Which building looks like a pig on its back?

Welcome to the brave new world of five, formerly known as Channel 5. Out with smutty films and sex series, in with the educational and historical.

Who'd have thought that naughty five would be running a daily peaktime series about religious architecture. There's not a nude woman in sight, just presenter Paul Binski, although the dirty mac he's wearing makes him look like he's on his way to an X-rated cinema. Or else he's auditioning to be the new Columbo.

The World Turned Upside Down finds him at King's College in his home town of Cambridge, where he teaches art history at the university. He lacks the extravagant gestures and enthusiastic delivery of other TV experts. Nor does the budget run to those tacky historical recreations that documentaries on all channels seem unable to resist at the moment.

All we get is Binski and lots of often-stunning shots of architecture. King's, we learn, is one of the most important buildings of late medieval Europe and was built in the fashionable perpendicular style.

Just as you're about to drop off, he provides a fascinating fact. The 19th Century art critic John Ruskin said it resembled "a sow lying on its back with her legs sticking up in the air". A more common reaction - at least among Binski's acquaintances - is wonder at its exquisite beauty.

The building isn't just grand, he contends, it's "terribly clever" with one of the greatest miracles of medieval engineering inside the chapel. This is the famous fanned vault, the largest in the world, stretching from one end of the chapel to the other. It's made up of small pieces, interlocked like a jigsaw.

Having had his fill of the fancy, Binski heads for the countryside and the purity and austerity of the church at Little Gidding, established during the Protestant Reformation.

He meets up with "my dear friend and fellow art historian" Pamela Tudor Craig. She gets terribly excited about the lifestyle of Nicholas Ferrar, the man who founded the community. He started praying at 1am, continued until matins at 6.30am and then on to litany at 10.

"I don't know whether he got any sleep," she admits. I only hope her audience were still awake to hear her say it.