Sex, feuds, a barmy aristo ... how did the Beeb make this so boring?

This ought to be a g odsend f or a ny documentary maker. England’s mos t flamboyant and eccentric aristocrat invites you into his stately home, the backdrop for gargantuan feuds and sexual extravaganzas.

he offers access to the mansion’s most secret corners. his heir cooperates with enthusiasm, even though father and son are not actually talking.

And if this extraordinary upperclass soap opera isn’t enthralling enough, there are lions and hippos outside the window. And Neko, a 53year- old gorilla, so magnificently disdainful that he deserves a seat in the Lords himself.

how could that get boring? Even if the footage was edited at random and Ed Miliband did the voiceover, surely that could never be dull?

somehow, it could. Forty minutes in to All Change At Longleat (BBC1), the show had lost all interest in what it was supposed to be doing and had wandered off, like a bored child on a National Trust tour.

instead of focusing on the stupendously barmy Lord Bath and his harem of elderly wifelets, or on his painfully diffident son Ceawlin and cheerful wife Emma, the film completely f orgot what i t was supposed to be showing us.

First the camera followed a couple of housekeepers around while they politely insisted that no, they didn’t mind cleaning and yes, they were happy to be referred to as servants.

Then it strayed into the village of horningsham, part of the Longleat estate owned by Alexander Thynn and maintained by his son — the 7th Marquess of Bath and Viscount Weymouth respectively.

We were hauled into a horningsham parish meeting, where villagers were sounding off and the estates manager was dutifully writing things down in a notebook.

The last ten minutes were spent dragging round horningsham fete. Even Lord Bath, slumped in a deckchair, looked bored out of his skull.

This was dire stuff. And yet the good material was there, just waiting to be plucked. The documentary started with a look inside Lord Bath’s ‘penthouse’, an annexe at the top of Longleat house where the 83year-old peer retreats and refuses to emerge when his wife is at home.

he showed off his office, an antique desk onto which several binbags of paper had apparently been emptied. ‘This is the urgent section,’ he explained, indicating a heap of documents under a fruit bowl.

Lord Bath has been on the frostiest of terms with his son ever since the boy and his new bride moved back into Longleat and dismantled one of his famous murals.

it’s hard to blame Ceawlin: the wall paintings are done in oils, an inch thick, and they stink — literally and artistically. Many of them are obscene beyond description, too.

But it’s also hard to blame the Marquess for feeling so outraged. Ceawlin and Emma have replaced the murals with shiny gold wallpaper. if once the rooms looked like a Moroccan drugs den, now they seem to be modelled on an indian restaurant in Bromley.

With his taste for the psyche- delic and surreal, Lord Bath would have enjoyed Britain As Seen On ITV (ITV) which felt like nostalgia on LSD.

Of all the weird snippets discovered in the telly archives, nothing was stranger than the sight of a very young Richard Madeley in bow tie and tuxedo, sashaying down a staircase at a nightclub in Leeds to interview Marc Almond of soft Cell about the New Romantic f ad f or l ace and mascara on boys.

Compilations like these are dependent on their researchers. An obsession with the bizarre and a twisted sense of humour are essential, and someone here has those qualities in sackfuls.

We saw a sixties news report about a school for trainee rock ’n’ rollers, run by a trouper from the music halls, and swedish guitar teacher Ulf, who had his own morning show in the seventies.

There were singing milkmen, a Wurlitzer organ in a car showroom, and a disco dancing contest with lotharios in gold lamé.

Mostly culled from local news, TV reports like these always did feature eccentrics and oddities. A few decades on, just like Lord Bath, they look even nuttier.