How Baldrick’s cunning guide to Buck House went horribly wrong
Buckingham Palace is falling down! The masonry is crumbling, servants wade through floods from burst water pipes and every day the royals must dodge lumps of plasterwork tumbling from the ceilings.
This must be true, because an ominous voiceover said so on Inside
Buckingham Palace (c5). and to prove it, there were close-ups of cracked paint and distressed stone, the very image of a stately home in disrepair.
Except that a caption in the corner of the screen said ‘Reconstruction’. These were not pictures of alleged decay at the actual palace because c5’s cameras had not been allowed inside. instead, we were being fed a spurious mock- up of what the interiors might look like.
To bolster this, anti-monarchist Sir Tony Robinson popped up with stories of how, during a Time Team special filmed in the palace gardens, he had tiptoed around Buck house and peeped behind the silk-panelled doors. The unseen spaces, he claimed, were like poky backrooms in an 1890s terrace house.
ask Blackadder’s servant Baldrick for a guided tour of the royal household, and this is what you can expect: he’ll delight in pointing out mouseholes in the skirting board, and the cupboard where they keep the mangle.
Whether you believe him rather depends on if you want to listen to a man who denounces the monarchy, but accepts a knighthood from the Queen and then tattles about the decor. much of the testimony was even more tasteless than that. This lurid documentary cobbled together all the well-worn crises of the past 60 years, with unsubstantiated rumours whirling around like penny dreadful headlines.
Prince Philip, it was said, was a member in the Fifties of the ‘Thursday club’, an association of bon viveurs including actors David niven and Peter ustinov, who lunched together every week at a Soho restaurant.
niven and ustinov were two of the greatest raconteurs of the century. imagine the debauchery — witty stories meandering on until three in the afternoon! apparently, Philip used to stroll back to the palace smelling of sweet port. Oh, the immorality.
There was talk of infidelities, too — ‘but the affairs were denied and there was no evidence’, admitted the narrator. Thanks to Britain’s libel laws, bandying around empty claims like that amounts to financial suicide . . . unless the victims are royal. in that case, it’s safe to peddle any old lies, because the Royal Family never sues.
We heard about the kidnap attempt on Princess anne in 1974, the death in a Paris road tunnel of Princess Diana in 1997, the 1982 palace break-in by michael Fagin . . . a litany of all the tawdriest episodes in the Queen’s reign without even the excuse of new information or fresh insights.
if this counts as history, then Baldrick’s signature dish of ratatouille made with real rats must qualify as haute cuisine.
The Prosecutors (BBc4) did offer something new, a glimpse behind the scenes as the Director of Public Prosecutions alison Saunders and her team decided which cases went to court once police had made their arrests.
The crown Prosecution Service handles more than 650,000 cases a year, so it was strange that this hour-long programme featured just two. The wheels of justice grind exceeding slow, we know, but there must have been room to squeeze in another couple.
The ones we did see were well chosen: a gang of bank raiders were caught after blowing up dozens of cash machines, and a grieving mother waited to see a Porsche driver sentenced for killing her 11-year-old son.
For the prosecution lawyers, the aim with the raiders was not just to get a conviction, but to ensure a hefty sentence. That meant charging them not with burglary, but with causing explosions.
The gang wore heavy disguises on their raids, so it was satisfying to see them convicted by the evidence of CCTV security cameras at their own gaffs — they forgot to wear their hoods and masks when they were unloading their getaway vehicles outside their homes.
if stupidity were a crime in this country, they would all be serving life sentences.