ENSCONCED in a bulging, brown Barbour, which made her look like a Michelin Man who had been dragged through a ploughed field, the queen of England was checking out a frisky foal. She was at Highclere Castle in Hampshire, where the owners, the Carnarvons (yes, yes, descendants of the Carnarvon bloke who went on those grave robbing expeditions to Egypt) are strapped for cash.
Well, sort of strapped for cash. It's all relative, of course. Network First's High Stakes at Highclere showed that the Carnarvons are not destitute or on the dole. After all, as titled aristocracy, they get rather more than a few DHSS giros from British taxpayers. Their problem is that it costs about £1 million a year to renovate and maintain the crumbling castle. So new financial wheezes, along with such staples as flogging horses to Elizabeth Windsor, are necessary. Enter Adrian Wylie.
Adrian has been appointed castle manager. His job is to turn Highclere from ancestral home into heritage theme park. His aims are to attract 160,000 punters a year to the 6,000 acre estate and to "rationalise" the staff of 85. Adrian, in regulation striped shirt with white collar, is a Thatcherite. Oh, he's obsequious enough to the earl and his wife, but he's keen to put the boot a robust green welly, actually into the staff.
Adrian is keen on PR too. He wants his employer to sit on a horse for a "photo opportunity" on the eve of the castle's "launch". But the earl will have none of this malarky. He feels that the idea is pure horse manure. Then Adrian suggests hanging baskets in the courtyard. His lordship is aghast and finds the prospect "quite unacceptable", a reaction which, I understand, was meant to provide anecdotal evidence of superior breeding. In an earlier time, Adrian might have been left hanging in the courtyard.
So, toffs think that hanging baskets are naff. What an instructive little insight this is. You can almost feel the heat from the blushes of those in middle England who didn't suss this one before now. The leniency afforded aristocrats to behave as incontrovertible arbiters of aesthetic merit is what's really naff. The earl may, or may not, be right in his judgment of hanging baskets. Titled people are entitled to their tastes, but the knee jerk assumption that such tastes automatically define worth is the mark of the brutalised snob.
Still, some folk seem to feel reassured by believing in a handy pecking order which renders class and taste synonymous. A guide explains to the milling punters that the Carnarvon family motto a courtly, plaster maxim in old Norman French translates as "Only one will I serve". Then another anecdote "When the present earl asked his father what does it mean?" he was told so the servants know who's the bloody boss. Such wit. How the punters chuckled.
It was the let's face it, matter of factness which perversely cast historical power as natural order, that was offensive. Then again, the punters had come to drool over the spoils of their "betters", so the guide could feel confident indeed, almost duty bound to emphasise inequality. "This," as any fairground huxter would tell you, "is what they paid their money for. This is what they came to see."
Fifty computer salesmen from Basingstoke arrived at Highclere for a medieval banquet. Dressed up like wallies, they were tended to by "serving wenches" and a "court jester". The salesmen made lewd suggestions to the wenches threw mashed potato at paintings and sang The Wild Rover. In the matter of basic manners it was hard not to conclude that, indeed, a new Dark Ages are upon us. The salesmen were vulgarians, big time.
And there was the heart of this documentary old money needing to cater to new money to keep old ways afloat in a new world. To be fair to the Carnarvons, they seemed, as did the castle staff, like mannerly people. Adrian and the salesmen did not. But it is foolish to conclude that old money is fundamentally different to new.
With both rooted in loot, the difference is about style, not substance. The common urge is to let the servants know who's the bloody boss. So Adrian, with his lordship's approval, sacked a load of them. And that, as any computer salesman, could tell you, was "the bottom line".
WHILE the uneasy merger between old and new money was gently (too gently, actually) observed by Net First, the 1996 World Music Awards gloried in naffness. Millionaire pop stars gathered in Monaco to mix with the local royals. The result was a television version of Hello magazine.
Michael Jackson was there with children on his knees, which was, in itself, deserving of the 1996 Sick PR Stunts Award. Even Adrian Wylie wouldn't chance this sort of stuff. Called on stage, Jacko, now a whiter shade of pale than ever, led his little friends by the hand and effected an ultra coy, Diana Spencer, peering out from bowed head look. "I love you. I love you all," he cooed to the applauding audience.
He followed with a couple of sheepish grins, intended to maximise his designer vulnerability, and returned to his seat.
Please. Enough is enough. "I love you. I love you all." What can you say to that sort of thing? Is Jacko the full shilling? He'll soon be tipping 40, so the child man effort is not just sick, but thoroughly diseased. Look, the choices are quite simple. If he's doing all this nonsense just to sell records, then that is unacceptable. If he believes in his vulnerable messiah personality, then he needs psychiatric treatment.
Diana Ross, Jacko's physiognomical blueprint, glided on to sing a mutilated medley of her old hits. In a white feather wig, she could have been a photographic negative of Jacko. "Welcome Diana the Legend," said Jean Claude Van Damme. The audience complied and Diana the Legend struck up. Murdering some classic pop songs by giving them the most abject cabaret treatment, she left the stage to sit on Jacko's knee.
Obviously remembering the show's rehearsals, Jacko's knee was child free for the arrival of Diana the Legend. She perched herself on a spot warmed by innocents and snuggled Jacko's head to her throat. When she stood up to leave, Jacko had a grin wider than Jack Nicholson's Joker. He sat there, grinning and shaking his head slowly from side to side. The choreography was pure American Bible Belt televangelism.
His face remained transfixed in a peculiar sort of meek rapture, while the Monaco audience rose to its feet and clapped the most watery clap. Rich kids seem incapable of real enthusiasm. Oh, they swayed and kept time to Diana the Legend's cabaret singing, but the entire show was castrated. There's a falseness about showbiz anyway, but these awards were royally naffer than a hanging basket with plastic flowers. They made the Eurovision seem like classic culture.
AT last, an animal that David Attenborough wouldn't have sit on his knee! He is as squeamish as the rest of us about rats. Even hearing the word makes many people recoil rats horrible hairy, long tailed rats. It's the Mark Spitz rats that you really don't want to meet. Some of them have been known to swim around the U bend and up into lavatory bowls. Film of a Spitz rat doing his stuff on Wildlife on One was the scariest thing on television this week.
A child lay sleeping in the half light. It perfectly safe and cosy not even a Jackson poster on the wall. Cut A rat is a pipe. Cut to the 100 and a rat's head pushing up the toilet lid. The rat jumps down and scurries away. The camera scurries back to the sleeping child. On no, surely not. This was pure Hitchcock. Then a sleeping cat wakes up. Our hero. He has smelled a rat and is on the trail.
Even though we knew it was all just a set up the technique the grammar of the camera made it almost unwatchable. Attenborough while proclaiming his distaste for rats, was not without respect for them. "An animal that can stay afloat for 72 hours, can jump six feet (high or long, he didn't say) and can run 100 metres in under 10 seconds" is an Olympian.
As ever, the camera work was astonishing. It" was clear that a rat set had been built near a likely sewer. We saw an urban fox catch and eat a rat. Not pleasant. Neither was the nest of blind and hairless rat babies. But it's tough for rats too. Survival is not easy in the rat rat race even though one female rat can produce 1,000 descendants in a year. Pest control and nature combine "to keep their numbers (per city) in the millions instead of the multi billions. Heavy rain, causing flash floods in the sewers, is the greatest killer.
But these creatures are incredibly adaptable. They will eat almost anything and are, it seems, developing a taste for computer cable. Even the antiseptic, hi-tech world can be breached by rats. "But, for all that," said Attenborough, "we owe rats a great deal." Laboratories all over the world have used them in experiments which have benefited humans. You could see what he meant, but in spite of his insistence that they were just animals", it was hard to know if he wasn't just whistling past the sewer... or even the loo.
FINALLY, Cold Lazarus. The opening episode of Dennis Potter's final TV drama (a four parter) was a kind of Star Trek meets RADA in a fight to the death. Set 374 years after Daniel Feeld (you have to have seen Karaoke to attempt to make sense of this one) has died, scientists are attempting to break into the synapses in Feeld's preserved head in order to experience his memories.
It is, as all sci-fi is, confusing and not always well grounded. On one level, it's just a pretentious Flash Gordon for culture vultures. But some of the jokes are sweet all the same. Potter, when he knew he was dying anyway, particularly enjoyed his cigarettes ("my little tubes of pleasure") and, in the future, a cigarette is the most forbidden of all decadent objects. Smoking one gets you 30 years in prison. Sell them and you face "the needle death", which sounds as grim as the sight of a rat in a pair of Speedo trunks.
Anyway, Potter's future world is dominated by evil, California based media and entertainment moguls. Now, who could he be referring to? Back in London, the RON (Reality or Nothing) urban guerrillas are on a terror spree. It is more Huxley than Orwell in its warnings, but it does seem like a world in which Adrian Wylie, Michael Jackson and (by then) old money computer salesmen would feel at home. It's not a very nice place. No doubt the rats are doing quite well too.