Well, as I discovered in my new series Elegance and Decadence: The Age of the Regency, the waltz was the Regency equivalent of dirty dancing.

When it first appeared in the 1810s, this new dance from Germany caused a scandal.
Obviously, when I was offered a dancing lesson, I couldn't wait to have a go.

Equipped with a red Regency dress and a pair of dancing pumps, I got myself to the Royal Pump Rooms of Leamington Spa.

The Pump Rooms were used for Regency parties and balls, but are actually named for the pump there that produces some rather nasty-tasting spa water.

This water's supposedly health-giving properties lay behind Leamington Spa's spectacular growth as a tourist resort in the Regency period.

At the Pump Rooms I met the dance historian Robin Benie.

He told me how the country dances of the eighteenth century involved men and women standing in long lines, each person forming a couple briefly, in turn with all the other members of the set.

In the waltz, by contrast, you remain clasped in the arms of just one partner throughout, perhaps taking the opportunity for private conversation.

The Times newspaper condemned the new dance for its 'voluptuous intertwining of the limbs'.

Waltzing also played a sad part in the unstable Lady Caroline Lamb's tempestuous relationship with the poet Lord Byron.

Lady Caroline was one of Lord Byron's many groupies, and for a while he indulged her in a scandalous affair.

He made her swear never to waltz, as it made him so jealous to see her in the arms of another man. (He couldn't waltz himself because he had a bad foot.)

After their break-up, though, they ran into each other at a ball, and she said to him that 'she supposed she might waltz now'.

Yes, he said, she could dance with anybody she liked.

Poor Caroline was devastated by this evidence that their relationship was really over.

She immediately got hold of a knife, cut herself, and blood went all over her gown.

I myself managed to get through my waltz lesson without bloodshed and can now twirl very nicely indeed.

And I really enjoyed my afternoon as a Regency Rihanna.

Lucy Worsley is the presenter of Elegance and Decadence: The Age of the Regency.

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

This BBC Four series explores the history of British homes at all levels in society, from peasant's cottage to palace.

The series started last week and its four episodes examine the living room, bathroom, bedroom and kitchen respectively.

We cover the whole period from the Normans to the present day, examining shifting attitudes to privacy, class, cleanliness and technology.

Episode two tells the story of the bathroom, the room with the shortest history as it only developed in the Victorian period.

While making this film last March, I found myself shivering in a Georgian swimming costume (a long white linen shift, with lead weights sewn into its hem so that it wouldn't float up and reveal a lady's legs), about to take a freezing dip from Bognor Regis beach.

I was trying to imagine the Georgian urge to bathe in cold water - an urge that the Tudors and Stuarts before them had failed to feel. 

As well as enjoying a chilly sea dip as a presumed cure for infertility, constipation and impotence, the Georgians were the first people to bathe regularly at home. But they still had no separate bathrooms, and washed in tubs in a bedroom or kitchen. 

In cities the tub might be filled from the exciting new plumbed-in taps now to be found in Georgian basements.

The bathroom's laggardly development is one of the things that surprised me most about the home's history, and bizarrely it was society's attitudes towards personal hygiene rather than technology that set the pace. 

Despite Sir John Harrington building and writing a book about the flushing toilet in Elizabethan times, it wasn't until the 19th century that the flush became widespread.

For If Walls Could Talk, we spent several (very cold) months recreating different bits of historic domestic life - and every time I learned something new about what it was really like to live in the past. 

Episode two also reveals exactly how well urine works as a Tudor stain-remover, when bubble bath was invented, and even how Georgian ladies went to the loo (they used a jug rather like a gravy-boat - easy to use discreetly in a big hooped skirt). 

I even used Sir John Harrington's detailed instructions to build his 1590s design for a toilet. To my amazement, it really worked, successfully flushing down a handful of cherry tomatoes.

Having made this series, I see my own home with new eyes.  And when I look at my clean, convenient, cholera-free toilet - the john - I thank its namesake Sir John Harrington. 

Lucy Worsley is chief curator of Historic Royal Palaces and presenter of If Walls Could Talk: The History Of The Home.

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.