Serving toffs is like pig farming — feed ’em and clear up the mess
WHEN Mick Jagger calls round, make sure that you have plenty of biscuits. The skinny Stone wasn’t happy when he dropped in at Renishaw hall in Derbyshire, looked in the biscuit barrel and found it empty.
‘Oi Keef,’ he wailed. ‘I can’t get no . . . snackie action!’
Oh all right, I’m making up that last bit. But the denizens of Renishaw, Rick and Alexandra — descendants of the infamous artistic Sitwell siblings — insist it’s true that Mick came to visit.
he lifted the lid of an antique soup tureen, expecting to find biccies in there. Keeping Up With The Aristocrats (ITV) is crammed with similar anecdotes, like a racy National Trust guidebook.
The running joke of the show is that, while the stately homes are lordly, life behind the facade is anything but. Lady emma Fitzalanhoward, whose father-in-law was the Duke of Norfolk, spends much of her time at Carlton Towers in Yorkshire ironing her husband Gerald’s linen shirts.
he seems to get through a lot of them. Most of the time, he’s pottering outdoors, trying to coax grapes from their chilly vineyard or smoking bits of trout in a converted garden shed.
Lord Ivar Mountbatten, a cousin of both the Queen and Prince Philip, runs a cafe at his mansion in Devon, Bridwell Park. With his husband James, they specialise in cupcakes.
Princess Olga Romanoff conducts her own guided tours of her halftimbered country house in Kent, at £14 a head. An incorrigible flirt, she could definitely be counted on to make sure Mick Jagger got his biscuits. She likes the more macho type, though — military men, ‘trained killers’ in her words, preferably blond and tall.
her father was a nephew of Tsar Nicholas II and her mother wanted her to marry Prince Charles. Fortunately for the British monarchy, she was the wrong religion.
‘he definitely had a lucky escape,’ she mused. We all did — Princess Olga makes Sarah Ferguson look like Sister Julienne from Call The Midwife.
It was all great fun, and the producers didn’t need to over-egg it with a string quartet on the soundtrack, scraping their way through hits by Abba and Lady Gaga.
Downton Abbey this was not, even though Renishaw hall does
have a butler. his father was a pig farmer. ‘It’s the same thing,’ he said. ‘You feed them when they’re hungry and clean up their mess.’
There was no shortage of wisecracks and one-liners, either, on Geordie Hospital (C4), filmed on the wards of the Freeman hospital and the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle. ‘We’re a bunch of oddbods, laughing morning, noon and night,’ declared one surgeon. ‘They have a sense of humour that is second to none,’ said another.
The nurses were chatting up the man on the fruit stall in the car park and the clinicians were giggling about their diets — it was non-stop fun and games.
That’s all very well, but it was a relief when transplant surgeon Colin Wilson, a miner’s grandson, spoke up in the operating theatre during a tricky procedure: ‘Jokes stop, banter stops, this is a serious job.’
Some of it was very serious indeed. Four-year-old Kit was waiting for a heart transplant. All that was keeping him alive was a massive battery pack, powering the mechanical pump in his little chest.
his parents, inevitably, looked wrung out. In that situation, light-hearted moments are the only thing that keep you going.
hurrah, then, for Poppy Jingles, the ‘staff welfare hound’ who was back at work after being unable to come in to the hospitals during lockdown. She was ‘furryloughed’.