grandfather’s tools to make the instruments. “You don’t know exactly what they’ll sound like until the strings go on.”

Everyone you meet in this and all the other episodes (from reed-cutters to Cheviot goat herders, from volunteers making osprey nests to a maker of woollen shrouds) has the unmistakable aura of true contentment. They are living lives of precision and patience, experiencing that rarest thing: the knowledge that they are making, every day, their little patch of earth and time better than it was before. When you’ve finished Googling deer, you can start Googling career changes. Good luck.

• Inside Britain’s National Parks aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now.