A royal grand design
Rating *****
Avenue 5
Rating: ***
Damn Nora, said the Prince of Wales. Really, royal or not, it was the only correct response.
Filmed before he ascended to the throne, Charles oversaw renovations at Dumfries House in the Scottish Lowlands, as head of a £45 million consortium he’d assembled to save the stately home and its unique collection of Chippendale furniture for the nation.
As his ambitions for the project grew on A Royal Grand Design (ITV), the future king envisioned a scientific and technical center on the 2000 hectare site, an adventure complex, a walled garden… from the tower, with a magnificent view.
Charles, a man without a suburban bone in his body, was not about to see swamp gutters on his watchtower. He wanted gargoyles.
Kevin McCloud (pictured) presents A Royal Grand Design on ITV
At a yard meeting amid heaps of brick and mud, his designer produced an example of a gargoyle – on loan, he said, from the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, of neighboring Drumlanrig Castle.
The spout, carved of stone and ancient, had been removed from the castle wall to save HRH the trouble of climbing a ladder to see it. Even among an aristocracy known for its noblesse oblige, this was clearly more obliging than usual.
And then the royal B-word was uttered, in a stunned murmur.
Filmed over a decade, this stunning documentary was packed with surprises that could make even the most straightforward Dowager Duchess spit out her pink gin in a jet of four-letter words.
For the average Ikea shopper like me, the biggest shock was the price of 18th century furniture. A Chippendale bookcase was valued at £4 million by auction house Christie’s before a private buyer made an offer of £12 million.
In the end none of it sold, but Charles revealed just how close the entire collection was to becoming dispersed. The house’s former owner, racing driver Johnny Dumfries, 7th Marquess of Bute, had it all sent away in moving vans, before changing his mind and accepting the £45 million royal offer.
The lorries were stopped at 1:00 am on the M6 in Cumbria and turned around. Whether Charles used the police force or the Household Cavalry for this we’re not told, but it’s useful to have either one at your disposal in business negotiations.
Why a Chippendale is so valuable may seem hard to understand, until cameras sneak into the bedroom of the late Marquess. Even a Philistine could see that the four-poster bed was an object of exquisite art.
Wooden ivy swirled along the fluted bedposts to a silk canopy that portrayed an enchanting night sky. One of the conservation experts slid onto the covers, tilted her head back and held out an arm. “Where’s the count?” she sighed, lost in a moment of romance.
The ten years spent restoring Dumfries House will hardly be long enough to bring home hapless Captain Hugh Laurie and his passengers on an interplanetary cruise ship in Avenue 5 (Sky Comedy).
This sitcom – created by Armando Iannucci, who wrote The Thick Of It – is literally going nowhere: The ship has lost orientation and won’t return to Earth for the next ten years.
When the series returned for a second run, the captain almost sent into the sun, but didn’t.
With no plot other than a constant catalog of panic, the script tries to fool us by occasionally killing off characters and introducing others. Jonathan Aris, from Sherlock, has now joined the cast.
Otherwise, Avenue 5 relies on hit-and-miss one-liners. The best came when the crew struggled with food shortages and the impending stellar fireball. “Burn or starve,” the chief engineer grumbled, “it’s nice to have options.”