In with the Old Dominic Sandbrook: Let Us Entertain You

MUSIC: Jumpin' Jack Flash by The Rolling Stones

This programme contains some strong language.

One Sunday evening in 1967,

a minivan raced towards a country house.

# I was born in a crossfire hurricane... #

The men packed into the van were on their way to a party.

Their destination, Redlands -

home of the Rolling Stones' lead guitarist Keith Richards.

There was only one problem though, they weren't on the guest list.

# Jumpin' Jack Flash It's a gas, gas, gas... #

Richards had spent the weekend at his country retreat

with Mick Jagger and friends.

They'd been walking in the woods, listening to music,

and dropping acid.

In fact, they'd been having so much fun they didn't hear

the tyres screeching outside or the hammering on the door.

TYRES SCREECH

When Keith finally opened up, he got the shock of his life,

for there on the doorstep he saw a group of dwarves all wearing

identical blue outfits and tall shiny hats.

But then Keith was a bit confused and more than a little stoned,

because his unexpected visitors weren't dwarves at all,

they were the West Sussex Police Force.

It was to Redlands, the expensive Tudor-style house at the end

of this drive, that a 15-strong squad of policemen arrived

armed with a search warrant issued under the Dangerous Drugs Act.

You know what really rankled with the policemen who came roaring

down here that evening in 1967, it wasn't the drugs, it was the house.

A thatched Elizabethan farm house with its own gardener,

its own chauffeur and even its own moat.

The very last place that you would expect to find a 23-year-old

tearaway from suburban Dartford.

The Redlands drugs bust showed how the self-made stars of the '60s

were changing from Street Fighting Men to Lords of the Manor.

Ever since the '60s, we've been told that our pop culture, our music and

films, books and TV has been a great levelling force, undermining

the establishment and tearing down the barriers of birth and breeding.

But I'm not so sure.

There has been no greater inspiration for Britain's

popular culture than the icons of the old order.

From country houses and boarding schools, to royal sagas

and establishment heroes.

And the British elite has proved remarkably good at absorbing

and deflecting the irreverent energy of our modern culture.

I think that far from overthrowing the old elite,

our popular culture has often romanticised it and reinforced it.

So this is the story of British culture that you don't often hear.

It's the story of how outsiders became insiders

and of the triumph of the old order.

Imagine being an estate agent in the 1960s.

I quite fancy this one, Jacobean country house in East Sussex.

20 rooms, 35 acres, 18 fireplaces and four lakes.

Sold to Roger Daltry.

Or this one. Neogothic mansion in Henley-on-Thames,

it comes with a 120 rooms, a subterranean cave network

and a 20,000 tonne replica of the Matterhorn mountain.

Sold to George Harrison.

Or this one, a 15th-century manor in Suffolk. It comes with its own title,

Lord of the Manor of Gedding and Thornwood.

Sold! Arise Lord of the Manor, Bill Wyman.

Rock and roll stars weren't supposed to live like country gents.

They were meant to be the scourge of the establishment.

Exploding on to the scene armed only with their ability,

these were the standard bearers of a new generation

who remade the world of the British imagination.

This was a new aristocracy - the talent class.

We've had nothing really, except our own talent.

I think we can say Twiggy is the mini queen of

the new social aristocracy.

They might claim to be changing the world.

But they were actually treading a well-worn path.

And following in the footsteps of their predecessors,

the self-made men of the Industrial Revolution.

Here in Cromford in 1771, the great industrialist

Sir Richard Arkwright had built the first water-powered mill.

And as the father of the modern factory and mass production,

he really did change the world.

You know, Sir Richard Arkwright was the absolute

epitome of the self-made man.

Born the youngest of 13 children to a humble Lancashire tailor,

he ended his days as one of the richest men in the country

and the father of the Industrial Revolution.

But even as Arkwright's inventions led the world forward,

he was looking backwards.

To mark his ascent into Britain's social elite,

he built himself a piece of the past.

Arkwright was buying into a vision of Britain as a pastoral Eden,

an old-fashioned social hierarchy based on the country house.

And that's a vision that has proved remarkably enduring.

The dream of owning a whacking great pile somewhere in the countryside

isn't confined to Britain's rock aristocracy,

indeed the very idea of the country house is deeply

embedded in our popular culture, as the setting for family

melodrama, class conflict and pure Sunday night entertainment.

"We drove on and in the early afternoon came to our destination.

"We were at the head of a valley,

"and below us, half a mile distant,

"grey and gold amid a screen of boscage

"shone the dome and columns of an old house.

"'Well,' said Sebastian, stopping the car."

Well?

Well?

What a place to live in.

Evelyn Waugh's book Brideshead Revisited was published in 1945.

At the time, houses like this seem doomed to decay.

Waugh's book was a hymn to the aristocratic past at the very

moment that Britain was turning to social democracy.

It offered a window into an "enchanted palace"

from which most people had always been shut out.

When Granada Television adapted Brideshead Revisited

for the small screen in 1981,

this was Brideshead. Castle Howard in Yorkshire.

Granada could hardly have found a more magnificent setting.

And almost overnight, millions of viewers fell in love with

what Waugh himself had called "the cult of the country house."

Charles, we are going to have a heavenly time alone.

This was the country house as a lost Arcadia.

If it was mine, I couldn't live anywhere else.

A prime-time tribute to upper-class glamour.

Chateau Lafite 1899.

And once we'd tasted it, we wanted more.

Downton Abbey is merely the latest example of an

extraordinarily successful genre.

But the real attraction isn't the aristocratic household

or its army of servants.

It's Downton Abbey itself,

magnificently played by Highclere Castle.

With a global audience of 120 million,

the show has been a huge success both at home...

The new valet has arrived, my lord.

..and abroad.

Grazie, Carson.

HE CLEARS THROAT

Che c'e?

The enduring appeal of the country house drama says a great

deal I think about our culture, and about us.

This is a little corner of the television schedules in which

we can freely indulge our long running obsessions with

hierarchy, nostalgia and social class.

As it is, my lord, we may have to have a maid in the dining room.

Cheer up, Carson. There are worse things happening in the world.

Not worse than a maid serving a duke.

Upstairs is the domain of the aristocracy, all fancy frocks

and cut glass accents, only occasionally interrupted by nagging

anxieties about the subversive novelties of the 20th century.

I couldn't have electricity in the house,

I wouldn't sleep a wink, all those in vapours seeping about.

And downstairs, the world of the servants,

endlessly scrubbing the floors, polishing the silver and, like

their masters, fretting about their place in the social hierarchy.

What will the butler say, whatever will Cook think

and where did I put those oysters with mignonette sauce?

The duke went berserk for your anchovy pinwheels.

He's hardly the king though, is he?

I mean, I've seen him coming out the bank.

Just think in a few hours from now the king of England's...

..posterior shall occupy this very chair.

This is hardly the moment for such reflections, Rose.

You've still got the flowers to do, the coffee tray,

the polishing in the front hall, the landing and the drawing room.

The popular appeal of the country house drama goes I think

well beyond nostalgic escapism.

In an anxious individualistic age, what dramas like Brideshead and

Downton offer is a reassuring vision of a paternalistic social hierarchy.

This is Britain as an extended family, in which we all have a role

and we all know our place, even it is just cleaning the master's boots.

It's no accident that these dramas all enjoyed success

at a time of deep economic anxiety.

The oil crisis just added fuel to the coal crisis

and gave us the three-day-week.

'70s audiences preferred Upstairs, Downstairs

to the three-day-week.

Grease 'em up again, Mrs Bridges.

SHE SHRIEKS

To tune out the recession of the early '80s,

people tuned in to Brideshead.

And to help us forget the credit crunch,

Downton Abbey.

Indeed, their appeal is so attractive

that it goes well beyond the small screen.

Because we don't just want to watch these dramas in our living rooms.

We want to visit their living rooms.

MUSIC: Us And Them by Pink Floyd

On the left is Henry VIII. Well-known face. And up above him,

less well known, is King Charles I. Sorry, King James I.

Slipping a monarch.

And at the same time they replaced the roof,

but unfortunately that was destroyed.

Every year, more than a third of the population visits a country house.

It's become one of the great middle-class rituals,

from the gift shop to the gardens.

Well, naturally, I see them walking in the gardens.

They used to start by asking for my autograph. Well it's impossible

to give an autograph to 2,000 people who come around here.

You do it for one, you have to do it for another,

so I gave up that idea soon after the house was open.

The owners didn't let us in out of generosity.

They needed our money.

Death duties had forced their hand.

And it was their changing fortunes that inspired one of the BBC's

most successful sitcoms.

Penelope Keith plays Audrey Forbes-Hamilton,

forced after the death of her husband to sell her ancestral home.

Oh, thank you, Rector, it was a lovely funeral,

we must have one again sometime.

To the upstart Richard DeVere.

Indeed, from Audrey's point of view, DeVere could hardly be worse,

because not only is he of Czechoslovakian descent,

but he made his money in, of all things, supermarkets.

-This is Mr DeVere.

-How do you do?

My condolences, Mrs Hamilton.

How kind, it was a great shock, but life must go on.

Do help yourself to a drink.

It's Mr DeVere of Cavendish Foods.

Oh, the caterers. In that case, help everyone else to a drink.

LAUGHTER

Almost uniquely among country house dramas,

To The Manor Born is set not in the romanticised past

but squarely in the present. And at its heart is the story

of a country house struggling to come to terms with social and

economic change, much to displeasure of the old upper-class elite.

But the show is also unusual in that it doesn't present that change

as a terribly bad thing. Sir Richard DeVere might be nouveau riche, but

he's also a thoroughly decent chap, whereas Audrey really is the most

dreadful snob. And in that sense, To The Manor Born is not just the most

honest of country house dramas but it might just be the most radical.

To the Manor Born ends with the fairy-tale marriage

of the old blood and the new money.

And the audience loved it.

When Audrey and Richard tied the knot,

24 million people were watching.

Ladies and gentlemen, the bride and groom.

But the biggest country house drama of all is, of course...

The Windsors.

No show on Earth has obsessed the nation

quite as much as our royal family.

And their story could hardly be more deeply

embedded at the heart of our popular culture, from novels

and paintings to films, television and - yes - even pop music.

The Royal Variety Performance in 1963 has gone down in history

as the night the Beatles dared to tease their royal audience.

For our last number, I'd like to ask your help.

For the people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands.

And the rest of you, if you just rattle your jewellery.

Still, I'm not sure about John Lennon's scripted quip really

counts as one of history's greatest witticisms.

And for all the cultural turbulence of the '60s and '70s,

the monarchy remained extraordinarily popular.

God save the Queen.

The year was 1977.

As the nation was putting up bunting

and looking forward to the Queen's Silver Jubilee,

one group of excitable youngsters

was planning its own special tribute.

# God save the Queen

# She ain't no human being... #

The Sex Pistols' single God Save The Queen

could hardly have been better timed.

# And England's dreaming... #

But this wasn't just cheeky, this was positively blistering.

# There's no future

# No future... #

As a publicity stunt to accompany the song, the Pistols' management

had planned a parody of the Queen's river pageant.

They hired this boat, the Queen Elizabeth,

as a floating stage for the band to perform their confrontational

single in the very heart of Westminster.

Things didn't get off to a very good start. As the Sex Pistols

were boarding, the captain said,

"It's not one of those punk bands, is it?"

"Oh, no, no," said the management, "It's not a punk band, it's a

"German synthesizer band very heavily influenced by Johann Sebastian Bach."

I can't wait for it to get dark.

The plan was for the Pistols to start playing by the time they

reached the Houses of Parliament,

but as they were approaching the Palace of Westminster

they realised they being pursued by a police boat.

On board, the atmosphere was electric with tension and

excitement, and then, as the Pistols finally took to the stage...

bedlam.

# We're so pretty

# So pretty

# Pretty vacant

# We're so pretty

# Oh, so pretty

# Vacant

# Don't ask us to attend cos we're not all there

# Oh, don't pretend cos I don't care... #

The boat trip ended with the power being switched off, and a

punch-up between the police and the band's manager, Malcolm McLaren.

This was pop culture at its least deferential, deliberately

bating the establishment in a week of pomp and pageantry.

Indeed the Sex Pistols are a very good example of a subversive

strain in British pop culture, outraging respectable opinion

and taking on the orthodoxies of the political elite.

The irony though is, in a sense, the Pistols really needed the Queen,

they needed something to kick against,

a target who would ensure maximum shock value and maximum publicity.

After all, God Save The President

doesn't have quite the same ring, does it?

The Pistols might have needed the Queen,

but the Queen certainly didn't need them.

And the jubilee spirit wasn't diluted in the slightest.

Punk did, of course, have a potent cultural legacy -

not so much musically as aesthetically,

in the worlds of design and fashion.

For all its irreverent energy, though,

it never seriously challenged the popularity of the monarchy.

But almost exactly 20 years later,

the Palace was rocked to its very foundations.

Within the last few moments, the Press Association has

reported that Diana, Princess of Wales, has died.

The death of Princess Diana in 1997 saw a genuinely extraordinary

outpouring of national grief.

Never in our modern history have the monarchy seemed

quite as vulnerable as it did in the days after Diana's death. Indeed,

for me, this was an even bigger crisis than the abdication of 1936.

There will much pressure for public mourning for the Princess

who captured many hearts, and in her sudden, unexpected death,

continues to attract great public attention.

The royal family needed to find the right tone for their response

to Diana's death.

Or risk alienating the millions mourning "their" heroine.

She was different to the rest of royal family.

I felt I probably could've been a friend of hers,

but obviously we were worlds apart.

We have lost our princess, the world has lost a princess.

As public hysteria reached boiling point, the royal family were

widely pilloried as cold, unfeeling and out of touch.

But then came the funeral.

A moment of a national catharsis remembered

today for something that most people could never have dreamed they would

see on such a solemn royal occasion.

# Goodbye, England's rose

# May you ever grow in our hearts

# You were the grace that placed itself

# Where lives... #

For the first time in history,

pop music provided the soundtrack to a sombre State occasion.

And in Elton John's Candle In The Wind,

millions found emotional release after days of tension.

Originally released in 1974, the song had been written as a tribute

to the Hollywood movie star Marilyn Monroe who died at the age of 36.

# Like a candle in the wind Never knowing... #

And now, two decades later, Elton John reworked his '70s hit

as the defining tribute to another troubled 36-year-old blonde.

The single version of the Elton John song that you will be able to

buy from this Saturday.

It sold 33 million copies worldwide.

And became the bestselling single in musical history.

Given that Candle In The Wind had originally been written

about one of the biggest global celebrities of the century, her life

a tangled web of glamour, sex appeal, loneliness and tragedy,

it didn't really take much tweaking

to turn it into a song about Princess Diana.

But as a moment, there could hardly have been a more powerful

symbol of the closely intertwined relationship between our royal family

and our popular culture.

TRUMPETS PLAY PEOPLE CHEER

Buckingham Palace had now grasped the PR power of popular music.

And so, at the Queen's Diamond Jubilee in 2012,

it was pop that provided the soundtrack.

How are you feeling, London?!

# Life's too short for you to die

# So grab yourself an alibi

# Heaven knows your mother lied, mon cher... #

This wasn't exactly Anarchy In The UK.

Please welcome Her Majesty the Queen and Her Royal Highnesses,

the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall.

From Paul McCartney to Shirley Bassey,

they all answered the royal call.

One of the night's highlights was the appearance of the ska hit makers

Madness performing Our House on the roof of Buckingham palace.

# Our house, in the middle of our street

# Our house, in the middle of our

# Our house, in the middle of our street

# Our house, in the middle of our... #

For some observers, the moment Madness

appeared on the roof of Buckingham Palace,

turning their house into Our House,

marked the definitive triumph of pop over privilege.

But I think that's to get things completely the wrong way around.

The moment Madness stepped out on that roof

wasn't a victory for the people, it was a victory for the royal family.

After all, you could hardly find a better illustration of the monarchy's

endless capacity to absorb and appropriate

the democratic energies of our popular culture.

The Diamond Jubilee was more than just a pop concert.

It was the supreme recognition of the Queen's 60 years

on the throne - and her place at the centre of our national history.

# God save the Queen... #

The royal story is the ultimate family melodrama.

A story of fallible human beings with some very familiar failings.

I meet you today...

..in...

..in circumstances which are...

The film The King's Speech is an intimate

portrait of our queen's father, George VI.

It's the true story of his struggle to overcome a terrible stammer.

And in exposing his weakness, it made him all the more likeable.

No independent British film has ever made more money.

In fact, British cinema owes a tremendous debt to the royal family.

Look at that.

For it was Charles Laughton's portrayal of Henry VIII in 1933

that helped British cinema storm Hollywood for the very first time.

There's no delicacy nowadays.

And no consideration for others.

Indeed, Henry VIII is virtually an industry in his own right.

Every time I felt like it, it was,

"Not tonight, dear. I've got a headache, a bellyache."

No wonder your marriage is deteriorating,

you didn't consummate it.

Marvellous, isn't it? After six months of married life

the only thing I'm having off is her head.

Henry believes God won't give him sons

because he and Catherine were never truly married.

He's just noticed? After 18 years?

He's reading his Bible.

Henry VIII is of course merely the most colourful of a vast cast

of kings and queens whose stories we love to tell again and again.

From Richard III and Elizabeth I

to Charles II and Queen Victoria.

This is British history as pure royal soap opera,

full of feuding and bloodshed,

narrative twists and national glory.

And what all this does is to confirm the very principle of monarchy

as one of the essential pillars of our cultural and political life.

But the cultural appeal of British history goes

well beyond our own shores.

HBO's spectacular fantasy series Game Of Thrones has been

one of the great cultural success stories of the 21st century.

It's written and made by Americans.

And yet the story seems strangely familiar.

You know, it really isn't difficult to spot

the parallels between the feuding families in Game Of Thrones -

the Lannisters and the Starks -

and the rival dynasties in England's Wars of the Roses -

Lancaster and York.

The King of the North!

-ALL CHANTING:

-The King of the North.

The King of the North...

What Game Of Thrones offers is British history

gently fictionalised for a global audience.

And with the blood and thunder and, of course,

the nudity turned up to the maximum.

Don't get up.

-My lord.

-Should I explain to you

the meaning of a closed door in whorehouse, Brother?

And there's another ingredient that seems remarkably familiar to

British audiences.

Magic.

All this seems strikingly reminiscent of the oldest

and greatest royal story of them all.

# A legend is sung of when England was young

# And knights were brave and bold... #

This is Walt Disney's cartoon version of the legend

of King Arthur, released in 1963.

Another American tribute to the lasting appeal of perhaps

the most powerful story in our entire cultural history.

Disney's film was inspired by the book The Sword In The Stone,

written by this man, Terence Hanbury White.

First published in 1938,

it reinvented the Arthurian legend for the 20th century.

White's best known work is The Sword In The Stone,

which tells, in agreeable anachronistic terms,

of the education of the young Arthur by the magician Merlin.

Merlin - a testy old patriarch fond of practical jokes - seems

to have been compounded in equal parts of Aristotle,

Kipling and Tommy Handley.

I first read TH White's books as a boy and I was absolutely captivated

by the adventures of a young lad called Wart and his friend Merlin,

the wizard who guides him to greatness.

What I never really picked up on though was just how much

White romanticises the values of the past.

White was a child of Empire,

the son of a civil servant in colonial India.

But after a Cambridge education

he became an eccentric recluse, living in an almost feral state.

And in the legend of Arthur, White found not only a riveting story

but a parable for the modern world.

By reviving the story of King Arthur, TH White

was following in the footsteps of some very eminent Victorians.

Chief among them was the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson,

whose book The Idylls Of The King effectively kick-started

the Victorian romance with all things Arthurian.

Now, when Tennyson and the Victorians looked at Arthur's Camelot

they saw a lost paradise of heroic knights and beautiful maidens,

a world untouched by the dark Satanic mills of industrial modernity.

And in White's version of the Arthurian legend,

he too evoked the lost values of a bygone age.

Well, you see, I'm middle class Edwardian Englishman.

Why are you writing about Arthur?

Because my grandfather was a judge, a very upright, just, good old man

who believed in right and wrong

and he had these standards of value

which King Arthur and Victoria and good people have.

I think the core of White's vision could hardly be more conservative.

Like those other bestselling writers of his generation,

JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, he was effectively using historical

fantasy as a way of criticising the values of the modern world.

And he looked back to a lost paradise of hierarchy and tradition

ruled by a king who one day will return

to lead us into a new golden age.

This land shall be God's kingdom on Earth

until the darkness falls again.

Now kneel to your king.

White's version of Victorian medievalism

proved enormously popular.

Go down to the lake, King Arthur, take your sword.

And the story of a young man being taught by a wise old man -

with a beard - would live on.

It's not difficult to spot the striking similarities

between the legend of King Arthur and the Harry Potter stories.

Harry, said JK Rowling,

is the spiritual descendant of TH White's Young Arthur.

Like Arthur, Harry is a young man being taught by a wise old man -

with a beard - to groom him for leadership.

And by sending Harry to Hogwarts, Rowling was embracing

one of the most potent and enduring themes in all our popular culture -

the British boarding school.

MUSIC: Escape (The Pina Colada Song) by Jimmy Buffet

# I was tired of my lady... #

In the summer of 1979, here in the seaside town of Selsey,

West Sussex, Paul Weller - lead singer of the Jam -

came to this caravan park to enjoy a traditional British seaside holiday.

Fish and chips, bucket and spade, and a copy of the Socialist Worker.

While Paul Weller was basking in the summer sunshine, he became intrigued

by the story of a confrontation between protestors and public

schoolboys outside one of Britain's most prestigious institutions.

A few weeks earlier,

hundreds of union-backed right-to-work demonstrators had left

Liverpool on a protest march to the Houses of Parliament.

On the way, they had marched through Windsor, walking straight

past a place at the very heart of the British establishment.

As Weller himself later put it,

this seemed an irresistibly great scene.

A crowd of left-wing demonstrators marching past

one of Britain's most expensive educational establishments.

And being jeered at by these wankers.

His words, by the way, not mine.

So Weller decided to write about one of the most provocative

four-letter-words in the English language.

Eton!

MUSIC: Eton Rifles by The Jam

Weller entitled his song The Eton Rifles.

But its message was strikingly unromantic.

Because in the song, it's not the socialist marchers who win the day.

It's the public schoolboys.

# Thought you were smart when you took them on

# But you didn't take a peep in their artillery room

# All that rugby puts hairs on your chest

# What chance have you got against a tie and a crest?

-# Hello

-Hurray

# What a nice day for the Eton Rifles, Eton Rifles

-# Hello

-Hurray

# I hope rain stops play for the Eton Rifles, Eton Rifles... #

There's a nice irony in the fact that

although Weller is an outspoken socialist, one of his best known

songs is about Britain's most exclusive boarding school.

What better example of the enduring resonance

of the boarding school story.

# ..to the Eton Rifles, Eton Rifles. #

From songs and films to books and comics,

boarding school stories play a central role

in our collective imagination.

The remarkable thing, though, is that they are enjoyed by

so many people who have never been anywhere near one.

Today, only one-in-100 children goes to a boarding school.

And yet, from Victorian bullies to boy wizards, we just can't get

enough of them. If you can judge the character of a nation from its

popular culture, then maybe, deep down,

we are all public schoolboys at heart.

Boarding school stories have always been extraordinarily popular.

From Billy Bunter to Harry Potter,

they've never failed to find an enthusiastic audience.

Like country house dramas, school stories are set in

a closed world dominated by hierarchy and tradition.

And they too tend to follow a tried and tested formula.

Our hero is a kind of boyish everyman with an ordinary

unremarkable name - Brown, Jennings, Potter.

His parents are never seen or removed from the action

in chapter one se he can get on with having an adventure

without somebody telling him to wash his hands for tea.

And through his nervous eyes we are introduced to a strange new

world of arcane rituals, avuncular school masters

and terrifying, though always cowardly, bullies.

The public school story was born in the 19th century,

here at Rugby School in Warwickshire.

In 1828, Dr Thomas Arnold arrived here as headmaster.

He revolutionised education not just in Rugby

but in the entire public school system.

And it's the sheer force of Arnold's moral vision that I think

explains the lasting power of the public school story

in our popular culture.

Dr Arnold was a man of extraordinary evangelical zeal.

Indeed, in many ways, his was the guiding spirit

of the entire Victorian age.

Now, Arnold believed education was a moral duty

and what he sought to produce were boys not just to run the

growing British Empire but to fly the flag for muscular Christianity.

As Arnold himself put it, his priorities were, first,

religious and moral principle,

second, gentlemanly conduct

and third, academic ability.

Arnold's vision of the ideal Christian gentleman was to prove

tremendously influential,

because one of the young men he taught

was so inspired that he wrote a book based on his experiences at Rugby.

"Tom's heart beat quick as he passed the great school field

"and he began already to be proud of being a Rugby boy as he passed

"the school gates with the oriel window above and saw the boys

"standing their looking as if the town belonged to them."

This must be the most famous school story ever written.

Tom Brown's Schooldays, published by Thomas Hughes in 1857.

No novel in history, I think, has ever had a greater

impact on the lives of generations of schoolchildren,

not just in Britain but all over the world.

It's been said just as Charles Dickens invented Christmas,

so it was Thomas Hughes who invented the public school spirit.

In 1971, the BBC turned the book into a Sunday afternoon family serial.

Millions tuned in to watch the coming of age

of a very proper little man.

Ah. Here he is now. Matron, let me introduce Brown.

-Brown, this is Matron.

-How do you do, ma'am?

Welcome to Rugby School, Master Brown.

Matron is a present help in time of trouble.

So be sure and keep in her good books.

I'll do my best, ma'am.

Of course he will.

The story charts Tom's evolution from a cheeky little urchin

into a sportsman, a Christian and, above all, an Englishman.

Thomas Hughes once said that he wrote the book to

"get the chance of preaching."

And it's hard to think of any book that better captures Victorian

values, or that more completely embodies the essential British hero -

decent, honourable, patriotic and unflappable.

The perfect gentleman.

There is, however, one public school character who epitomises

none of those virtues.

Somebody sadly expelled from Rugby for blatant drunkenness.

And who was, by his own account, a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat,

a thief, a coward.

And, oh, yes, a toady. And those were just the good points.

His name was Harry Flashman.

For that impertinence, Brown, you'll get double honours.

We're going toss you until we kill you.

Harry Flashman was the bully in Tom Brown's schooldays.

But in the 1960s,

the writer George MacDonald Fraser spotted his potential.

And he plucked the arch rogue from the original novel

and turned him into a grown-up, arch rogue.

'I need not tell you of the dauntless heroism

'he displayed in Afghanistan.

'Of the matchless gallantry of his defence of Piper's Fort.'

In reviving this bully as a Victorian antihero, Fraser created

one of most entertaining characters in modern British fiction.

And in 1975, he put Flashman on the big screen,

writing the screenplay for the film Royal Flash.

Here, take the bloody thing, I don't want it. Take it.

Oh.

Fraser's Flashman is even more of a bully and a coward than ever.

Still, he never lets it hold him back.

There's a British officer there.

'With his countrymen, nay, his country's honour,

'clasped to his wounded body.'

He's alive.

One of the great things about the Flashman books is that

although he spends all his time running away from one

imperial disaster after another, everybody else insists

on believing the very best of him. So, despite being a thoroughly

bad egg, he ends his days as one of Victorian Britain's greatest heroes.

To be fair to Flashman though,

he is very good with women and with horses.

Indeed, by book nine, he's bedded almost 480 of them.

Women that is, not horses.

Lola what?

Montez.

Lola Montez, ain't that a dago name?

You looks a bit dago.

-Thank you.

-Why didn't you...?

Harry Flashman and Tom Brown could hardly be more different and

yet both of them are unmistakably products of their times.

Tom Brown, of course, is the quintessentially Victorian hero,

the embodiment of Christian manliness in the heyday of Empire.

Flashman, however, is a hero for a cynical, post-imperial age.

Selfish and lecherous, his adventures shining an unsparing

light on the hypocrisies of Britain's colonial past.

And if you put those two characters together,

the noble-hearted gentleman and the sardonic womaniser,

then what you get is the best known British hero of them all.

James Bond was a public school hero for the modern age.

# Never know how much I love you

# Never know how much I... #

A publishing sensation in the '60s,

Bond became the star of the longest running -

and one of most successful - film franchises of all time.

But for all his gadgets, his girls, his conquests

and his cocktails, he remains a supremely patrician figure.

Indeed, for all his apparent classlessness, Bond was

essentially a mouthpiece for his Old Etonian creator, Ian Fleming.

These observations are all really observations of my own,

which I have put into Bond's mouth.

The son of a rich Tory MP,

Fleming spent much of his childhood at the family estate, Joyce Grove.

And like Fleming, Bond enjoys a gilded existence. Educated at Eton.

He drives a Bentley and plays for high stakes.

From the start, Fleming wanted David Niven to play his gentleman spy.

But he didn't get his way.

The producers of the first Bond film were very anxious that

worldwide audiences might be put-off by an upper-class English gent.

So they looked for somebody harder, tougher. A cold-blooded killer.

Not a simpering fop.

-Anybody want a dainty custard cream?

-Yeah.

They picked someone completely different.

A muscular milkman from the tenements of Edinburgh.

Connery had the look.

But not the manners.

So the producers handed him over to Terence Young,

the public-school-educated director of the first Bond film.

And he gave Connery a makeover.

Young took him to his Savile Row tailor and got him a suit.

He took him to dinner and showed him how to talk, how to walk,

and even how to eat.

What Terence Young did was to transform Sean Connery

into the suave establishment hero that James Bond remains today.

And so a Scottish bodybuilder became the ultimate gentleman adventurer.

Hold it.

'May we call your attention to Mr Bond's impeccable

'tailoring from London's Savile Row? The shirt is hand tailored in

'Indian madras, also the cravat

'hand-woven of Javanese batik.

'This is 007.'

If you carry a double-0 number, it means you're licensed to kill.

Now properly attired, Connery's Bond was ready to enjoy the high life.

Something hugely attractive

and unimaginably glamorous to audiences in the early '60s.

"Connery was not quite the idea I had of Bond," said Ian Fleming,

"But he would be if I wrote the books over again."

I have to leave immediately.

Just as things were getting interesting again.

After Connery finally hung up his Walther PPK,

the series started to acquire more and more

of Harry Flashman's irrepressible patrician style.

So, to me, Roger Moore's Bond is basically the embodiment

of effortless superiority and a unreconstructed imperial hero

with an eyebrow knowingly raised and a quip for every occasion.

All that's really missing are the bushy whiskers

and the flashing sabre.

And in The Spy Who Loved Me, Moore's Bond has never been more

splendidly Flashmanesque.

007!

Triple-X.

Bond, what do you think you're doing?

Keeping the British end up, sir.

# Nobody does it better... #

Not only is Roger Moore's Bond much funnier than Connery's,

he's also even more patrician.

And far from disguising their hero's upper-class background,

the later Bond films placed it centre stage.

In Skyfall, we finally get to see James Bond's ancestral home,

an imposing Scottish manor house - complete with staff.

M, this is Kinkade. Gamekeeper here since I was a boy.

Pleased to meet you, Emma.

Mr Kinkade.

The truth is that, apart from his womanising, Britain's greatest

fictional hero might have been written in the 1850s - a public

schoolboy taking on the bullies on behalf of a grateful nation.

Yet right from the beginning, Bond was a fantasy.

Even as Fleming's first books hit the shelves,

Britain's power was fast ebbing away.

Bond was an imperial hero for a country without an empire.

And the collapse of British prestige was to have unexpected

cultural consequences.

JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS

In 1961, a rangy young man was walking through the seedier

parts of Soho, looking for a dodgy nightclub.

The comedian Peter Cook had long dreamed of opening a cabaret

club in London, like the satirical clubs he'd visited in West Germany.

But he needed a venue.

And here in Greek Street, he came across Club Tropicana, a former

all-girl strip revue that had been closed down after a police raid.

He immediately sent a telegram to his business partner.

"Have Premises. Stop travelling."

Cook named his new club after the very people

he was planning to satirise.

And so, in October 1961, The Establishment Club was born.

And in its sights were the small group of upper-class men

who dominated politics, business, the law and the military.

Is your target here the establishment?

It is must be largely. Most of the establishment has joined,

and I'm glad to have them there.

They'll be here every night, and we can get at them.

Britain has a rich tradition of scathing social

and political satire.

From the cartoons of Hogarth and Gillray

to the novels of Jonathan Swift and Charles Dickens.

But the 1950s had been an age of relative deference and conformity.

And what people like Peter Cook and his friends represented was

not just the revival of the old tradition but the emergence

of a generation shaped by something entirely new, the experience

of economic affluence, mass education and social mobility.

Today their material looks pretty tame.

But in 1961, it was anything but.

-Perkins.

-Sir.

-I want you to lay down your life.

Yes, sir.

We need a futile gesture at this stage.

LAUGHTER

It will raise the whole tone of the war.

-Get up in a crate, Perkins.

-Sir.

-Pop over to Bremen.

-Yes, sir.

-Take a shufty.

-Yes, sir.

-Don't come back.

-Right you are.

Their chief targets were the old guard at the top.

From the men who'd won the war

to the men who ran the government.

Good evening, I have recently been

travelling round the world...

LAUGHTER

..on your behalf and at your expense.

For a short time in the early 1960s,

it really was fashionable to stand up on this stage

and make fun of Britain's politicians.

And this, I think, was the beginning of a profound

shift in our attitude towards our governing classes.

The disaster of the Suez Crisis in 1956 had shattered forever

the illusion of Britain's politicians as masterful statesmen

who'd never make a mistake and certainly never tell a lie.

And as our empire slipped away

and our economy fell behind its European rivals,

so it became more and more tempting to point a mocking and accusing

finger at our political elite who seemed shifty,

self-interested and all too fallible.

Our other bouquet for the week goes to the government

for its sensitive handling of the half a million unemployed.

Only yesterday, Mr Maudling received a delegation of the unemployed

and after talking to them for ten minutes, he got up

and said, "Well, I don't know about you, but I've got work to do."

It might not have been side-splittingly funny,

but the new mood of anti-establishment irreverence

proved enormously influential.

And by the early 1980s, satire had acquired a much harder edge,

reflecting the end of '60s optimism

and a new atmosphere of conflict and confrontation.

What do we call it when people going around

stealing other people's property?

-GROANS

-You!

-A free market economy?

-Rubbish.

In the mid-80s, Spitting Image attracted some 15 million viewers.

Satire was now mainstream.

The irony though is that the more people laughed at Spitting Image,

the less impact it actually had.

Because the show did not make the slightest bit of difference

to Margaret Thatcher's popularity.

On the one hand, the jokes merely confirmed

the prejudices of the people who hated her already.

And on the other, among her supporters,

the image of Margaret Thatcher as a ball-crushing strongman,

well, that was the kind of prime minister they wanted.

Although I work a 20-hour day organising the affairs of Britain,

nothing I do gives me greater pleasure than

the simple domestic ritual of waking my husband with a pot of tea.

HE SCREAMS

Come on, pigeon brain! Are you going to lie there all day?

After half a century of satire and scandal,

respect for politicians is now in tatters.

And today's best satires reflect an almost total

contempt for politics itself.

-Is that your chair?

-Oh, God, yes. It's cool, isn't it?

It's got lumbar support.

Bin it. People don't like their politicians to be comfortable.

They don't like you having expenses. They don't like you being paid.

They'd rather you lived in a fucking cave.

OK, fine.

So what should I be sitting on?

Should I just get an upturned KFC bucket?"

A fucking normal chair, right.

Not a fucking massive vibrating throne.

There's no doubt, I think, that Britain's satirical culture

helps to keep our politicians honest - well, reasonably honest.

But it hasn't changed the world.

In fact, its real legacy has been to gnaw relentlessly away

at our trust in Westminster politics.

Back in the 1960s, it had been thought a bit daring to

suggest our politicians didn't know what they were doing.

These days, the really daring thing would be to suggest that they do.

Joking about corrupt politicians has become

our equivalent of joking about your mother-in-law.

And what all this does it to erode our faith in politics itself,

because if they are all equally corrupt and inept, then why bother?

Why try to change anything when you can just laugh at them instead?

Perhaps Peter Cook had it right all along.

"Britain," he once said,

"is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea."

Because while we've been giggling, very little has changed.

Westminster remains the domain of a gilded political elite,

ever more detached from the people they claim to represent.

Indeed, at the height of the satire boom,

few people would have imagined that 21st-century Britain

would be, in many respects, a more unequal country than ever.

And I think the explanation lies not just in the halls of Westminster

but in our books and our films, our music and our television.

From Downton Abbey and Harry Potter

to James Bond and Elton John.

It's not just that so much of our culture openly celebrates

the old order, it's that even when it kicks against it,

it somehow ends up reinforcing it.

We may like to think of our popular culture as democratic

and inclusive, but I don't think there has ever been a better

advert for the British establishment.

How Britain's culture still grapples with

the obsessions of the Victorians.

From our moral mission,

to the perils of progress.

And beyond.