Dancing on the Edge Ð Upstairs Downstairs to a jazz soundtrack

There have been many worthy challengers but at the end of the day nobody quite does drama like the BBC – and they’re currently lapping up the praise for their latest success, which throws a spotlight onto the colliding worlds of jazz and royalty in the years before the war.

Dancing on the Edge (BBC2, Monday nights) is in essence the story of a black jazz band which finds fame through royal patronage in the early 1930s, at a time when most Britons had never met a black person let alone encountered the devil’s music.

Louis Lester is an urbane, black Englishman whose merry troupe is a mix of Brits and Americans, quietly making their way through the lower reaches of the music world until they hook up with Stanley Mitchell, a journalist with Music Express and social gadfly who turns out to be their initial ticket to fame and fortune.

Their big break comes when their parallel universe intersects with that of the aristocracy, always on the look-out for something different, something new, something slightly deviant and dodgy . . . and that’s where a world of jazz and nightclubs and colourful – and, as it happens, coloured – people come in.

Their biggest fan is the Prince of Wales – Edward, who will go on to be Edward VIII, briefly before his penchant for Mrs Simpson takes hold. He and his younger brother George like jazz and all of the freedom that goes with it as they indulge their passions in the company of the Louis Lester Band, who have a residency at the Imperial Hotel.

But the difficulty for Louis and his outfit is that, on the one hand they’ve got these socialites and heady aristocrats wanting to party with them till the cows come home; but outside, it’s still the 1930s and a world where prejudice and narrow-mindedness reins with the ever-present threat of immigration for some of them, because not all of the band are British.

There are plenty of familiar faces dotted among the cast – Hollywood heavyweight John Goodman is terrific as Mr Masterson, one of the richest men in the world undone by a weakness for young women and random violence.

For more, read this week's Connacht Sentinel.