Television
Hooked on heritage
James Delingpole
Never mind the huntin', shooting' and pension-payin' classes, New Labour's real victims are the nation's weaker alternative comics. For 18 years, they've earned a cosy living treating audiences to hilarious one- liners like 'Margaret Thatcher!!!' or `**** Michael Howard!' But the joke doesn't work quite so well when your satirical tar- gets have been reduced to a minority so small that even rabid socialists are starting to feel sorry for them.
I noticed this the other day in the crowd- ed cabaret tent at Glastonbury. It was crowded because it was one of the few places dry enough to sit down — not, as you'll soon see, because of the quality of the stand up. First on was a peculiarly nasty, stupid compere. He made a David Mellor joke. No one laughed because they'd for- gotten who David Mellor was. Then he cracked the 'Did you see Portillo's face?' joke. Again no one laughed because it's been the staple of every second-rate comic's routine since the election. Eons later, the next act appeared with a guitar. 'This is a song about Michael Portillo,' he announced. And launched into a stream of invective so bilious (e.g. 'I'd like to * * * * all over his death certificate') that even Pol Pot might have blanched. To the audience's eternal credit, they walked out in droves.
All completely irrelevant to this week's viewing, of course, apart from the fact that sweet, cruelly maligned Mike could be seen presenting a deliciously poignant featurette on One Foot in the Past (BBC 2, Wednes- day). It concerned Portillo's infatuation with Wotton House, the smallish but perfectly formed Buckinghamshire stately home remodelled in 1820 by Sir John Soane.
On first sight, it looked fairly ordinary. But that, as Portillo persuasively observed, is part of its appeal. Though it was built for a duke, its scale is still just modest enough to provide an ideal late-20th-century home. Its interiors — spacious arches and a cun- ning back-staircase which apparently sus- pends from thin air — are breathtaking. Terrifying to think that it was very nearly destroyed in the Fifties. That it survived is down to its elderly owner Mrs Brunner, who snapped it up on the day demolition was due to begin and restored it to its pre- sent glories. Call me a sentimental fool, but, after she'd told her story, I wanted to give the old dear a big hug.
I also liked the juicy little item about Arsenal Football Club. Its 1930s stadium, we saw, is a magnificent piece of art deco. Unfortunately, the club's owners now want to replace it with something bigger. The heritage lobby is aghast and wants it listed. If it is, then the club is threatening to leave. Sports minister Tony Banks faces a horri- ble dilemma: will he go down in history as the man who drove Arsenal out of High- bury? Or the man whose negligence led to the destruction of a masterpiece of sporting architecture? Ha ha ha. Bet he thought that all the job entailed was a few uplifting speeches and free tickets to Wembley.
Guess it's another sign of impending middle age that I can summon up such enthusiasm for a series devoted to heritage. Then again, One Foot in the Past must have quite a trendy following, or The Fast Show wouldn't have bothered doing all those send-ups of its fogeyish co-presenter Dan Cruickshank, would it?
Whatever, I've now got the heritage bug so bad that I've actually become a family member of the National Trust. I mention this mainly because I need your advice, dear readers (or yours, Dear Mary). I love spending weekends hanging out at posh crumbly NT-owned houses and, obviously, I want to preserve olde England for poster- ity. On the other hand, I'm mighty pissed off with the NT's craven decision to cave into the anti-stag-hunting lobby and thus help destroy part of the very tradition it's supposed to hold dear. How can I punish those responsible for this idiocy without resigning my membership?
And while we're on the subject of pun- ishment ... Architects: don'tcha hate 'em? Actually, I didn't until the first episode of How Buildings Learn (BBC 2, Thursday). But, to judge by the evidence presented by Californian iconoclast Stewart Brand, hanging's too good for them. No, they deserve something altogether nastier. Like being forced to live and work in the unin- habitable monstrosities they've designed for the greater glorification of their egos.
As Brand explained, many big-name architects simply don't give a fig for their buildings' end-users. All they care about is pose value. That's why the designers of Paris's Bibliotheque Nationale, for exam- ple, managed to overlook the elementary point that, if you make your library build- ing out of glass, all the valuable books inside are going to be fried in the sun.
Brand's argument got a bit strange and Californian, though, when he suggested that, rather than build finished products, architects should try to design structures which can be easily modified by successive generations. A cute, eco-friendly theory, no doubt. But Brand never successfully explained how it would work in practice. Does he want us to follow the example of the Greeks, who always seem to build their houses without roofs? Maybe we'll learn in the next episode — if any of us can be bothered to continue watching a series with such a magisterially dull title.
Previous page
