Beware the bumbling gent in the tweed jacket

Normal for Norfolk BBC Two, Monday

Channel 4, Wednesday

or the past 70 years we have been lamenting the demise of the English country house. These buildings that long ago stood imperiously as symbols of localised power have become decaying mausoleums that leave their owners in a perpetual state of impecuniosity.

Wiveton Hall, at the heart of returning fly-on-the-wall series

is a particular beauty – a flint-faced Jacobean jewel that glows with mellow modesty on the coastal flatlands of north Norfolk. Its custodian, Desmond MacCarthy, has rather a tangential relationship to the real world, or so I at first thought. MacCarthy is a man possessed of a love of tweed, three-dimensional eyebrows that seemed on the verge of deserting his head, and a voice soaked in ancestral malmsey. “There’s too much kissing goes on nowadays,” he spluttered, like George V stepping out of a time machine into an Ibiza nightclub.

How on earth could this shambolic soul, so seemingly at odds s with the 21st century, tury, make his money pit of a manor house, e, into something vaguely profitable?e? In fact, MacCarthy hy seemed to have staff taff eating out of his hand. Builders, caterers s and gardeners all l flocked to his aid and doted on himm in some sort of pseudo-homage to Britain’s feudall past. “I’m not gay or anything but I do like him,” growled Peter, the head gardener.

FMacCarthy had decided to go Soviet and introduced a five-year plan. This included his offering tours of the grounds, which meant he had to be nice to the peasants who flocked to Wiveton in obeisance. “Hello,” he said to one, before adding vaguely: “What a nice hat you’ve got.” He also opened up the mouldy east wing and rebranded it as a yoga retreat. Spearheading the various campaigns was manager Kim, a beacon of normality amid a sea of eccentricity. Indeed, she was one of several women who mopped up MacCarthy’s affairs. There was also his ex-wife, Tina, a local tailor, whom we saw measuring him for a new tweed suit. She assiduously accounted for her ex-husband’s increasing girth, mindful that he shouldn’t look like Tom Kitten.

“The house is very much warmer than when Tina lived there,” remarked MacCarthy, as Tina stuck pins into his trouser leg with meaning. Meanwhile, his 10 101-year-old mother, Chloe, totteredtotte around the grounds like o one of Titus Groan’s identical twin aunts at Gormenghas Gormenghast. “She’s lived so long because she doesn’t drink milk,” explainedex her son proudly. “I like cream, cream,” hissed Chloe, wrongfooting ouro assumption that she had d devoted her life to some progressive lactose lactose-free diet. By the end of this first episode, MacCarthyMa was beingbe massaged by Lisa, the yoga gurugu who had broughtb “cosmic smellss and ethnic candles” to the east wing. “Oh good girl,” purred MacCarthy as she set to work on his tension points.

Actually, I’m not sure MacCarthy has any tension points. Don’t be fooled by the bumbling gent act. I reckon he has inherited the mercantile steel of his ancestors. Tailors, cooks, builders, masseurs – they all do his bidding. This is a man who is fazed by and wants for precisely nothing, and inviting TV cameras into his home is merely the latest logical step in ensuring the survival of him and his stately pile.

Survival was key to the latest episode of the delightfully treasonous sitcom from Bert Tyler-Moore and George Jeffrie. Harry (Richard Goulding) found himself in a duel with Pippa’s psychopathic fiancé “Johnny Mathers” (Ben Lambert), spurred on by the bloodthirsty Anne ( Vicki Pepperdine). Charles’s primogeniture was threatened by the discovery of a slightly older twin brother (played by Harry Enfield who also plays Charles) who had been kept prisoner in a tower for the past 69 years, and poor Kate (Louise Ford) was getting squeamish about having to participate in blood sports. “I think shooting is wrong,” she demurred. “As a young gypsy, I enjoyed nothing more than tracking hedgehogs. But that was to eat.”

Meanwhile, Beatrice and Eugenie were set on ensuring the survival of another important institution – the British steel industry. “So you need to, like, get on Instagram,” reasoned the toothsome Bea (Ellie White) to a group of surly Welshmen in hard hats. By luck, rather than judgment, they succeeded.

The Windsors paints its humour in the broadest of strokes and that’s precisely why it works. No amount of media coverage has made us any the wiser as to the real people at the head of this country and so zany caricatures are a sort of release from the faintly fawning speculation. Here, Princess Anne growls rather than speaks, eats dog biscuits and seems sexually

Builders, caterers and gardeners all flocked to his aid and doted on him