David Hayman loves ships and ship-building. I know this because he uses the words "steel" and "wrought iron" as if he means "breasts" and "inner thigh".

There is also a disturbing gleam in his eye whenever he approaches a fo'c'sle.

This must be why ships are always referred to as "she". The most beautiful of all ships, says Hayman at the start of Clydebuilt: The Ships That Made The Commonwealth (BBC Two, Monday 9pm), is Cutty Sark, the 19th-century clipper that was built on the Clyde and now has a permanent dry dock in Greenwich.

When he was a boy, Hayman tells us, he found a painting of Cutty Sark in a flea market and hung it on his wall to gaze at.

Such behaviour certainly doesn't seem to have done Hayman any harm and it makes him an obvious choice for a series about four of the greatest ships built by the Glasgow yards, including Cutty Sark.

He points out at the start of the first episode that he grew up near the yards, but he has other qualities that make him right for the programme: for a start, his voice, which sounds like it's hoarse from shouting over the sound of waves, and that marvellous face of his with all the wrinkles whipped into it by a thousand sea-winds.

He also makes a good stab at spreading his infectious enthusiasm about ships, even though he's stuck with a script that at times is heavy with cliche and lumbered with the tone of a Look And Learn book.

The filming is also horribly literal sometimes - a section about the famous tea race between the clipper ships, for instance, is illustrated by Hayman standing in front of people racing.

The most interesting sections are the ones about the men who served on Cutty Sark, in particular first mate Sidney Smith, who killed his crewmate John Francis in 1880.

Smith later served time in prison but Hayman talked to some of his descendents, who were prickly with resentment and insistent that their relative was provoked and misunderstood.

There was also the story of Jock Willis, who commissioned Cutty Sark in the first place, and it was his story that contained what could have been the moral of the programme.

As steam threatened to replace sail, Willis - known as White Hat Willis because of his penchant for white top hats - refused to accept the inevitable and was determined to prove Cutty Sark could still pay her way. And she did for a time, until the inevitable happened and she began the slow decline to obscurity.

In the longer term, of course, she was saved and has survived as a museum piece in Greenwich - she also survived the terrible fire of 2007.

But in the end, the story of the ship told in Hayman's programme seems to prove the old rule of history: profit, practicality and progress will always be more powerful than nostalgia, indulgence and emotion, even for a ship as beautiful as Cutty Sark.