Rural rides
James Delingpole
Important stuff first: can the chap with the farm address in Shropshire who very kindly said he’d let me have his hunt coats and boots for a modest sum please get in touch again on Jamesdel@dircon.co.uk? My email has been playing up something rotten — apologies to all those of you who’ve not been getting replies — and my archive has been wiped. God, I hate technology.
Right, now to TV. My theme this week is how I hate not just technology but also pretty much every aspect of the modern world. All I want to do is retire to the country — Wiltshire is current favourite because I’ve lots of friends there and I quite fancy getting my boy into Bishop Wordsworth’s in Salisbury, provided Dave ‘Crossman’ Cameron hasn’t managed to abolish grammar schools by then — and spend my time hunting and writing novels set in the second world war.
I’m clearly not the only person with this impulse either, or the BBC wouldn’t be showing programmes like The Bart & The Bounder (BBC2, Tuesday) in the prime 8 p.m. slot. This was the pilot for what I’m quite sure will turn into a whole series about the true-life adventures of Sir Richard Heygate (Bart) and his boomingvoiced mucker Michael ‘Bounder’ Daunt, as they motor round the country doing agreeable rural things like eating pigeon pie and catching wild salmon.
As with Two Fat Ladies and Clarissa and the Countryman, the premise needs to be taken with a huge pinch of salt. It requires that the Bart and the Bounder continually vouchsafe to one another information about their past and about the country which, being old friends and countrymen, they must know perfectly well already. But they play the game with such gusto that you soon surrender to their charm and enjoy it all for the nonsense it is.
I dare say there were one or two suburban squeals over the scene where Daunt skewered and bent a dead pigeon so that it fitted correctly on to the cunning device a bit like a spinning washing line — which lures live pigeons to be shot. The programme-makers, though, deftly pre-empted any criticism by having Daunt explain just how much damage pigeons do to farmers’ crops and then tear open his victim’s crop to show the quantity of rape a single bird can gobble up.
The programme’s message, in other words, is: ‘You may think these people are brainless, fruity-voiced savages. But don’t you see they’re sensitive souls, really, at one with nature and proud guardians of our rural heritage?’ Nothing wrong with that thesis. It does, after all, have the virtue of being true and, God knows, authentic country tradition needs all the help it can get if it’s not to be swamped by Prescott housing estates, wind farms, Tesco hypermarkets and Blairite bans on anything that smacks of fun.
What bothers me, though, is the arrant hypocrisy of it all. Sure, the BBC’s happy enough to surf the wave now that country toffs fit into the all-important ‘endangered minority’ category and now that licencefee payers are beginning to ask, ‘Isn’t it about time we stopped metropolitan lefties trying to eradicate all those things that make Britain worth living in?’ But which organisation is it that has done so much to create this bien-pensant, anti-hunting, anti-country, anti-liberty, anti-tradition culture in the first place? Why the BB sodding C, of course.
Everyone’s watching The Armstrongs (BBC2, Wednesday) and going, ‘I can’t believe this is for real. No way is this real.’ And of course they’re absolutely right, because it isn’t. Yes, I know that the characters aren’t actors — it really is about the zany, stranger-than-fiction lives of John and Ann, the husband and wife team who run Coventry’s third largest double-glazing firm. But how much of this stuff would go on, do you think, if the cameras weren’t there?
The highlight of this week’s episode was the scene where the couple went to France to try to sell to a large firm of local glaziers some of their DIY conservatories — with John and Ann unable to speak French and apparently unaware that ‘conservatoire’ means ‘music academy’. When his attempts at French didn’t work, John decided that the best way forward was to speak in English but with an Inspector Clouseau accent.
You can well see why the couple were chosen for this comi-doc or docu-com or whatever the term is. They’re lovable and they’re very good at saying really idiotic things (‘The one-eyed man is something in the kingdom of the blind,’ announces John, sagely) in a completely straight-faced way. But I still have difficulties believing that a couple who’ve been in business nearly ten years and are earning enough to afford a newish Jag are yet so hilariously incompetent that they go into a French business meeting without first having sorted out the translation problem. All TV’s a construct, I know. But this one requires more suspension of disbelief than I’m prepared to muster.
The Apprentice is back and it’s not a game show, insists ‘Sir’ Alan Sugar (Simon Hoggart was so right last week: it does need inverted commas), it’s a chance to win a coveted position with one of Britain’s top businessmen. What, work for the irascible, humourless, New Labour-loving beardie behind loser Amstrad and loser Spurs? You’d need to pay me a lot more than six figures to do that.
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