From time to time I fantasize about being appointed head of Radio 4. Needless to say, my first thoughts revolve around all the annoying programs I would take off the air.
These include You And Yours, with its daily stream of embittered listeners calling for urgent legislation to save them from stumbling over their own shoelaces, and most programs considered comedy, which can only be distinguished from misery by inclusion of increasingly arduous audience laughter.
But what would I put in their place? My best suggestion is Rock Gardeners’ Question Time. This will provide an opportunity for the ever-growing population of middle-aged and elderly rock stars to ask experts for tips on how to improve their massive estates.
Sting fills us in on how he and his wife Trudie applied to the council for planning permission to create a new lake. There were, he adds helpfully, ‘no material objections, and the court granted permission for a lake of one and a half acres to be excavated during the summer of 1995’.
No rock star’s memoir is complete these days without a chapter on digging a lake or creating a walled garden at their luxury home.
In Sting’s Broken Music, the singer devotes a chapter to his acquisition of a ‘large and rather eccentric’ Wiltshire country house ‘built in the reign of James II’.
Sting fills us in on how he and his wife Trudie applied to the council for planning permission to create a new lake. There were, he adds helpfully, ‘no material objections, and the court granted permission for a lake of one and a half acres to be excavated during the summer of 1995.
Secateurs ‘n’ Diggers ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll: Carole King devotes nearly 20 pages of her 2012 memoir A Natural Woman to mapping a protracted border dispute with a neighboring Idaho estate. Madonna also had cross-border problems when she tried in 2004 to close a footpath that runs through her estate on the Wiltshire / Dorset border.
In his most recent autobiography, Cliff Richard recounted the planting of a vineyard on his Portuguese estate – ‘a long, complex process’. Similarly, Elton John filled in the reader over the two years he spent renovating his ‘gigantic, 30-acre Georgian house in Old Windsor’.
The term ‘Rock Garden’ has taken on a new meaning. All in all, there is clearly a screaming need for a Rock Gardeners Question Time. For the first time in the series, I plan to show two rock stars whose relationship as closest neighbors was awkward at best and fragile at worst. I am referring, of course, to the dispute between Robbie Williams (48) and Jimmy Page (78) that has been raging for almost ten years since Robbie Williams first moved next door in 2013.
A full version of the Page / Williams dispute has yet to be written. Mapping his endless ups and downs would by this time require at least three volumes from an avid historian like Mary Beard or Simon Heffer.
In short: shortly after Robbie Williams bought his 46-room mansion in London’s Holland Park, he decided it was a bit on the small side, and submitted plans to build a 3,600 sq. Ft. Basement, including ‘ an indoor pool, a car park, a recording studio and a sports complex.
In his most recent autobiography, Cliff Richard recounted the planting of a vineyard on his Portuguese estate – ‘a long, complex process’. Similarly, Elton John filled in the reader over the two years he spent renovating his ‘gigantic imitation Georgian house in Old Windsor with 30 acres’
His elderly neighbor Jimmy Page was, in the words of his biographer, ‘terrified’. Fearing that Williams would destabilize the foundations of his own, much larger, Grade I-listed home, he began to frustrate his plans. As in the 100 Years War, which this one began to look like, one thing led to another.
In 2019, Williams finally got permission for its underground expansion, but then Page managed to get a concession that meant Williams’ builders could only use hand tools for the excavation, making it virtually impossible.
At this point there was talk of Williams hoisting the white flag and moving to Switzerland, but he clearly now had second thoughts as he is back on the warpath.
In April, the council refused him permission to cut down an 80-foot-tall Robinia tree on its site.
In a rather feeble attempt to argue his case, Williams pointed out that the tree ‘touches the adjoining street lamp’ just outside his property.
But the council ruled with wry wisdom that ‘leaves growing against street furniture do not necessitate the removal of a tree’.
The same council last week gave Jimmy Page permission to ‘shrink and shape’ a large laurel tree on his own site.
That means Jimmy Page will be asking for my first issue of Rock Gardeners’ Question Time on how to shrink and shape with a smug grin on his face, while Bob Flowerdew and Bunny Guinness will have to be extra nice to an embittered Robbie Williams .