You could not help but feel that Jonathan Meades’ choice of Edward Burra (1905-1976) to open the new series of Great Lives (5 August) highlighted the enterprise’s solitary drawback: its much canvassed attempts to make better-known people who, a moment or two’s reflection insists, are pretty well-known to begin with. Surely, I thought to myself, as Meades rhapsodised about “the greatest English artist you’ve never heard of”, everyone has heard of Burra. But no, Matthew Parris, the series’ amiable presenter, confessed himself entirely ignorant.To Parris’ credit, the questions he began to pose were a testimony to the homework he had clearly done since Burra’s name came up on the schedules, even if the inevitable “were they gay?&rdqu