I have a hazy memory of a 1950s television series on stately homes in which Richard Dimbleby (dubbed ‘Gold-Microphone-in-Waiting’ by Malcolm Muggeridge) would respectfully prompt their Wode- housian owners into trotting out seasoned anecdotes. ‘And this of course is the celebrated Red Drawing-room. Your Grace, I think, ahem, you have a story about that curious portrait over the fireplace?’ ‘Eh? What? Ah yes . . .’
Half a century on, his eldest son David adopts a different approach. We see him turning up in his Land-Rover at eerily empty houses, with no sign of the present proprietor or (more usually) the National Trust manager, and proceed to poke about. Informally attired in bright leisure-shirtings and alarming socks, our energetic guide, whose boyish enthusiasm belies his years (he will enter his 70th year this autumn), is ever ready to clamber on to a roof, jump into a tub, wriggle through a manhole, row on the lake at Stourhead, stand on the footplate of a steam engine, and so forth. Above the fan-vaulted ceiling of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, he thinks ‘how tempting it would be to drop a stink bomb through the tiny gap in the middle of evensong’. Always up for a jape, he is happy to tuck into a medieval banquet, belt out a chorus of ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’, jive in Blackpool and play the Wurlitzer organ at the Granada, Tooting.
It all makes for jolly telly in the magnificently filmed BBC1 series of the same name but also works well in book form, with special photography by Paul Barker. Dimbleby has no pretensions to being an architectural historian and while I can imagine my lamented friend Peter Reid, the country-house buff, snorting, ‘Not those old chestnuts again!’ as we follow the well-worn route from Burghley to Blenheim, it would be churlish not to enjoy such a lively, literate and stimulating tour.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in