Enduring anxiety about being part of the in-crowd fuels our appetite for TV like Desperate Romantics

The idea of the group – artistic, intellectual or just plain old social – has always exercised a potent pull. Think of Bloomsbury, the Algonquin Round Table and, more recently, the Young British Artists. Stories of their internecine squabbles circulate endlessly in every kind of cultural context, from lavish feature film to scholarly monograph.

The latest gang to fall under the spotlight is the pre-Raphaelites, who last night began a BBC2 six-part drama, Desperate Romantics, promising attractive young men and women romping, sprawling, brawling and deliciously reconciling. While doing a bit of painting too. As single subjects it would be hard to see how William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais or Dante Gabriel Rossetti could muster even a BBC4 half-hour documentary slot devoted to their life and work. But put them together, and you’ve got prime-time dynamite.

Where does this pull of the group on our imaginations come from? Why do we endlessly rehash the narratives attached to the coming together (and falling apart) of the Lakeland poets or the Beatles? Because we are stuck in the playground, that’s why, forever rehearsing the dramas of our own relationship with the collective. After all, who hasn’t spent a chilly lunchtime on the edge of the action, watching longingly while a gang of cooler kids holds centre court?

It carries on into adulthood, this anxiety about whether one is “in” or “out” of some notional and ever-shifting group. It’s an unusual 40-year-old who doesn’t experience a twinge of anxiety about striding over to a canteen table where a gaggle of colleagues has already set up a cosy camp. Although you know your co-workers are not about to tell you to get lost, there’s always that split second when you imagine a terrifying scenario of expulsion and abandonment.

The irony is that in real life a group is only identifiable from the outside. When you’re inside it, you can’t see it and, what’s more, you really don’t care. The Bloomsberries and the pre-Raphaelites may have gone in for a lot of self-mythologising, but they remained essentially a set of individuals, each with their own distinct tastes, beliefs and allegiances. When Rossetti woke up in the morning, he was Rossetti, singular. As the day wore on he might have experienced himself fleetingly as Lizzie Siddal’s husband or Christina Rossetti’s brother or William Morris’s friend but, even as his head fell on the pillow at midnight, it’s unlikely that the thought “I am a founding member of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” trotted through his head. It was only to jealous outsiders and fascinated posterity that he became fixed in aspic at the centre of a golden gang of clever, beautiful people, forever gathered in a shabby-chic studio somewhere off Chelsea.

It is to assuage these panicky feelings of anomic individualism that we continue to need stories about coherent cohorts. Take the smashingly successful Friends, Cheers and Sex in the City. According to their formatted rules of engagement, a group of friends may endlessly row, sleep and make up with one another. They can even travel to the other side of the world for a couple of episodes, or get het up about a wacky sibling or a new boyfriend. Heck, they can even star in their own spin-off series. But what they must never ever do is grow bored or disillusioned or wander off to find someone else to play with. For what keeps us watching repeats of these programmes is the delicious fantasy that somewhere – in Boston or New York – there is a group of individuals that has found the secret to holding together, week after week. Here is a world where no one ever decides that, actually, just for tonight, they’d really rather be by themselves.