TV review: Grand designs (original) (raw)

The last in Channel 4's three programmes about our class system was always going to be the most amusing. The working classes are, lets be honest, a bit dour to be so much fun. The middle classes are just deeply boring. But the top end is a hoot, which is why The British Upper Class (Channel 4, Sunday) was so watchable.

Our guide this time is newspaper journalist James Delingpole, whose teeth are better suited to newspaper journalism than to television, but who otherwise seems like a thoroughly genial sort of chap. Except that he has that annoying habit of saying, "when I was at Oxford in the 1980s..." It's only Oxbridge people who do that, to everyone else it's just uni. At least he didn't say "up at Oxford", so I don't have to firebomb his house.

Anyway, it was while he was at uni that James became fascinated by the aristocracy, mainly because he wanted to be part of it. He admired their spunk, he says, their backbone, and the splendour in their veins. Not that he's exactly working class - I'd put him at the toffier end of middle class. But the Oxford toffs wouldn't let James in. So now Channel 4 are acting as Jim'll fix it (for Jim!) by letting him run loose among them for a few days.

It doesn't start well. At the historian Andrew Roberts' classy Mayfair soiree, no one will speak to James and his camera. He's like Moses in a sea of toffs, the waters part wherever he goes, as earls and viscounts and duchesses scuttle off sideways, terrified of explaining themselves to the camera and the outside world.

But James has better luck out of town. With the Cotswold Hunt, he can't hide his admiration for the haughty folk on horses in all their finery, though he almost blows it when the fox he spots turns out to be a hare. In St Moritz he dives headfirst down icy death slides with whooping tweeded twits. The Cresta Run it's called. And then he goes Ferrari-ing with Lord Brocket of Reality Television.

There's not much thought or analysis in this one, certainly not as much as in Tristram Hunt's middle-class show last week. This is just James having fun playing at being posh with a bunch of toffs. But because toffs are so amusing, and the things they get up to so extraordinary, it's fun for us to watch as well.

Finally, James ends up in heaven - allowed to ride with the Cotswold Hunt (it's a shame it isn't the Berkshire Hunt, that may have been more appropriate). With a red coat on, too, a privilege normally reserved for the masters of the hounds. Surely now James has arrived. It's totally thrilling for him: "God, that was exciting, the best day of my life," he pants, before remembering another exciting day. "Um, apart from maybe the birth of my kid."

And it's nice to see him so happy in toffdom, even if I'm not buying some of his arguments about hunting - that the countryside only looks the way it does because of it, that dry-stone walls and hedges were only built so horses could jump over them. I would say farming plays some part in that. Whatever you think about conservation and all that, hunting is really about getting dogs to tear apart a wild animal. Maybe I will have to firebomb James's house - renamed Delingpole Hall at the end of the show - after all.

There's more violence in LA cop drama The Shield (Five, Saturday), although this time dogs and people are the victims. A pooch is shot in the head by a rookie cop in the opening sequence of this one, and it's not long before a whole family - of people this time - is found dead in the bathroom, murdered by drowning, one after the other.

The Shield is gritty as hell. As well as all that violence, there's gang warfare, drugs, guns, wads of cash, respect, corruption, racial tension, sexual tension, every other kind of tension. And fabulous dialogue. And now it also has Glenn Close, the new captain, icy as ice. What more could you want?

They do cop shows so much better over there. Maybe it's because our police are just too tame for TV drama. There's been no glamour since the Sweeney. Look at the evidence: America gives the world CSI, The Wire (my favourite), and The Shield. And what can we offer? The Bill.