Plummy Penelope returns to the manor – for an hour of grinding tedium
It's Audrey Fforbes-Hamilton! Fflipping heck! No, wait, it's … come on reality, I know you're in there somewhere … it's … it's Penelope Keith! Yes! The last working Penelope in the west, the BBC's 70s Sitcom Pursuivant of Arms has broken out her best Barbour, dusted off her vowels and pitched up to present The Manor Reborn (BBC1). You know, because she used to be in To the Manor Born. Everything old is new again!
Seamlessly filling the supposed mouldering-pile-'n'-plummy-woman-shaped hole in the viewers' hearts left by the end of Sarah Beeny's Restoration Nightmare, Keith and co-host Paul "Flog It!" Martin (the latter presumably drafted in to blunt the edge of Keith's really quite piercing Penelopeness just a smidge) are on a mission to restore the National Trust's Avery House in Wiltshire, a neglected 500-year-old gallimaufry of a place, its Tudor, Georgian, Victorian rooms bundled together so madly it looks like history had a party in the middle of its grounds and forgot to clear up properly. And they have – as tradition, or possibly by now statute, requires – just six months to do it!
So we are off. Or rather: so we grind through an hour of extreme tedium. It takes 20 minutes to introduce us to the three experts (social historian Anna Whitelaw, the Goring Hotel's interior designer Russell Sage and wildly gesticulating architectural historian Dan Cruikshank), another 20 to tell us what they are going to do (tell us about the social history of the house, design its interior and provide information about its architecture while gesticulating wildly) and to let one of them start doing it, and 20 minutes to have what passes for a flaming row with the National Trust, who on present evidence should ditch the oak leaf emblem and go for something based on a set of pursed lips and flared nostrils atop a jackboot stamping on an interior designer's face for ever. After the idea of moving the bed from against the wall to the middle of the Queen Anne bedroom was vetoed, Sage must have known his faux-marble panelling was a non-starter. Still, he beat on bravely against the currents of disapproval trying to bear him back into the historically accurate past painted only in colours proven by scrape analysis to have been there before.
Eventually the trust conceded the use of decorative precedents gleaned from other houses of the period but – BUT – they would explain to visitors what had been done. I daresay the relief at Mafeking was greater, but not by much.
I don't understand the structure of these programmes. Here we have an hour spent on what should – especially once you've decided to ignore the one interesting angle, the pros and cons of perfect reproduction versus a broader sense of historical preservation – have taken five minutes. And yet, judging by the trailer for next week and the genre's own historical precedents, dozens of fascinating subjects (they're going to handweave bedlinen, throw period pots and just generally get artisanned up the wazoo) will be barely glimpsed. One master craftsman after another will have his life's work and accrued knowledge rendered down to a three-minute segment, minus honking voiceover time for Keith.
Living With the Amish (Channel 4), by contrast, moved along at the kind of clip its eponymous participants would probably regard as quite ungodly. Again, it is the traditional mix of its kind. Six fish (modern British teenagers) are placed out of water (various Amish communities in Ohio) for six weeks to learn lessons, gain insights and make occasional tits of themselves. Charlotte, an 18-year-old musical theatre student, is the series' comic relief. Gazing not-terribly-thoughtfully at a jar of home-pickled salmon from the pantry of her hosts, Jonathan and Marietta, she asks: "Do you ever have takeaways? Chinese? Indian?" But she sets to work with a will, and for this she is forgiven everything by Jonathan, Marietta and the viewer.
Seventeen-year-old James – who is unemployed and doesn't like fruit or vegetables – is set up as the hate figure until, in a manipulative twist that the producers ought to be ashamed of and works like a charm, his history of abandonment and foster care is revealed. In the end, he gets his long hair cut in the Amish style because, as he put it in a speech so sweet and straightforward it had you crying long before the end, "I started to respect Jonathan and thought it would be nice to pay back some of the thank-you for what they've done for us." "I appreciate that," said Jonathan after a long pause. "'Salright, mate," said James, "but don't make me do it again." I laughed as I cried for the rest of the hour. I tell you, when this crap works, it really works.
