A new BBC1 documentary series promises a real-life “upstairs, downstairs” portrait of Longleat, one of Britain’s most extraordinary aristocratic estates.
The three-part series, All Change at Longleat, will go behind the scenes of the Wiltshire stately home as its flamboyant owner, the Marquess of Bath, hands over to his eldest son and his new wife, Emma, who will be Britain’s first black marchioness.
The couple take on a stately home and safari park with a staff of hundreds. They married in 2013, amid reports of a family feud over the future of erotic paintings at Longleat.
It was one of a number of documentaries announced by BBC1 controller Charlotte Moore at the Sheffield international documentary festival on Tuesday.
Acclaimed filmmaker Roger Graef will return to the subject of one of his earliest documentaries for BBC1 in Brett: A Life with No Arms, about a man born with no arms because of thalidomide.
Half a century after he featured in Graef’s 1964 documentary, One of Them is Brett, Graef catches up with Brett Nielsen in Australia. He is now a sports car enthusiast, record producer, father of two children and has three ex-wives.
The original documentary, made when Nielsen was four years old, was produced for the Society for the Aid of Thalidomide Children. “It doesn’t matter what happens to you in your life, it matters how you deal with it,” Nielsen tells Graef.
Other new documentaries include Cancer, a three-part observational series described as an “intimate look at what it means to live with cancer today”, and Black Cab White Cab, the story of two Burnely taxi cab companies, white and Asian, told through the experiences of the drivers and their customers.
