Mary has the right mix
THERE used to be a restaurant near my house, specialising in curry and pizzas. The pizzas tasted, inevitably, of curry and the curry of pizzas and it was a classic example of someone trying to have their cake and eat it, and failing twice.
On paper MARY BERRY’S COUNTRY HOUSE SECRETS (BBC1) might have seemed like another cake-eat-it-fail combo. We’ve seen its kind before, after all, those shows banged out by some TV execs sitting around a table, writing down formats and then trying to glue them all together.
“The history of posh houses,” you could imagine them musing. “Mary Berry baking…no, Mary Berry nosing around posh houses while baking!” Sometimes though an idea is so silly it works. Wisely selecting for her first trip the granddaddy of all country piles, Highclere Castle – aka Downton Abbey – Mary trotted up the steps with all the confidence of a weekend guest.
I remember an episode of Downton in which the Dowager Countess glared imperiously through her lorgnettes and asked, “What, exactly, is a weekend?”
Last night’s programme would have us believe the toffs knew all about weekends long before Lady Violet and their three-day house parties were the stuff of history.
Princes dallied with mistresses, politicians struck deals with business magnates while treaties and laws were drawn up between bouts of hunting and noshing.
Highclere, seat of the Earl of Carnarvon, is only a drive away from London, making it a handy hub for the movers and shakers. This was all interesting stuff, the factual backbone of our most successful TV drama to date, and it was no less entertaining to peek into the life of Highclere today.
If you didn’t know your TV celebrities, you wouldn’t have known that Mary wasn’t some sort of duchess herself and that meant, in the presence of the Earl and Countess, she was neither tugging her forelock nor taking the mick.
It must have felt like a biographer or a historian had come to stay, all serious and attentive, with a handy sideline in raspberry tarts. Whoever dreamt up this show, a layer cake of cookery, history documentary, people-watching and interior-snooping, indeed deserves a biscuit.
Sometimes there’s a strange symmetry between a TV show and what’s going on elsewhere as it’s broadcast. A murder plot in a soap, for example, filmed months in advance, airs just as grisly details of a real-life case come to light.
In a happier coincidence, DIGGING FOR BRITAIN (BBC4) hinted at possibilities being proven elsewhere. It’s an annual bulletin of all the recent finds around the British Isles and nicely scheduled just before archaeological comedy Detectorists, as well.
We learnt about a Viking camp, just outside the Derbyshire town of Repton where Icelandic sagas suggested the invading hordes had holed up for the winter of 873, readying themselves to take over the rest of the country.
This year, thanks to expert excavations, saga became truth. They also revealed, among the bodies in a Viking cemetery, the remains of women. So were some of the ferocious hordes female?
Only a few weeks back, the body in a lavishly endowed warrior’s grave in southern Sweden was identified as a woman who’d been laid to rest with swords, arrowheads and two horses.
What a treat to see history rewritten as we watch.