We crossed the river to Berkeley Castle last night, to watch the Rococo Players perform A Winter’s Tale, an very good they were too. The Great Hall made a wonderfully intimate space for such a performance and brought us up close to big, human emotions.

I found it odd that my daughter could be so engrossed in the Shakespeare, with all it’s difficult language and want not to watch Jeremy Kyle on the same day. The people on Jeremy Kyle were horrible, doing horrible things to each other, but the more I watched the Shakespeare unfold in front of us, in close up almost touching distance, the more I saw similarities between the protagonists in both Shakespeare’s and Kyle’s productions.

Kings and queens have more elegant language and make larger gestures because they can, but the Family feuds and structures on Jeremy Kyle are exactly the same as those found in Shakespeare.

What would Shakespeare be doing if he lived now? He’d be watching Jeremy Kyle every morning, that’s for sure, and probably working in reality TV.

That’s why Shakespeare is still so relevant – The first quarter of an hour is hard, as the ear gets used to the language, but soon we are absorbed by all our petty family stories writ large and repeated generation by generation.

Not been to Berkeley Castle before. It was wonderful in the night, prettily light up with bulbs rather than spotlights. We must go again in the daylight and see what it looks like.