The British Upper Class (2005)

 Blue blood on the carpet

Charlie Brooker

Sat 23 Jul 2005 00.22 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2005/jul/23/screenburn.features16

 

Hard scientific fact: unless you're a member of the gentry yourself, it's neurologically impossible to feel in the slightest bit sorry for posh people under any circumstances whatsoever. It's true. A team of researchers proved it in a laboratory. They took a random bunch of proles, wired them to some electro-magnificent brainscanner widgets, and showed them footage of top-hatted aristocrats falling from buildings, tumbling into threshing machines, and inadvertently poisoning their own children. No one exhibited the faintest glimmer of pity for any of them. I think it's something to do with the accents.

 

Actually there is one exception to the no-pity-for-toffs rule, and that's journalist James Delingpole, who pities them so much he's made a documentary called The British Upper Class (Sun, 8pm, C4) - a passionate defence of roaring snobs and everything they bally well stand for. Delingpole himself is middle class and sincerely wishes he wasn't. "I'm no toff, and I never will be," he confesses. "But I've always been curious about the upper class - it all started when I was at Oxford back in the 80s."

 

Having established his credentials, James (who went to Oxford) sets out on "a journey" to discover just what it is about the gentry that gives him such a broom-handle. First port of call is a posh party thrown by historian Andrew Roberts, who reckons the upper classes are "impossibly romantic and splendid". Rubbing shoulders with earls, viscounts, dames and princes, James (formerly of Oxford University) seems happy as a pig in shit. But alas! Not one of the toffs he approaches wants to take part in his documentary. Not even Earl Spencer. Not even when James walks right up to him and bellows, "I'm James Delingpole, I reviewed your book about Blenheim," by way of introduction.

 

The poshos, James reckons, are "terrified of being stitched up", although I suspect their reticence has more to do with James himself, who looks like a cross between Mick Jones and Mr Logic, and is cursed with a floppy bottom lip which dangles so perilously low it's a wonder he doesn't trip over it. They're probably just freaked out.

 

Never mind. James leaves the party and sets about persuading us the upper classes are inherently admirable because they're jolly keen on rough-and-ready games. To prove it he visits St Moritz and has a crack at the Cresta Run (an extreme tobogganing event favoured by blue bloods). It's dangerous and thrilling, sure - but a taste for perilous activities is hardly limited to the aristocracy. You don't need a coat of arms to go skateboarding, just a benevolent attitude toward shattering your hip on a concrete step. Idiotic thrill-seekers exist in all classes. As do tossers called James.

 

Next, James mourns the passing of two other favourite posho sports - fox-hunting ("a magnificent sight!") and hare-coursing. The latter, he reckons, is under attack because it's "a ritual that flies in the face of sanitised bourgeois morality... it's too messy, too visceral - too real."

 

"Nowadays it's the middle classes who are running the show. For many of them, traditions are all very well, so long as they're cleaned up, packaged, and sold back to us as products in the National Trust gift shop. But [hare-coursing] isn't 'chocolate box' heritage, it's the real thing - and the chattering classes simply can't hack it."

 

Yeah, James - you tell 'em! Screw the nanny state! Let's see that rabbit blood fly! Let's get naked and dance around in a big fat spray of it! And since you're keen to preserve noble English customs that celebrate "the cycle of life and death", let's reintroduce some others - such as the tradition of sticking criminals' heads on poles above the entrance to London Bridge, where they can be pecked at by crows until they go a bit mushy and topple off and burst on the cobblestones below! Like to see what those Islington pussies make of that! Ah well. At least Delingpole succeeds in improving the image of the upper classes. Whenever he opens his mouth to defend them, they magically become 50 times less irritating. Than him.