Want to know if you’re Just test how you say ‘piano’
THE English class system is defined by its names for a musical instrument. The way you say ‘piano’ fixes precisely where you fall on the social scale.
Pronounce it ‘pee-yan-oh’ and you are reliably lower middle class. Refer to it as a ‘Bechstein concert grand’ and you are insufferably pretentious and upper middle.
If you talk about ‘tinkling the ivories’ and ‘the old Joanna’, you are working class or a member of the EastEnders cast.
But if you call it a ‘ pey-arrn- oo’, you are very posh indeed and should be preserved for the nation.
Lady Rosemary Spencer Churchill lands firmly in the final category. Showing the cameras round Blenheim Palace, her family seat, in
The Last Dukes (BBC2), she pointed out where the pey-arrn- oos had been before the house was opened to the public.
In a true stately home, it seems, there was a pey-arrn- oo in every room, as common as flat-screen TVs today. Lady Rosemary, who is 86 and was one of the Queen’s maids of honour at the Coronation, was more interested in finding the daggers, which were the size of machetes and hung beside the Old Masters.
In the event of fire, she explained, her father, the tenth Duke of Marlborough, and the staff would have belted round the palace, slashing the canvases out of their frames to save them from the conflagration.
It helped that all the footmen were over 6ft tall — at the insistence of her mother, the Duchess: ‘In a house like this, you didn’t want a lot of midgets walking about.’
This documentary was long on anecdote but low on facts. The narrator informed us there were 26 surviving dukedoms in Britain and that ‘it is inconceivable that there will ever be any more’.
That’s a strange prediction, since the Queen has immense respect for aristocratic tradition, and did once offer to invest Churchill as the Duke of London. The great man turned it down, pointing out that a proper duke would own great tracts of land, while he was perpetually skint.
Several of the dukes interviewed by director Michael Waldman looked a bit short of cash, too. The Duke of St Albans, who is descended from an illegitimate son of Charles II and Nell Gwyn, complained that as Hereditary Grand Falconer of England he used to be paid in venison, with the gift of a deer’s quarter from Richmond Park each year.
Tony Blair put a stop to that. ‘Poor show,’ muttered the Duke.
There were dull patches, where the camera followed peers round their houses in search of moth-eaten robes and coronets, and watched them struggle into their ceremonial finery. At these moments, it felt as if the programme’s aim was simply to mock, which was pointless: you might as well laugh at a fellow because his father was a fishmonger.
Lady Camilla Osborne, daughter of the Duke of Leeds, clearly suspected she was being sent up, but ignored it. Instead, she spoke poignantly about her father’s rackety life as he drifted around the playboy haunts of Europe, marrying ballerinas and drinking his life away. She was elegantly sad without straying into selfpity. Now that’s innate class.
Class is what the little rich girls in Scream Queens (E4) lack in abundance. This 13-part horror movie spoof, set in an American university ‘sorority house’, traps a group of dollar princesses in a haunted mansion and sets about murdering them in a succession of gruesomely silly ways. One has her head lopped off with a lawnmower. The cleaner, nicknamed ‘ White Mammy’ by the girls because they can treat her as their slave, is drowned in a vat of boiling chip fat.
All the girls, even the ones we are supposed to like, are racist snobs with foul mouths. Jamie Lee Curtis, a veteran of numerous slash-and-gore Halloween pictures, tries to inject some style as the college’s demonic dean, but with material this crass, there’s nothing she can do.
Jamie is not only a hereditary Hollywood noble, the daughter of film stars, but the wife of a British peer — the 5th Baron Haden-Guest. Whatever induced her to take this role? Perhaps she’s another aristo fallen on hard times.