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. Then, just when it was ready to go on the market, the credit crunch happened, the potential buyers evaporated and lots of stories appeared about English Heritage having splurged £7 million on some poncy, pointless old building.
That was the programme’s line, anyway, and I’m sure televisually it was the sensible one. Thurley could be presented as a semi- comical, waspish but bouncy, Mercedes-coupé-driving Tintin figure; Sam West’s voiceover could have a sly sneer at EH’s absurd pernicketiness in demanding the roof be tiled with stone from an ancient quarry that no longer existed; villains could emerge in the form of the lord and lady (and ex-owners) just opposite who’d planted a wall of Leylandii to ruin the view and apparently wouldn’t accept less than a grand a tree to chop it down; at the end we could be invited to throw up our arms at this waste of taxpayers’ money.
If Thurley feels like the victim of a hatchet job, though, I don’t think he should. Rarely have I seen a documentary where the ostensible directorial slant has been so utterly confounded by the footage itself. You looked at those fantastically gorgeous weathered tiles and understood instantly why they were the only possible choice for the roof (where was Thurley supposed to have gone: B&Q?). You looked at the ornate plasterwork, and the carved oak, and the old doors, and that glowing stone and you thought, ‘Thank heavens, someone has had the foresight to save this masterpiece for the nation before it fell into complete ruin. And for only £7 million? What an absolute snip!’
Evelyn Waugh said in his preface to Brideshead that the English country house was ‘our chief national achievement’. Thurley understands this. Without his brilliance, imagination and inspirational leadership English Heritage would be just another dismal, sclerotic, drearily PC government quango. And our English heritage would be a pile of rubble.
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