I've just watched an hour or so of the best television I have seen for a long time.
Francis Fulford is an eccentric English aristocrat (aka 'landowner') from Devon. You may have seen him in the all too brief televison series the F**king Fulfords, which chronicled is thoughts on life as a member of the landed gentry with little income to maintain his crumbling family pile. He is the antithesis of 'political correctness'. Every sentence includes the fuck expletive and he is as funny as all get out. The short clip gives you a taste, but not really the full flavour of the man.
His show tonight was somewhat more considered. He goes on a road trip to see what the rest of England is like - ranging from a visit to a truly horrible precast concrete housing estate (which the National Heritage of England was either seeking a protective listing for or had gotten one already)to a dash of hypnotherapy (which, predictably fails). Needless to say our hero despised the buildings as monstrosities. He interviews a middle class member of the intellegensia who agitated for the preservation of the buildings but who, when pressed, confessed to living in a top floor flat in a Victorian terrace in tony North London. Talking to the residents and local people was equally revealing - 'blow them up', was the consensus. The folk who lived there wanted to live somewhere nice, maybe with a bit of room for their families…
He made the point, time and again that England's ruling class are the middle classes now, not the historical aristocratic class. The problem, as Fulford sees it is that the intellectuals in power have little understanding or appreciation of the culture and that short term gains and financial returns are all that matter. I wonder if he might be right. He decried the 'nanny state' and its obsession with political correctness - as do I. For example the kind of governments that rule against cigarette smoking in many ways and issue expensive propaganda to demonise and marginalise the people who have been permitted to become addicts - and yet same governments, regardles of which edge of the political safe centre they tread simply dont have the balls to end the sale of tobacco products all together - principally because they earn a substantial taxation from the stuff to pay for the swollen, utterly unnecessary beaurocracy. They are, themselves, addicted.
More people should be as outspoken as Francis Fulford. He's not as extreme as you might think. In fact I find his approach refreshingly open. He is not a bigot and, while he was awkard taking part in a gay pride parade, riding on a float dressed as Brittania, he regarded gays as entitled to express themselves in the same forthright fashion as he does, though with more eye makeup.
Francis Fulford is an eccentric English aristocrat (aka 'landowner') from Devon. You may have seen him in the all too brief televison series the F**king Fulfords, which chronicled is thoughts on life as a member of the landed gentry with little income to maintain his crumbling family pile. He is the antithesis of 'political correctness'. Every sentence includes the fuck expletive and he is as funny as all get out. The short clip gives you a taste, but not really the full flavour of the man.
His show tonight was somewhat more considered. He goes on a road trip to see what the rest of England is like - ranging from a visit to a truly horrible precast concrete housing estate (which the National Heritage of England was either seeking a protective listing for or had gotten one already)to a dash of hypnotherapy (which, predictably fails). Needless to say our hero despised the buildings as monstrosities. He interviews a middle class member of the intellegensia who agitated for the preservation of the buildings but who, when pressed, confessed to living in a top floor flat in a Victorian terrace in tony North London. Talking to the residents and local people was equally revealing - 'blow them up', was the consensus. The folk who lived there wanted to live somewhere nice, maybe with a bit of room for their families…
He made the point, time and again that England's ruling class are the middle classes now, not the historical aristocratic class. The problem, as Fulford sees it is that the intellectuals in power have little understanding or appreciation of the culture and that short term gains and financial returns are all that matter. I wonder if he might be right. He decried the 'nanny state' and its obsession with political correctness - as do I. For example the kind of governments that rule against cigarette smoking in many ways and issue expensive propaganda to demonise and marginalise the people who have been permitted to become addicts - and yet same governments, regardles of which edge of the political safe centre they tread simply dont have the balls to end the sale of tobacco products all together - principally because they earn a substantial taxation from the stuff to pay for the swollen, utterly unnecessary beaurocracy. They are, themselves, addicted.
More people should be as outspoken as Francis Fulford. He's not as extreme as you might think. In fact I find his approach refreshingly open. He is not a bigot and, while he was awkard taking part in a gay pride parade, riding on a float dressed as Brittania, he regarded gays as entitled to express themselves in the same forthright fashion as he does, though with more eye makeup.
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