All Change for Jamie as he heads for TV stardom
IF YOU thought the BBC documentary All Change At Longleat made for lacklustre television, brace yourselves for a much racier sequel.
Last month’s three-part series featured the colourful Lord Bath – famous for his harem of ‘wifelets’ – handing over the reins of his estate in Wiltshire to his far more sensible son Ceawlin, and critics were quick to dismiss it as boring.
But now I can reveal that All Change At Blenheim – starring former drug addict and ex-convict Jamie Blandford, who is now the 12th Duke of Marlborough – could be coming to our screens.
‘There is a generation that feels it has lived through all of Jamie’s travails, through all the headlines about his drug-taking and run-ins with the police during his riotous youth,’ says director Mike Warner, who discovered intrepid adventurer Bear Grylls and who previously persuaded Princess Diana’s former lover James Hewitt to become the subject of a fly-onthe-wall documentary.
‘After his father’s death last year, it is a time of reckoning. Jamie’s life is now one of responsibility and duty and, from what I hear, he is proving more than up to the job. There is a great human story to be told.’
Having taken over the running of the cash-guzzling Blenheim estate in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, Jamie, 59, clearly appreciates that becoming the focus of a TV series would help bring in extra visitors.
Although All Change At Blenheim cannot promise the drama behind Longleat’s zoo, Jamie insists his show would be vastly more entertaining, not least because his past is almost as colourful as Lord Bath’s. ‘I’m fond of Ceawlin, but he makes a point of being studiously normal and that doesn’t make for great television,’ Jamie told me at the Philip Mould and Co party in Pall Mall last week.
‘Whatever people say about me, I’ve never been afraid of speaking my mind. And Blenheim would make a great backdrop. I am interested.’
The 187-room palace was built in the early 18th Century and Winston Churchill was born there in 1874.