A jolly fun lesson in how to preserve the ancestral pile
It is terribly difficult for the plebs among us to know what is common. The interior designer Nicky Haslam has drawn up a list and printed it on a tea towel. Entries include vodka tonic, polo, cufflinks, James Bond and being ill. He sells these for £18 via his website, or £24 for a signed version. Is selling signed tea towels not a bit common? You see how confusing this is.
Anyway, allowing a fly-on-the-wall film crew to follow you around can’t be common, even if it’s for ITV, because some genuine aristocrats are doing it. The Mountbattens, the Fitzalanhowards, the Sitwells and Princess Olga Romanoff are the stars of Keeping Up with the Aristocrats, a jolly series offering a window into the lives of the upper classes.
The series is warm-hearted and great fun, fruitily narrated by Simon Callow. All of the participants have entered into it with gusto. We can ogle at the gorgeousness of the houses but the general theme is that they are ruinously expensive to maintain, while their owners are asset-rich but cash poor. The show is an appeal for sympathy. So we follow the Fitzalanhowards as they flog wine at a farmers ‘market, and Princess Olga (great-niece of Tsar Nicholas II) as she conducts tours of her somewhat dilapidated home. Actually, this show answered the tea towel question, because she is also selling them. They bear her personal motto: “B8gger, $h!t, F*ck”. I suspect the Princess will be this show’s break-out star. A job as This Morning’s etiquette expert and a spot on I’m a Celebrity surely beckon.
“I’m not your average princess. At home you will find me shovelling s---, sadly, not sitting down eating caviar,” she said. She inspected a roof beam with horror: “I’ve just seen a huge f--- off hole!” Princess Olga is also on the look-out for a man, so if you fit the bill – a trained killer and Steve Mcqueen lookalike, preferably good with horses – then do apply.
The houses may be Downton-esque, but the Sitwells’ butler wears shorts and Lord Ivar cleans his own windows. Most of them seem pretty down-toearth, which could be a result of ordinary folk marrying into this world: Emma Fitzalan-howard is the daughter of a GP, and Lord Ivar’s husband, James Coyle, is an airline cabin crew director. Lord Ivar and James are the very model of a modern blended family, playing host to Ivar’s ex-wife and three children. All in all, a good bit of PR for the posh.
Atelevision personality with no farming experience buys a farm and attempts to run it, with often comical results. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It’s impossible to describe Kelvin’s Big Farming Adventure (BBC One) as anything other than a shameless rip-off of Clarkson’s Farm. “This is the side you don’t see all too often, isn’t it?” said Kelvin Fletcher, as he wrestled with a sheep. Well, only if you don’t have an Amazon subscription enabling you to watch the infinitely superior Jeremy Clarkson series.
Fletcher, the former Emmerdale
actor and 2019 Strictly Come Dancing
winner, is a lifelong townie. Why has he bought 120 acres on the edge of the Peak District? A cynic might say it’s because these situations are ripe for fly-on-the-wall television shows.
We saw Fletcher buying a shiny new tractor and encountering sheep for the first time. Where Clarkson has local Kaleb Cooper as his sidekick, Fletcher has neighbour Jilly to dispense no-nonsense advice. At one point she declared him “a blinkin’ wuss”.
Certainly, he has no clue what he’s doing. The voiceover (provided by Maxine Peake, whose agent is earning their commission this month) informs us that Fletcher has only a week to learn about livestock, inserting an obligatory note of jeopardy.
Fletcher tells us that it’s imperative for the farm to be commercially viable – “hopefully it’ll be earning some money in a year” – but we’ve learned from Clarkson’s Farm just how difficult that is. How much did his shiny John Deere tractor cost? We weren’t told.
There was the merest hint of tension when Fletcher’s wife, Liz, said he was someone who can’t deal with things going wrong, and has no Plan B. She appears to be shouldering none of the responsibility and just hovers about commentating on his efforts.
“Do you want this lifestyle?” Liz asked. “Yeah,” he said, half-heartedly, like a man who had lost a pound and found a penny. You had to feel a bit sorry for him, really, as he scraped maggots from a sheep with footrot – it’s a long way from the Strictly ballroom.
Keeping Up with the Aristocrats ★★★★
Kelvin’s Big Farming Adventure ★★