How we used to live: Under the stuarts Channel 4, Tuesdays 10.25-10.45am. Repeated Fridays 11.40-12.00. Teachers’ guide, Pounds 3.95. Educational Television Company, PO Box 100, Warwick CV34 6TZ

We use the word “genius” so lightly these days that we find it increasingly difficult to appreciate the achievements of those who really deserve the title.

Isaac Newton, for instance, has been so often portrayed as the man who had an apple fall on his head, that his staggeringly inspirational and yet painstaking work on the fundamentals of physical science is even now hardly recognised outside the scientific community.

The fact is, though, that 300 years ago, in an England where superstition and alchemy were the normal currency of life, he was methodically setting out, and demonstrating by experiment, the laws governing the movement of the planets, as well as those determining the nature of light.

This special unit of five programmes sets out to inform pupils of Newton’s work, and to set it in the context of its time, for he lived through the great events of Stuart times, notably the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London.

The documentary programmes which start and finish the series look at what we can see today that tells us of Stuart times. “Plots, Plagues and Pyrotechnics” visits Eyam, where a school party is using documentary evidence to dispel some common assumptions about what happened there when the Great Plague came.

There is also an investigation, with the aid of carbon-dating, into whether the apple tree which can now be seen at the Newton family home, Woolsthorpe Manor, is the same one under which Newton famously sat.

There are three dramas, set against the plague years which started in 1665, which show Isaac in his early twenties, returning to his family home at Woolsthorpe and working on his theories and experiments.

Flashback sequences illuminate his early upbringing, and show something of his unhappiness as a scholarly, enquiring child brought up in a farming community. The whole series very successfully interweaves science and history.

Newton’s experiments, such as splitting up light with the aid of a prism, are intelligible and often quite dramatic. Importantly, they also encourage teachers and pupils to reproduce them in the classroom, and there is lots of advice about this in the teacher notes.

This latest unit of How We Used to Live demonstrates the care that the producers have always brought to the task of combining accuracy with enjoyable drama. That, for example, they should take the trouble to shoot one brief conversation out of doors against the background of a field where 17th-century haymaking is going on, is typical of the values which have caused this series to be the one against which other primary history programmes have to be judged.