ABSTRACT
A Noble Past Television's intense propaganda of a noble past, as a way of rejecting our own world, cannot be planned. It comes up too blithe and naive, like Mr Betjeman" in a balloon. As we all have reason to know, it was actually a helicopter (Bird's-Eye View, BBC-2): some of the approaches and angles would simply have burst a balloon. But the tone was that: floating and gaseous. The Englishman's Home, the first programme in this series, was almost too precisely the cultural pattern, the ideology, that I have so often attacked. Apart from a few primitive circles in Anglesey, the only "Englishmen's" homes before the late 19th century were the mansions and terraces of the aristocracy. Seen in isolation, from where the rest of us were then living, they were made the basis for the simplest version of 20th-century decline. In Peacehaven, even, people could still plant what flowers they liked in their gardens (but not in the ranch-style houses in Kent?). Our contemporary world was the tower-block: reasonably criticised, on social grounds, but with a revealing change of criterion: visually-and this had been the overt recommendation of the mansions-they have their own nobility. And this is the key to the pattern: the past is all art and buildings; the present all people and confusion. What is really astonishing, and would provoke anger against a more substantial target, is that all this is done from a mid20th-century machine through mid-20th-century electronic equipment. I suppose it is to maintain this disjunction between the medium and the message (which has, incidentally, a decisive theoretical relevance) that we have mandarins and governors.
