Arthur Fulford, heir to the Great Fulford estate, lays his cards on the table: “If anyone turns around and tries to judge me for being in this amazing position, then frankly they can fuck off.”
As British Class History For Beginners – or, as it’s sometimes known, Downton Abbey – has been carefully explaining over four years, things aren’t what they used to be for aristos. Where once serfs bowed, scraped, and toiled away in the turnip field for the honour of living under the rule of someone with a coat of arms, the few landed gentry that remain tethered to their enormous draughty piles in modern Britain have to think on their feet. Francis Fulford, current custodian of the Fulford estate, toff, advert for genetic diversity and previous star of How Clean Is Your House, The Fucking Fulfords, Country House Rescue and Why Britain’s Fucked takes a philosophical view of the situation. “We peaked in about 1530 and it’s been a slow decline ever since,” he says, which is presumably why he’s signed his children, Matilda, Edmund, Humphrey and Arthur up for Life Is Toff (Tue, 10pm, BBC3), a show that looks at the four siblings as they prepare to leave school, finish university, join the army and generally be dispatched into the wider world.
At what feels like the tail-end of an 800-year history, the Fulford estate now relies on house tours and photoshoot bookings to keep its crumbling walls standing. “Some day someone will be a silly bugger but I don’t think it will be Arthur,” says Pater Fulford from a turret. Cut to Arthur failing dismally to put his shoes on the right feet and still, for what it’s worth, coming across as superior.
Opinion on the super-posh will always swing from those who rue the day Britain wasted its chance to revolt, to those who take the lazy belligerence of families who, in Arthur’s words have “been here since before the fucking monarchy”, as an amusing and lovable quirk. Whether the latter group’s warmth is on some kind of ancient subservience tip, like the genetic memory of peasant Stockholm Syndrome, I couldn’t possibly say, but the Fulfords give the strong impression that being thought of as amusing and lovable is beneath their dignity. How else can you explain Arthur’s unique approach to guiding a tour? Sauntering through his ancestral home with some hastily scrawled notes, he counts down the minutes till he can ditch the plebs and escape for a crafty fag, what what. All the while, ladies with blue rinses purse their lips into the back of their skulls.
The charitable response to such behaviour would be to err towards disdain, but as the programme goes on it becomes clear that it’s a cheap shot to sneer at a family who had as much choice in being born on to the Great Fulford estate as I did being born on to Loughborough housing estate. Laziness, entitlement and the capacity to be a right little idiot transcends class and rank as BBC3, tirelessly dedicated to documenting this phenomena, has amply proven. In the future, archaeologists will pull the hard drive containing BBC3’s programming history from some nuclear swamp and swear they’ve pinpointed the exact moment our civilisation turned on its prissy heel and headed to destruction. Little will they realise they’ve merely got the archive for Snog Marry Avoid?.
Back on the Fulford estate, and a car-boot sale the younger siblings have cobbled together to conjure a few extra quid isn’t going well. One van – which represents a third of the vehicles that have turned up – is stuck in a ditch, and a professional car-booter isn’t happy. “She’s come all the way from Bridport” gulps Edmund before hiding behind some antiques. Matilda, meanwhile, has been struck down with such a malaise that she played it safe and called an ambulance. Don’t worry, the attending paramedic gives her a clean bill of health, clearly amused at the whole thing. Bless them. Whose mind could swing to thoughts of the guillotine with a bunch as incapable as this?
