MODERN TIMES: THE LAST DUKES, BBC2, 9pm (Monday, 26)

Today’s modern duke tends not to be an old man shuffling around a dusty palace in robes and jewels. Instead, he might keep his coronet on a tidy bookshelf; be a South African who jets back to the old country to make sure his castle is still ship-shape, or have a sense of humour about the whole enterprise and list his cumbersome titles before admitting, “Ah, I think I’ve missed one out.”

This programme looks at those Dukedoms created by the monarchy for reasons as diverse as “a grateful nation rewarding a major war leader to a king acknowledging his illegitimate son.” But with it unlikely that any more shall be created, the current batch will “gradually become extinct” and this programme follows some of the country’s “last dukes” to see what their lives are like.

We visit Blenheim Palace, home to the Dukes of Marlborough, where a dagger is kept under a vast, priceless painting so it can be neatly cut from its frame and tossed from the window in case of fire. At Blair Castle, the Duke of Atholl flies in from Africa to march with The Atholl Highlanders, his estate’s private army – the only such army in Europe. And what of Lady Camilla Osborne who, being born a girl, couldn’t inherit her father’s title of Duke Of Leeds? She now lives in a “new build close” and her family’s title is becoming extinct.

We find these people aren’t tedious aristocrats, but ordinary – albeit privileged – people encumbered with a rather strange inheritance.