Majesty and Mortar: Britain ’s Great
Palaces, review: 'Dan Cruickshank for BBC Trust chairman'
Michael Pilgrim enjoys BBC
Four's Majesty and Mortar, in which showed that he's a World
Heritage Site in his own right
By Michael
Pilgrim / 18 Jun 2014 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/tv-and-radio-reviews/10909934/Majesty-and-Mortar-Britains-Great-Palaces-review-Dan-Cruickshank-for-BBC-Trust-chairman.html
A man’s
character may be judged by his adjectives. Here are a few deployed by Dan
Cruickshank in Majesty and Mortar: Britain ’s Great Palaces (BBC Four).
Mag-nificent. Palatial. Stu-pendous. Heroic. Princely. Phenomenal. Absolutely
wonderful. Extra-ordinary.
But the
effusive adjectives are only half of it. Cruickshank’s entire sentence
construction is an enthusiastic splurge of arty upspeak, eccentric metre and
sotto voce – the latter best demonstrated by his reference to “Henry VIII’s
[whisper] bedchamber”. Sometimes he sounds more like he’s relaying office
gossip than architectural history.
As the
alliterative title suggests, Majesty and Mortar was elitist. No attempt at
social relativism here. Cruickshank was not suggesting that an abandoned public
lavatory in Ramsgate is on a cultural par with Blenheim. Nor that a south London greyhound stadium was up there with Stonehenge . This was all about big, expensive pads built
by people with shedloads of dosh, their own armies and no electoral mandate.
In the
first part, our Dan, in signature brown-waxed raincoat, glided through the Tower of London , St James’s Palace and Hampton Court . It
was, in truth, much like all Cruickshank films. But a second bottle of Krug is
just as good as the first, so no harm in that.
Cruickshank
is brilliant at giving meaning to detail. There was much exposition on oak
hammer beams – with two arches for extra structural integrity, if you must
know. Then there was the open hearth in the middle of Henry VIII’s great hall
at Hampton . It
might seem superfluous, given that the palace has modern fireplaces and
chimneys, but was symbolic of ancient English values and Arthurian mysticism.
Smoke and mirrors for Tudor propaganda.
Henry loved
his palaces. In fact, he covered most of what is now central London in them, before hitting the
stockbroker belt. His biggest construction was the wonderfully named and long
gone Nonsuch in Surrey , so called because
there was no other such. The sprawling edifice enjoyed one of the earliest
examples of cisterns and piped water in England . With all those wives, you
need bathrooms.
Cruickshank
is a World Heritage Site in his own right. In fact, he and Jonathan Meades are
about the only people on telly who sound like they know more about their
subject than the autocue.
So forget
Lord Coe and any number of cultural apparatchiks. Cruickshank for BBC Trust
chairman.
Majesty and Mortar: Britain 's Great
Palaces, TV review: Dan Cruickshank scores again with an engrossing alternative
to the World Cup
WILL DEAN Thursday 26 June 2014 / http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/majesty-and-mortar-britains-great-palaces-tv-review-dan-cruickshank-scores-again-with-an-engrossing-alternative-to-the-world-cup-9563470.html
The problem with the World Cup – besides
Fifa, the impact on the Brazilian economy, and England's quadrennial
pants-downing – is that its domination of the TV schedules is so absolute that
there's sometimes not a tremendous amount else for your common-or-garden TV
hack to mull over. Even the Radio Times – whose daily picks denote a rigorous
thumbing through the schedules worthy of a bloke in the pub with a creased copy
of TV Quick and a pink highlighter – selected a 9am repeat of Frasier as one of
its Wednesday highlights. Admittedly it's a great episode, the one where
Frasier thinks he has a stalker – but it doesn't bode well for a classic
night's viewing. Not when Honduras
vs Switzerland
is on elsewhere.
Thanks goodness, then, for Dan Cruickshank.
Whereas Honduran jugador Carlo Costly is the one attracting the big, big
ratings on BBC1, Cruickshank, the Roy Race of architectural history, is
providing the factual rabonas in Majesty and Mortar: Britain 's Great Palaces over on
BBC4. Which, presuming they got on the first flight out of Belo Horizonte,
England's players will have got home in time to watch.
Now, if only there were some way to connect
the hubris and vanity of Charles I and his unyielding belief in his own godly,
unchallenged, deserved genius and success and English football... I'll leave
that to Hugh McIlvanney, but in the mean time, Cruickshank learned me some
mid-millennial art history.
After last week's opening episode of this
wildly interesting series, Cruickshank alighted at the end of the Tudor period
with Elizabeth I's death and the beginning of the reign of James I and then his
son Charles I.
As Cruickshank entered Inigo Jones's
Banqueting House – built for James – on Whitehall ,
he was awed. This was, he purred, a "revolution in stone". And, as it
rose over London ,
its people marvelled at a structure "alien in design, towering above the
older brick and timber structures as if from another world". Jones's
classicism was a giant piece of stone public relations, expressing, Cruickshank
reckoned, "the unity, the harmony, the authority of the monarchy."
Now, they say hindsight is 20/20, but you can guess where this kind of divine
hubris might lead.
So when James carked it in 1625 and his son
Charles took over, he employed his pal Rubens to paint a triptych of images on
the ceiling of Banqueting House depicting James I as a wondrous godly figure,
just like himself. And no meddling Parliament was going to get in his way when
it came to going further and building a giant new Whitehall Palace .
Alas. ..
Cruikshank's description of Charles having
his head lumped off was brilliant. Standing on the spot where it happened, he
told the tale with the malice of a man spooking his grandkids with a
particularly gory ghost story. We even got a macabre chopping effect when we
got to the, er, crunch.
As you'd hope, Cruickshank's monologue was
stuffed with things you (well, I, at least) didn't know: Hampton Court is
actually a cut'n'shunt of a Tudor building and a Stewart one (obvious, really);
Christopher Wren proposed a grid system for London after the Great Fire but it
was overtaken by the city's rapid rebuilding in its old topography; and William
III had a giant bed at Hampton Court he didn't even sleep in.
Cruickshank is the best of hosts for this
kind of thing. His expertise, combined with a gift for delivering historical
tittle-tattle, makes him a whisperingly ebullient tour guide. And he doesn't
even bite people. Tune in next week.
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