National treasure

The phone rang last night, I picked it up and it was our friend Tania. ‘God, I hate my ****ing husband,’ she said. ‘Oh, Tania, don’t be silly, Jamie’s a sweetheart,’ I said. ‘Oh, shut up, I don’t want to be talking to you, you’re a man. Pass me to your wife, she’ll understand,’ said Tania. So I handed the phone to the wife and she made all the right noises. It seemed that Jamie had arrived home late and hungry to discover that Tania had eaten all his sausages. Jamie had called her a ‘****ing bitch’.

I felt similarly divided loyalties watching English Heritage (BBC2, Friday). It was made by a likeable chap who lives down the road from me called Patrick Forbes, but it stars my dear old mate Simon Thurley, who is chairman of English Heritage. Clearly, hardly anyone these days is going to want to sit through four hour-long documentaries about agreeable old toffs and the sunlight glowing amber on the stone of 16th-century hunting palaces, no matter how exquisitely shot. What viewers want now is the thing TV people call ‘jeopardy’: they want rows, they want races against time, they want expectations dashed, they want charming, gimlet-eyed blond English Heritage chairmen coming out with egg on their face.

This, more or less, was the narrative Forbes gave us in the first episode. It told the story of how, in 2006, English Heritage paid £3 million for Apethorpe Hall in Northamptonshire — only surviving palace of James I — and blew another £4 million fixing the roof and plasterwork with a view to selling it on at a profit to some eccentric billionaire who didn’t mind living in a huge, draughty old house with no central heating, not much land (only 50 acres) and no chance of introducing even the slightest creature comfort because it’s all grade one listed.