The violent courtship rituals, extravagant wedding celebrations and circumscribed lives of traveller women who are governed by a strict code of traditional morality - which protects them from the dangers of ladette excess, but also tends to mean they are often poorly educated, without many options beyond early marriage and a life of housework and child-rearing.

The gypsy life portrayed in the series is very different from Eva Petulengro’s recollections of a Romany childhood. As a young woman, Eva earned a reputation as a showbusiness clairvoyant.

She had a newspaper column, appeared on television, read the palms of George Harrison and Paul McCartney (though she missed out on John Lennon - whose tragic fate she is convinced she would have foreseen).

But it isn’t the sprinkling of showbiz stardust that makes her story remarkable. She was one of the last generation of Romanies to follow a traditional lifestyle, travelling the roads of Norfolk and the Lincolnshire fens in a painted wooden caravan.

Eva was born in 1939 and her earliest memories are of  her grandmother Alice’s horse-drawn caravan, or ‘vardo’. This had been ordered as a wedding present by her husband, Nathaniel, whom Eva recalls as ‘a very striking man. He had style and grace, even though his arms seemed to go on for ever.