Mary swaps soggy bottoms for the upper crust — and it’s a joy
THe great mistake most of us make early in life is not being born into the aristocracy. Mary berry’s charmingly well-bred new series, Country House Secrets (bbC1), gave a glimpse of what life might be like at the top of the social spiral — royal visits, mouthwatering banquets, glorious architecture and sumptuous furnishings. even the dogs behaved with innate nobility.
As Mary led the cameras around Highclere Castle, the Queen’s favourite stately home and backdrop for the costume drama downton Abbey, two ghastly pitfalls threatened the show.
This could so easily have become a kitsch trek along the tourist trail, treating viewers like gawping American visitors on a coach tour.
or it might have turned into a snooty parade of snobs, showing off their heritage for the riff-raff to envy. but Mary is so sweetly assured, never obsequious and always perfectly polite, that she seemed to put even the 8th Countess of Carnarvon at her ease.
They met in the castle’s Great Hall, immediately recognisable from the Christmas balls at downton, and made their way to a grand library that was the TV setting for so many Grantham family discussions.
With her bobbed hair and a jaunty red trilby, Mary looked ready to be a guest star. instead, she was shown to the kitchens and invited to rustle up a menu for a grand dinner party.
royalty would not be present, but Alan Titchmarsh was coming — which is almost the same.
The recipes for raspberry tartlets with creme patissiere, cannon of lamb on celeriac potato cakes and gooseberry fool desserts were not too detailed: this wasn’t a cookery show, more an entertainment with a dash of kitchen magic.
but Mary is such a consummate cook that she is able to impart more useful hints and tips in a two-minute demonstration than many celebrity chefs can manage in an entire programme.
she was equally at ease with Geordie, the 8th earl and the Queen’s godson, as she was with Pat, the castle’s handywoman who has been fixing the leaks and repainting the 300 rooms for 57 years.
At 82, Mary is seven years older than Pat. ‘No sign of retirement?’ she asked with a twinkle. ‘i understand that — you just keep going, it’s much better.’ Then she packed a picnic and grabbed a metal detector, going off to search for pieces of a Flying Fortress bomber that crashed in the Highclere woods at the end of World War 2. What a woman.
Metal detectors were also doing the business on Digging For Britain (bbC4), unearthing four magnificent gold torques in a staffordshire field. Presenter Alice roberts declared them to be the earliest wrought gold pieces ever found in britain, and suggested they could have been jewellery worn by a chieftain’s bride from the continent.
other historians might have been tempted to spin an entire hour out of the find, but this was just one half of a dozen intriguing discoveries. others included the remnants of a house at the centre of Avebury stone circle, and the foundations of a Viking camp with the skulls of warriors scattered around.
Most poignant were the bones of convicts who died aboard the prison hulks moored off Portsmouth harbour in the early 19th century.
They were tossed into graves on a rocky outcrop in the Channel, known as rat island because of the infestation of rodents burrowing at the bodies.
Archaeology might seem a dry subject, but i defy you to watch this show without being amazed at least twice.