It will surely go down in television history as the year of the frock coat and the bonnet. In 2007 we witnessed a veritable seaside promenade of Eleanors and Annes sashaying across our screens. Dickens and Gaskell were there along with more Jane Austen than you could flutter a fan at. We gorged ourselves on chocolate box images of the 19th century; the urchin children, the cottages with smoking chimneys, the purse-lipped matrons, the girls with corkscrew curls.

For decades, TV programmers have been feeding us on the comfort viewing that has come to define our vision of the 19th century. Through the adapter’s skill and the camera’s seductive imagery we’ve come to see our modern lives reflected in the experiences of Ebenezer Scrooge, Lizzie Bennet and Jane Eyre more than Dickens, Austen or Charlotte Brontë surely intended. After some 50 years of intense exposure to the 19th century we no longer view the muddy streets of northern towns or the Bath Assembly Rooms as a Martian terrain. But we should.

Our ancestors were aliens. Aliens in bonnets. Especially the Victorians. The quiet crime of the costume drama has been to slyly convince us that in spite of their indefatigable Christian morality, social crusading zeal, and sense of civic responsibility that the inhabitants of the 19th century shared our modern values more than their predecessors. That somehow, their restrained, conviction-led era was in fact very close to our own.

Oddly, in the 1960s when the BBC started raiding the local library for historic works of literature, this might have held some truth. Memories of rationing and make-do-and-mend were still fresh in the mind; a belief in thrift and community spirit lingered. But times moved on, greed became good and churches were turned into luxury flats but our diet of 19th century viewing persisted. Is it any wonder that by the end of 2007 there were whispers of “bonnet fatigue”.

A growing disaffection with period programming stuck in a Dickens-Austen loop has led the rare, brave network executive to opt for something fresher. Over the past two years, BBC Four has stuck its neck out and served up regular doses of the 18th century, culminating in the success of Fanny Hill, which captured 1.1 million viewers on its first night, the channel’s largest ratings share to date. It may go some way towards proving that, in spite of the homeliness of the 19th century, 21st-century audiences are more likely to recognise life in the Georgian era.

Take London: not unlike today, it was a booming place. The city was expanding in every direction, speculators and investors fuelled a commerce-driven economy. Society revelled in money and its conspicuous display. Church attendance suffered and the flesh trade flourished. Political corruption was rife. The enfranchised, privileged classes were more anxious about preserving their personal property and liberty than they were in righting social wrongs.

This all-too-familiar setting is the backdrop for Channel 4’s new five-part series, City of Vice, a story that dramatises the establishment of London’s first police force, the Bow Street Runners, in 1753. Unlike the historical dramas of late, it’s gritty and unapologetic. Life could be desperately ugly and City of Vice is not coy about depicting this.

One of the bonnet drama’s greatest misdemeanours has been to sanitise history. The result is that audiences are left with the sense that society, with all of its knife crime, violent robbery and brutality, has only recently gone to hell in a hand basket. Earlier eras were often far more dangerous and corrupt. This was certainly the case when Henry Fielding, the Magistrate of Westminster (and author of Tom Jones) was amassing his team of Runners. City of Vice follows Henry (played by Ian McDiarmid) and his blind half-brother, John Fielding (Iain Glen) in their attempts to salvage London’s streets from a state of near anarchy. At the time, robberies, burglaries and pickpocketing had reached such epic proportions that complaints were being voiced in Parliament. Gangs of robbers were openly roaming the capital by day and the metropolis’s assortment of feckless nightwatchmen were impotent to stop them. The propertied classes, which included the diarist Horace Walpole, lived in fear of becoming victims to “the savage barbarity” of “the profusion of housebreakers, highwaymen and footpads... who commit the most wanton cruelties”.

City of Vice is more likely to resonate with cynical modern audiences than the garden variety of period programming. There are no bonnets but the series is populated with strong, believable female characters, most of whom were drawn from historical documents rather than novels.

The aim was to fashion a drama moulded around scrupulously researched history, to decorate hard fact with plumes of plausible fiction and like an inventive milliner to weave a sturdy ribbon of plot through it. There’s nothing remotely bonnet about it. In the 18th century such headgear was called a chip hat.

City of Vice, Mon, C4, 9pm; Hallie Rubenhold was the historical adviser to City of Vice and is author of The Covent Garden Ladies; Pimp General Jack and the Extraordinary Story of Harris’s List (Tempus)

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