I’m a celebrity... get me an E-Type and let’s go on a jolly hunt for junk!
Well, you wouldn’t have guessed that. Psychotherapist Philippa Perry, married to cross-dressing potter Grayson, is best pals with Jerry Hall, supermodel emeritus and current wife of Rupert Murdoch.
The girls met on the party circuit and go clothes shopping together, though last night they were in search of bric-a-brac bargains as Celebrity Antiques Road Trip (BBC2) returned.
Do the couples get together for dinner at the Murdochs’ £30 million Cotswolds mansion? I’d love to think that, after second helpings of tiramisu, Rupe and Gray retire to the hot tub with their brandies to discuss ceramics, frocks and the output of Fox News.
On their antiques hunt, Philippa was mischievous, Jerry imperious as they scoured the posh junk shops of Oxfordshire. When their buys went to auction and Jerry started losing money on every item, Philippa was gleeful. ‘Jerry’s cross!’ she teased, as her chum pulled a long pout.
Jerry had been doing so well, until the bids came in. elderly dealers crumpled before her strident flirtation. Picking up a rare biscuit tin with a £175 price tag, Jerry demanded a £100 discount and fluttered her eyelashes. She got her own way. Clearly, she weaponised this technique a long time ago. Her simpers are her superpower.
No amount of camera-ready charisma could save her in the saleroom, though. The biscuit tin went for £32. ‘Dang! That is so unfair!’ she bellowed.
In this well-worn but unfailingly fun format, each celeb gets a vintage car to whisk her around. Philippa had a Jaguar e-Type, Jerry a boat-tail Buick that barely squeezed down the country lanes.
They are also each assigned an antiques expert to guide their purchases, inject historical sidenotes and prod the conversation along with a few leading questions. Philippa was having none of it.
When her guide wondered aloud about her lurid fashion sense and asked what she might call her style, she snapped: ‘My clothes!’
Meanwhile, in the Buick, it was clear that many, many topics were off-limits. Jerry was not asked about exes Mick Jagger or Bryan Ferry, let alone what it was like to live with a real-life media mogul who is one of the inspirations for logan Roy from Succession. She did consent to demonstrate the catwalk strut. ‘Think of a string pulling your head right up,’ she said, ‘and walk on your tippy-toes.’
That’s the second lesson in runway swagger we’ve had this week, after Joanna lumley showed us an alternative method on her Human Swan documentary.
I’m practising furiously and by Friday I should be irresistible.
It’s always entertaining to guess what various antiques, from top hats to piano stools, will fetch at auction. But we don’t know the true worth of our possessions until we’re at risk of suddenly losing them.
With about one home in six across Britain now at risk from flooding as weather patterns become more extreme, footage of families struggling to save everything they own is distressingly familiar.
It Takes A Flood . . . (ITV) showed us how the country is coping. Khalsa Aid, an emergency charity headed by the inspirational Ravi Singh, arrived in Somerset when the water was waist-deep and got to work filling sandbags while government agencies were still dithering.
A former Grenadier Guardsman named lance in Hemsby, Norfolk, hitched his entire house to a tractor and hauled it back from the brink of a cliff, after erosion threatened to plunge it into the sea.
When lance answers his phone, he barks: ‘War Office! Do you want a fight?’ That’s the spirit.