How will they survive with only 72 priceless paintings? And why are trained killers such bad boyfriends? Lose yourself in the absurdly laughable dilemmas of these aristos
I think we are probably supposed to express bafflement that there is still an audience for shows such as Keeping Up With the Aristocrats (ITV), in which we are promised, explicitly and without irony, “exclusive access” to “Britain’s most prominent dynasties”. To bewail the fact that the thought of seeing how the 0.1% live who were in the right place at the right time when William the Conqueror came to town still has us in its thrall. And to ponder whether the continuing reduction of the nation – its democracy, economy, cultural life, morality – to rubble at the hands of the elite (aristocracy-allied even when they’re not actually aristos) will ever curb the appetite for watching them in their natural, heavily pargeted habitats.
But television viewing is a complex business. You can keep up with the aristocrats for an hour in much the same way as you watch Bridgerton or Downton Abbey. Pure escapism – what would it be like to have won life’s lottery and spend your days wandering round a Georgian mansion being a second cousin of Prince Charles (like Lord Ivar Mountbatten) or the 400-year-old, 126-room sprawl of Carlton Towers like Lord Gerald Fitzalan-Howard (brother of the Duke of Norfolk and related to most of the people you read about in Philippa Gregory novels). “I’m always full of ideas,” he says. “Some good. Some just completely rubbish.”
