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♪♪♪
Blenheim Palace.
It's so interesting that apparently Her Majesty,
whenever she goes there, always says,
"Why is your Palace bigger than mine?'
♪♪♪
We're at a quintessentially British event,
Sir James, what brings you here?
So this is an amazing place.
I've never been here before.
I've obviously been to Blenheim,
but not to Salon Privé before.
This is the Duke of Marlborough Award.
So Your Grace, would you like to present Ben
with his award, please?
Andrew, we're at the Salon Privé.
What brings you here?
We've been before, we've enjoyed it, I like cars
and it's a nice setting, you know,
it's just a nice thing to do.
What's special about British cars?
When they work?
They have a personality, a character.
What would you say is the defining qualities
of being quintessentially British?
Well, I think that we're very friendly people.
I think we're very relaxed and creative and I suppose
a little bit quirky.
And you think of all the incredible things
that have come out of this country,
from the Rolling Stones and the Beatles to Aston Martin.
I mean, it's an absolutely fantastic mélange
of excitement and creativity, I think.
♪♪♪
Our feature documentary is called
Quintessentially British.
What does quintessentially British mean to you?
Unique, I think, probably is the best way to describe it.
It's very difficult to pin down
what it means to be British.
There is something about self-deprecation,
something about attachment to history and tradition.
Quiet pride.
Being in a garden, a green space.
I think of our British sense of humor is really
what the British people turn to,
in times of trouble, and what helps us get out of it.
I think the way we speak,
because we're full of irony,
so ironic and always saying
things we don't quite mean.
There's always "Well, what did he mean when he said that?"
There's always that element. I love that.
Politeness, kindness.
Stuck-up-ness.
When American friends of mine come over here,
they often say, "Oh you know, the English
are so friendly." And I think
to myself and I sometimes say to them, "They're civil."
They're not really necessarily friendly.
But you know, they're polite in a way that you know,
in America you go into a shop or the supermarket
and you know, they're all over you
with this kind of, you know, bonhomie,
which then is just switched off.
You know, we don't overstate things.
Americans are all about these big gestures, aren't they?
You know, when they meet each other
and they're sort of "Oh, it's fantastic to see you."
We're a little bit quieter, you know, sort of assume
that it's good to see you,
but we'd really just rather sort of get
down to talking about what's going on.
We do like to go our own way and do our own thing,
and listening to other people can be difficult at times.
Yes.
We kind of have a strict sense of formal etiquette.
But in truth, anyone who's spent
any time with normal British people would know
that we're basically a lot of the time drunk.
So, we're a mass of contradictions.
I think if you ask my wife
what the quintessential characteristics
of an Englishmen are, she would say good manners,
respectful behaviour, decent standards of dress.
Perhaps she's a little old fashioned in that.
Just being very English.
If the cliché of the Englishman is his politeness,
his discretion, his privacy, obeys the rules,
is it any wonder that those same people
love going to the theatre where everything is different
and the people let their hair down and sometimes their pants.
We love the theatre, because so many of us are
not theatrical in our lives.
And the most famous Englishman who ever lived wrote plays,
but was an actor.
Not a king.
Not a politician.
Not an athlete.
Not a saint.
Our national hero is an actor.
Of course, other cultures love their theater.
And everyone loves storytelling it's a very, very basic need.
But the Brits have caught on to it, perhaps more than most.
We've been at it a long time.
Just do a sound check, Ian, just...
Yes, yes, go ahead. Yup.
Sir Ian McKellen.
You... please, I'm not Sir.
Okay, okay.
That's a title.
It's not a name.
Unless you're calling everybody else Mister.
Sure. Okay. Ian McKellen.
Yep, yep, thank you.
I began to like Shakespeare by going to see his plays.
Not by reading them.
Or being taught them.
He knew, it seems better
than any other writer who ever lived,
the variety of human needs and passions,
and desires.
That's the basis of it all
is the jealousy, the love, the hatred, the fear.
Shakespeare, in one speech tells you
more about the life of a man, from cradle to grave
than a thousand pages of someone else's writing
could tell you.
We love tales of horror and violence and murder
and people doing terrible things to each other.
And Shakespeare does them so brilliantly.
He only invented one plot for himself
in the whole of the 37 plays.
That was the last play he wrote.
All the others he pinched.
What? From history books,
from poetry books, from other people's plays.
There was a Hamlet play before Shakespeare wrote his.
We filmed Hamlet before we put it onto the stage
and when we were filming it, the Duke of Edinburgh died.
The Duke of Edinburgh dying as we were filming a play
about a royal family who lived in a castle.
And here we were in the shadow of Windsor Castle,
and we were filming the castle.
You know, the queen losing her husband after so long.
Here we are doing a story about a queen who
loses a husband and marries her husband's brother.
It's hard not to see what the connections are.
Ian McKellen was wary of playing Hamlet
because he's 80 and Hamlet's 20.
But I thought he can respect the language and the poetry,
but still make it his own and make it modern.
Because whilst he's known now as Gandalf, he's still
sort of known for being this great,
great Shakespearean actor.
Oh, we're living in an age when an 82 year old man
is pretending to be a 22 year old boy
and that specific man doing it, MacKellen.
Here we are, it's live.
And never forget, you can never forget
when you're seeing a Shakespeare play
that that's exactly what you're doing.
You're seeing a play.
Dame Judi.
Dame Judi, to your left please.
Over here please, Judi.
We were filming with Sir Ian McKellen
with Hamlet and you of course, played Ophelia in Hamlet
- and Hamlet... - And Gertrude.
And Gertrude and Ophelia...
Not in the same production.
What is it about Shakespeare that is
so quintessentially English
and beloved around the world?
I have two passions.
One is Shakespeare. The other is trees.
And I was brought up on Shakespeare as a little girl,
and my family used to quote it.
Reams of it, I could do a whole play for you now.
If you like the Dream or Twelfth Night, I could do all that.
I could do a lot of Measure for Measure.
I could do a bit of The Merchant of Venice.
It's a good note to give to tired old actors
of Shakespeare is, you know
Shakespeare was an Italian?
"To be or not to be, that's the question," I mean...
Italians, the cliche for us who are not Italians,
is that they never stop talking.
You can say the same of the Irish.
And talking very well.
Good talk. Not idle chatter.
But done with great flair and imagination and metaphor
and a variety of pace in the speaking and the hands
and the gestures coming to it in a way
that the British wouldn't express themselves these days.
I mean, we've had the Victorian era to live
through to change our collective personality,
our national personality. But I think Shakespeare's
characters are much more what we think of as Italian or Irish.
My world at the moment, we talk so much
about the provenance of where your item is made.
And I think what's so interesting about the Queen,
but also the Royal Family at large,
is they've always shopped that way.
They've always supported the Savile Row's,
the Henry Poole's, Prince Charles gets
his John Lobb shoes, the Duke of Edinburgh,
a Lock, Co. cap.
And that's so important to them to support these brands
and to give them their Royal Warrants and I think
it's often underestimated how important that is
and how that keeps these businesses alive.
I have to confess that I have never, ever been able
to afford to go to Savile Row to buy my clothes.
But I think there is something about precision tailoring,
genuine craftsmanship that is an important
bit of British making tradition.
The sartorial elegance, which is actually
partly seen in Downton Abbey, is very British,
whether it's through James Bond
or the Savile Row tailors.
I think the British are known for it
and it's trying to set a high bar.
And some ways, of course, that's what His Royal Highness
Prince Philip set out to do.
He always encouraged people to be the best
and that's where you should aim for.
Not half tying a tie, but tying a tie really well.
Learning how to do something really well, you know,
looking at someone's shoes, are they polished or not?
And I still find I look at someone's shoes,
just glancing down just seeing whether
they're polished or not.
My husband gave our son a 21st birthday present
of a suit from Savile Row.
So it's that wonderful process of choosing the fabric,
of deciding, it's of getting measured, of getting adjusted.
That whole process and journey is a delight to watch.
There is no other street like Savile Row.
Through the generations it's survived and it's survived
because of obviously the great houses, the names that have
existed here on the Row.
We don't claim to be in fashion at any one time,
because fashion comes and goes.
Like the tide, it comes in and out.
Bespoke is a tailoring term and the young will
always have a need to create things
that are unique for them.
Henry Poole really is the founding fathers
of Savile Row and also the great inventors of the dinner suit,
otherwise known as the Tuxedo.
It's a great honour to be at Henry Poole and being known
for dressing some of the great names of the past,
such as Vanderbilts, such as J.P. Morgan,
such as Napoleon III, such as the Tzars of Russia,
even the Emperor of Japan.
Still today, these names stand.
Winston Churchill was probably one of our great men
that have walked in here.
And of course, he came to us as a young, slim gentleman
and got to meet my great grandfather and my grandfather.
And my grandfather remembered talking about his suits
that came in for abundant alteration cleaning
due to the cigar smoke.
And they would always find little bits of ash
and stubs inside pockets,
which was very much his character.
But he was apparently a wonderful man,
even though he was quite moody
at some points, you know, and we did
have a little tit for tats over bills
that were eventually sorted.
This is what we call measure books.
So we would have measured Winston's father,
and this is 1886 by the looks of it.
Later on in life, Winston came to us in 1906, which is there,
and that's some of his clothes that was made.
You'll always meet customers and get to know them,
which is the best part of the business.
How would you like your pockets here?
This is the big question here.
Well, generally I don't use them.
You know, I won't be putting any cigars in them.
- Like Churchill. - You should, you should.
- I should. - Four working buttons
on the cuff? So there's four working buttons here?
Yes please, yes.
Pleats or no pleats?
That's a very good question.
You're not strong on the thigh,
so you don't need to have pleats.
- Right. - Zip fly or button fly?
- Zip fly. - I have to ask.
- Yeah. - But for most people it's zip.
So, single-breasted, button two, notched lapel.
So, that's your plain weave with no colorway.
That's your pinhead, showing the actual distances
between the two colorways.
And I probably would put it between those two.
So, Simon, I think executive decision, I think let's go...
- Yes. - Let's go for this.
Yes, I think that's a lovely one.
It perfectly works well.
It's smart casual and dress it up, dress it down.
And also it has a bit more character,
it has a little bit more of the depth
in the marbling effect with the pinhead.
So it's a good, good choice.
So when you mention Savile Row, I immediately think
of The Beatles and their last live performance
on the roof at number 3, Savile Row.
Sadly a bit before my time on the row.
There's quite often tours that come,
they will always stop outside the Apple building,
before they come and stop here at number 10, Savile Row.
We're very fortunate, we have quite an eclectic
range of customers.
Officers in the army, to captains of industry.
And we have been known to make the odd outfit
for heads of state.
Thankfully, I've still got my head.
Prince William and Prince Harry did their year
at Sandhurst and whilst they were training there,
we were asked to make their initial uniforms.
We received a great accolade and the fact
that their first official portrait was of them
wearing their uniforms made by Dege, Skinner.
When Prince Harry married, we were approached
and asked if we would make the frock-coat
uniform for the Blues and Royals,
which was his mother regiment.
Other than the people that were measuring
and doing the fitting, no one actually knew
who we were making it for.
We're going to be making you a sports coat,
but a sports coat with a difference.
This jacket here is what we call the Bentley coat.
We've utilised the Bentley stitching that is seen
on every car steering wheel.
And I understand that it takes 50 man hours to make
a Bentley steering wheel.
Which is, funnily enough, the same period
of time it takes us to make a two piece suit,
50 to 60 man hours.
The buttons are an engraved Bentley wheel nut that would
have been on all the original Bentley's.
Get the rubber hammer out,
bang it, untwist it, wheel comes off.
Bit like Formula One,
but not as quick as Formula One these days.
♪♪♪
My full name is Adrian Bailie Nottage Palmer
and I am the 4th Baron of Reading.
And I'm terribly fortunate
that I am able to wear quite a lot of my father's clothes
and indeed my grandfather's clothes.
When I got married, I actually wore
my grandfather's tailcoat, which was made
in Savile Row in 1921.
Huntley, Palmers was founded by Thomas Huntley.
The Palmers and the Huntleys were in fact related
and as things took off, he wrote to his cousin
and said, "Will you come and join me?"
Huntley, Palmers had a Royal Warrant
from every royal family in the world.
Beat that.
I was the last member of the family to do
what they called a really old fashioned
apprenticeship and I always remember when I went
to the Huntley, Palmer factory in Huyton,
they didn't like the idea of the boss's son coming up here.
And my first job was to get all the chewing gum off
the floor of the lady's loo.
I swear to this day that that lavatory
had never been so clean.
They thought I would last about 5 minutes,
whereas in fact it took me about 5 hours to do.
I think I'm very fortunate because I've had my biscuit
life and then I've had my farming life.
I was 39 when I inherited the title from my uncle.
I always slightly assumed that I would have inherited
the title from my father, but sadly he died before he was 71.
I nearly always actually have a bite to eat at lunch time
in the staff restaurant where the food is frightfully good
and quite a bit cheaper than upstairs.
Do you think the House of Lords
- should be abolished? - Definitely.
The House of Commons, I think, is the most incredible
institution on the planet.
The Lords...
Anything hereditary without actually doing it yourself
and achieving it yourself shouldn't be around.
I don't see why, you know, you should get there through birth.
I think that's just ridiculous.
It's a bit outdated, if you will.
So I've heard the House of Lords be called
the most expensive daycare facility
for the elderly, with their subsidised meals
paid by the taxpayer.
But that's all okay, I mean,
we have the House of Commons, right?
I thought we were just going to talk about some gardens here.
I haven't studied it in great depth,
to be honest, but it probably could
do with a bit of modernisation.
But I quite like the décor, so don't modernize that.
I'm quite keen on the House of Lords.
People want to abolish it, but basically it could be renamed
a House of Experts.
Somebody once said to my children's mother
that I speak on every subject. That is not true.
If, for example, there was a big division on a health bill
amendment, I probably wouldn't vote unless I'd spoken
to somebody who had health knowledge.
In the 30 years that you've been here,
what are you most proud of?
Being able to participate, particularly on amendments
to various bills, being able to change the course of history.
I think you famously described Manderston, your home,
as it has 109 rooms, but how many rooms too many?
A hundred.
Yes, so funny.
First thing you get given when you come here is a clothes peg
and then, if we're lucky, a locker and then even luckier
still, a desk and I've actually kept
my great-grandfather's nameplate,
which I'm very proud of.
This is a World Heritage site,
this is an important building, this is a working museum.
It is the people's parliament.
It is for the future of this country.
And I believe in this building.
I believe in the fabric of this building and I believe
in democracy and this is the home of democracy.
Which is the Commons, which is the Lords?
Well, the good thing is we always know,
if you're at this end of the building, everything's green.
If you go to the other end, it's red.
So we have that bit in the middle of no man's land.
Do I look in envy to the Lords?
I've got to say, it might be a little bit grander.
It might have a little bit more gold gilding than we have.
But the reality is, we are the elected House,
we are the democratic House.
This is supremacy when it comes between the two Houses.
Democracy's never perfect, we will all find fault,
but if you're going to find one democracy that people want
to copy, it's this one and can I stand by what I represent here?
Absolutely.
Am I proud of the Westminster democracy?
Yes, of course and I'm so pleased there are
so many parliaments around the world
that's based on this democracy.
And that matters to me and it matters the role
that we played around the world
in ensuring democracy comes first.
The Westminster model, I think by far, yes,
I'm going to say, it's the best model that we've got.
Part of my family, is not only my wife, daughter
and the grandchildren, but it's also the pets, isn't it?
You know, Boris the parrot thinks he's a politician.
He loves coming to Parliament.
He shouts, "Order, order, lock the doors."
Betty, a Patterdale Terrier,
who wants to keep charge of everything and of course,
I've got Maggie the tortoise and why's she called Maggie?
She's not for turning and she's got a hard shell.
So of course as you realize,
all the pets are named after politicians.
They all are part of the family,
they play the role and quite rightly,
they don't miss out either.
I've always thought that I had the great
advantage of growing up as a teenager in the 1960s.
I came out of that period wanting to change the world.
And I decided that democracy was the way to achieve change.
I wanted to come to Cambridge, so I applied.
I was absolutely terrified. I did a terrible interview,
but remarkably, Pembroke College gave me a place.
Spending a really wonderful period of time here,
burying myself in English literature
was not just a treat, but it was a rather
wonderful preparation for life.
One of the things that inspired me
in Cambridge was a supervision with one of the Fellows.
We had written essays, they weren't terribly good essays.
He said, "Let me tell you what Wordsworth and Coleridge
were really all about."
And for the next 2 hours, he paced up and down,
pulled books out of the bookcase
and read quotations at us.
He conjured up a whole world for us.
And that is the power of a good supervision.
It can inspire, it can fire your imagination,
it can fire your passion. That transference
of enthusiasm and inspiration is what Cambridge teaching,
at its very best, is all about.
It's no accident that Cambridge has produced
over 100 Nobel Prize winners because of the quality
of intellectual attainment,
the depth of research, the quality of teaching.
If we lost that, we would be diminished terribly.
The ability to offer to the very best and brightest
of our students, here in Britain,
an opportunity to flourish and to shine.
I was at Cambridge on a scholarship,
so I didn't get there through privilege.
But once you're there, you realise that you're
part of a great deal of historical privilege.
If I hadn't been to Cambridge, perhaps I wouldn't have been
invited to go to the Royal Shakespeare Company
by these Cambridge people who were running it.
I went for the interview and I didn't get in.
And I think they saw that I wasn't properly posh.
That's why. And I was just talking a lot.
And I think they were like, "Oh, please."
I'm not bitter, though. I'm definitely not bitter
about it, I never think about it,
even though it's 20 years ago.
My experience of Cambridge was that I flourished
because I went there to work.
I loved it.
It was very high pressure.
Now, a lot of students couldn't take the pressure,
wouldn't enjoy the pressure,
would hate the pressure.
I'm Callum Sullivan and I recently graduated
with a degree in music.
I captained my Cambridge crew in the Boat Race
against Oxford to victory.
When I really decided I wanted to apply to Cambridge
and put in the work that meant I could
get there was actually probably watching a Boat Race.
I realised at that point that this was an event
that was really special
and that I actually had the capacity
to possibly be in this environment.
Best decision I ever made.
Once you're part of this Boat Club, you have to be,
particularly for the six seven months leading up to the race,
totally locked in and making sure that you're getting
as much out of yourself as you can.
And we're all expected to do really well in our studies
as well, so it is a bit of a challenge
and one that's really, really great learning.
We usually end the week on a pretty tough session
on Sundays, earn the day off we tend to say.
Get up a little bit later than usual on Monday mornings,
head to Nanna Mex for a Monday burrito on the student deal.
You know, when you're sitting on the start line on race day
and you know that there's something like 6 million
people watching on BBC One
and you know that there's 200,000 people
on the banks of the Thames.
And you're sitting there and you're absolutely trying
to do anything but make a mess of the first stroke
and end up losing your crew the race.
And that's basically all you can think about, otherwise,
you do exactly that.
To hear the roars of the crowds coming through
Hammersmith Bridge, it's a really special
thing to be a part of.
So my first plaque is yet to go up,
it's somewhere in one of the corners of the room.
Oh, there it is.
Yes, that's my plaque there
and I'm right in the middle of the 5-seater.
And I think it's destined for one of these spaces
on the walls up here.
This race has been part of national culture
a little bit for so long.
I thoroughly enjoy the Oxbridge Boat Race.
My number two sister went to Cambridge and Geordie went
to Oxford and my number five sister went to Oxford as well.
So there is this extraordinary rivalry,
light blue and dark blue and obviously as children
we were always very excited if somebody sank,
we were usually waiting for that.
It was the first thing I ever saw on television.
I was walking past a shop front and there was a crowd
looking into the window and I went to join them
and on a little screen about that size,
there was some brown, shady image.
And I realised it was moving image, which was happening
at that moment and so that was the first time I saw television.
Oh, well, I've always wanted Cambridge
to win the Boat Race, because my uncle
went to Cambridge.
It's not really a race, is it?
Because it's the same two competing for something
that's largely irrelevant to everybody else.
Cricket originated in England,
originated in the countryside. I can't possibly imagine
what it was like back then, but look at where
we've come to now, so.
Cricket I think is part of tradition and of course
Lord's Cricket Ground is as much about the ceremony
as I guess the game itself.
You've got Lord's Cricket Ground, regarded as the home
of cricket and it's still only colonial countries
who predominantly play cricket,
which says everything about the game.
Cricket is essentially,
a quintessentially English pastime.
There are very few games where you can play for five days,
go home, do anything you like in between,
and at the end of five days, have a draw
and everyone be relatively happy with that result.
I was brought up on cricket because at the end
of our garden in Wigan was the local
cricket club and I watched
their ground through the seasons.
In the winter when it was fallow and snowing,
and then in the spring when the grass
could be cut and the players arrived to practice.
And then at the weekends when they actually played games,
I could watch them.
And I became not a player of cricket,
but I was in the score box marking
the rather complicated way in which
points are scored in cricket.
You go to a cricket match and you don't have
to watch it all the time.
There's plenty of time to have a chat with the person
next door to you, often about cricket.
"Oh, they're starting again."
To think of it as a game in which people win or lose,
no, it's a different sort of game altogether,
it's the game of life.
Okay, in my house, there was no cricket,
there was no rugby, there was no Aussie Rules,
none of that stuff. We all sailed.
I don't know anything about team sports.
Nothing. You're truly asking the wrong Australian.
I can't believe they didn't take away my passport.
But yes, I don't know anything about cricket.
Sorry.
Her Majesty the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh
many times attended test matches,
often meeting the players on the field of play
during the tea interval.
Only on one occasion has the Queen actually stayed
for lunch, however. That was during a test
match against Australia. Her favourite tipple,
Dubonnet, was not present.
So a member of the kitchen staff had to be dispatched
to find an off licence somewhere
in St John's Wood or Maida Vale,
which had a bottle of Dubonnet in stock.
And then had to dash back to the ground in time
to serve the Queen her favourite aperitif before lunch.
Just one of the little, extra measures that we take
to ensure our special guests
are well looked after at this ground.
I lived in Bloomsbury for several years
in London and it's an area that's very special to me.
And I think what I love about it,
other than the Dickensian heritage,
is all the little twists and turns
and you stumble upon these small museums
that you may not have known existed.
I particularly love the Sir John Soane's Museum.
And is quite famously said that the British
are such avid collectors.
And there's no better example of a random, delightful,
at times horrifying, collection of antiquities hidden away
on a quiet street in Bloomsbury.
People look at these buildings,
they look at a place like this and they see
something that's really like a fly in amber.
We're in the library dining room
of Sir John Soane's townhouse.
Which became, after his death, his museum.
He was appointed to be the architect of the Bank
of England and that was probably his greatest achievement,
and he was awarded a knighthood. He was also fortunate
in marrying an heiress, Eliza Smith.
One of the great tragedies was that only two years
after they moved into the house, Eliza Soane died.
Soane was disconsolate. The tomb he designed
a few months after her death
and it was a remarkable departure
from contemporary tombs.
Giles Gilbert Scott must have looked at it
and being intimate with the house
and the collections, it would have
come to him as an Edicule, which offers shelter
for communication.
Gilbert Scott, who designed the phone box,
he saw this and thought that shape,
and I hope he thought and that love story,
will be just perfect for this new invention
called the phone.
His inspiration was a brilliant bit
of lateral thinking, if you like.
Gilbert Scott wanted it to be silver,
but the Post Office said, "Oh no, budget, budget"
and they said it's going to have to be red.
And now that's an iconic sense of Englishness in this country
and right around the world.
So we're here today at Henry Poole.
At this stage, we've done now the pattern.
We've gone through the detailing with yourself.
Back width is good, shoulder width is good.
At this point, I'd be asking you if there's anything you
don't like, anything you want
to change, you know, button heights.
Sleeve length, they're just a little bit short.
So I'm just going to put in a quarter of an inch
on those and then you should show about
a centimetre 3/8 of shirt cuff.
Sure.
I mean, I really like how comfortable it feels
and how light and also I like the color.
Obviously, it's a little bit livelier than a plain navy,
but without being overly flashy, you know,
if you had a real electric blue suit,
then, you know, how many times are
you going to wear it before you get bored
or people say, "Here he comes in his electric blue suit again?"
We have to admire the entrepreneurial spirit
of the original John Lobb, who in 1863 saw the Prince
of Wales in the park and saw that he left a muddy footprint
and then he used that as an imprint to make his first
riding boots, which he'd gifted to the Prince of Wales
before he was King.
That's how the long standing relationship
with this heritage brand,
the Royal Family and of course, the Royal Warrant
that John Lobb has carried for so long, came about.
My great-great-grandfather
founded the firm.
The fact that it's a family run business.
Behind that family run element of it
is the fact that it's an independent business
and I think it is that element of independence,
which is maybe a quintessentially English trait.
In World War II, when my great-uncle had started
running the firm, there was a moment when the bombs
were falling on London.
One evening he decided that it would be best to have
the lasts move out into the country to keep them safe.
Early the next day, the building was bombed
and it was condemned.
The lasts are very much the lifeblood of the firm.
Keeping those from being burned was a good move.
So those are all old names.
Thing is, we've actually got to the point where lots
of people don't know who these people are anymore.
- Yes. - David Niven, Lord Olivier.
This is Peter O'Toole, Aristotle Onassis.
Sinatra.
- Wow. - Small feet.
Those are well used. We had a lot of work
for him over the years.
Jackie Onassis, she had large feet,
I have to say.
Yes, she was quite tall I think, she was a tall lady.
Yes.
Some people, I have heard, will be asked
to be buried in their shoes.
Obviously, their favourite items that they may have had
during their lives.
Well, they do say you should judge a man by shoes.
Regardless of what he might be wearing.
This is what we're faced with,
which is this blue suit which you're having made.
- Yes. - By Simon.
You might prefer something which is a little bit more,
sort of in keeping with the suit.
The one I think that really sort of complemented
what you were wearing was the double-monk shoe,
it's designed as quite a sort of comfortable shoe as well.
Which is good for everyday wear.
British weather is, for me, perfect.
It changes every day.
You never get bored.
It's reliable in its unreliability.
The best cab service in the world
is the London taxi driver, right or wrong?
Definitely, Fred.
Just our origin, it's being going so long, it's an icon.
It's like a red bus or a telephone box.
Come to London, you ride in a black cab.
If I got into the back of your cab and said,
"Take me to the umbrella shop."
We'd take you to James Smith, Sons,
New Oxford St, Bloomsbury. Of course we know it.
Yes.
I suppose rain is quintessentially English,
hence the umbrella has to also be quintessentially English
to protect you from this ghastly weather.
Having said that, today we are blessed
with some beautiful blue skies.
I love it when I see those sort of shops
which do something very particular.
Which are charming, which say something about us
and which I would hate to die out.
That emporium of umbrellas.
It's a mad idea and I'm absolutely delighted
it's still there.
James Smith and Sons have been in business
since 1830 and we're on to the sixth generation.
It's quintessential English,
but it's actually a little bit more than that.
The umbrella was said to have started either in Egypt
or China, and the real pick up with it came
with the invention of steel as part
of the Industrial Revolution.
People had more money, more time to spend on things.
Slowly then, umbrellas became popular in London
as a fashion accessory.
A good umbrella becomes part of you.
It can make you stand up tall,
but it can also make you feel good inside as well.
We've always been taught you must never open
your umbrella indoors, you always have
to store it wrapped up.
Part of the folklore, we say, is where that came from
is that the salesmen would tell people that it was bad luck
to leave an umbrella open indoors.
So then they'd be folded up, they'd be wet
and because they were made of silk
in those days, then they would rot
and then they'd come back to buy another umbrella.
You go to James Smith now, they've got an enormous
horseshoe saying, "Don't worry, it's not bad luck.
You can do what you like with your umbrella.
This horseshoe will protect you." Honestly.
There's a secret part in every Englishman which wants
to be The Gentleman Spy.
The immaculately tailored Savile Row suit,
the rolled up umbrella. It's as deeply rooted
in English culture these days, as cricket is.
If you've got the money and if you've got the inclination
to have someone look after you, to treat you, to pamper you,
go to somewhere like Trumper's.
They may even give you the cologne that James Bond wore.
We're at Geo. F. Trumper.
It's a flagship store, this has been here 100 years.
Open the door in the morning and your body
gets the goose bumps going.
We always give accessories
to the James Bond films.
You could miss it if you didn't know what you were
looking at in the bathroom,
but we usually spot them.
People trust us.
All the famous people that come to us
trust that we'll never mention who they are.
We never phone magazines or newspapers when they arrive.
They come in, feel very relaxed,
as if nobody's recognized them.
Ian McKellen?
Yes.
Oh, I have been there once.
Yes, to get a shave.
Yes, it was very good.
So even the current Prime Minister
was a customer of our other branch in St James'.
We actually don't do his hair anymore,
which is probably noticeable by the haircuts.
What, he pays to get that haircut?
I just assumed his mum did it.
That's ridiculous.
I love looking at gardens, sitting in gardens,
walking through gardens.
I am hopeless at being a gardener.
Sir Edmund Loder that classic example
of an English eccentric,
having that sort of passion that drive
to build a garden on such a grand scale,
a great deal of it by his own hand.
Leonardslee's often referred to as one
of the most important woodland gardens in England.
A lot of the English garden design was taking
influence from Europe.
After the English landscape movement and the woodland
garden explosion, suddenly English gardens
were influencing Europe.
And apparently Hitler had his eye on Leonardslee
as his new home.
The great English film Black Narcissus was shot here.
Sir Edmund created a landscape which could pass
for the Himalayas, certainly
with the rhododendrons and azaleas.
It's a place to get lost in, a place to wander
and every day it's a privilege and an honor
to come in and work in this classic example
of an English woodland garden.
One of the definitions
of Britishness is a love of gardens.
So even if you're living on the fifth floor of a high rise
and if you have a little balcony outside,
it's full of pots with things growing in it.
It's extraordinary.
The British love gardening.
The English are obsessed with gardens and that probably
culminates with the Chelsea Flower Show every year.
It brings a real mix of different types
of design in one location for people
to just get inspiration from for their own gardens
and for their own houses even as well.
This is essentially like, I suppose, the Champions League
of gardening that I'm visiting today, I think,
and having had a little walk around,
I'm definitely getting that sense.
This is fantastic, I mean it's if you like, in our back garden.
Chelsea is the quintessential British occasion.
It is. One of them.
What is so quintessentially British
about the Chelsea Flower Show?
That we're here in this weather with no coats
and with nothing else on.
And it's fun, and it's fun.
You get the chance to put a pretty frock on
and you see beautiful things and chat to lovely people.
And we are a Royal Borough, because Queen Victoria,
on her deathbed, decreed that the borough
she was born in should become a Royal Borough.
So that's why we're the Royal Borough of Kensington, Chelsea.
And later on this afternoon, we'll be welcoming
some of the Royal Family,
some of the people that live in our boroughs.
So it all comes together on our RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
♪♪♪
It's truly brilliant just to meet a fellow queen.
Especially today, where it is the art form of gardening
at the Chelsea Flower Show.
And the art form of drag.
And just a gorgeous British icon, as well.
Absolutely. Here here.
What a pleasure it is to meet Judi Dench.
Thank you.
Is it really bad as well that I really just wanted
to joke and be like, "It's such a pleasure
to meet Maggie Smith."
But no, it truly is a pleasure to meet you, honestly.
And you, you look beautiful.
Thank you.
I was making handbags in the early seventies
and the opportunity came to buy Launer.
When I bought the company, it had the Royal Warrant,
but it'd not been really used.
I obviously wanted to go direct to the palace
and slowly managed to do that.
Oh, the Queen is a delightful person.
Just like the lady next door.
Very interested in what we do, because when she was
in the factory, she spent a good afternoon with us.
It's reported that the Queen has 200 handbags,
predominantly Launer London handbags.
If I was lucky enough to be invited for an audience
with the Queen, I think the most mortifying thing for me
would be if she moved her Launer handbag
from her left to her right arm.
It is suggested that's her indication to the courtiers
to come and rescue her.
The Launer handbag, as well as being a stylish accessory,
has become her escape route in difficult social situations.
It's an understated British way of getting out
of an awkward situation.
We're very lucky to be in The Crown.
The costume designers were interested in coming
to the showroom, because they knew that Mrs. Thatcher
and Her Majesty carried my handbags.
That's very intriguing that two silhouetted,
famous, pair of ladies chose the same handbag brand.
This was the Traviata, which is the Queen's.
I know this is a beautiful white one.
Mrs. Thatcher had the Olympia, which was the nearest
to the bag that she carried when she bought from me.
Both great ladies.
James Purdey & Sons have been making guns
for quite a long time now.
They are probably the finest gunmaker in the world,
as British gunmakers are.
These take around about two and a half, three years
to build, so this is a real work of art.
New this would be 100,000 plus.
You will see someone using one of these,
particularly on a day like today,
which is the Glorious Twelfth.
It's probably the most exhilarating sport of all,
bird shooting, I think.
They can beat on the wing at up to 70 miles an hour,
which is a real sport.
Hitting them is quite a feat.
The Royals are traditionally very involved in country sports,
particularly shooting.
They're quite well known to be part of that scene.
That quintessential British scene, yes.
I think I was brought up to think
it was cruel to kill animals.
And the idea of the posh folks going off
and the centre of their activity,
being killing something.
I think you've got to be of a certain frame
of mind of which I am not.
I'd much rather they were gathered together,
the central point of the weekend
was when they all dressed up and did charades, played charades,
put on a little pantomime.
Shooting a bird...
Aww.
If that's essentially English,
it's not an Englishness that I can respond to at all.
I look at the Glorious Twelfth and think it is a load
of baloney as far as I'm concerned.
I'm quite grateful that they're not
blapping away at the grouse all year long,
but it's a quite absurd piece of gastronomic elitism.
I don't know anybody who eats grouse on August the 12th,
but I'm sure if we went to some of the smart hotels in London,
they would serve it to me for an astronomical amount of money,
which I do not wish to pay.
We're at the Stafford Hotel, and today we're
in the Game Bird, which is our wonderful signature restaurant.
This hotel has been here since 1912,
but Glorious Twelfth goes back to 1853.
So ever since that day, we've been serving grouse
on the 12th of August and get excited by it.
It was shot this morning and is on its way
from the North Yorkshire Moors.
It's the Glorious Twelfth, first grouse of the season.
We have it here at The Stafford.
It's a very discreet place.
So we're not about celebrity,
we're not about royalty, but they all come here.
Her Majesty, the Queen visits the Stafford.
The Queen Mother used to visit for afternoon tea weekly
walking up from Clarence House.
The cellars served the King of England when he lived
in St. James's Palace.
We served the port to the king.
It is a very special place.
We're going to be getting through
what's called the blessing.
The blessing involves the final fitting.
We're looking at the small details now and the general
comfort that we hear from you and how you enjoy the suit.
Also, we have the extra cloth there, which I must say Frank,
if any prosperity takes place,
we can have four inches of extra cloth inside to allow
that difference in inches.
So do not haste, we are there for you.
This is good to go now.
Of course, in reality,
I couldn't show you around because it's members only.
Absolutely.
We're rule breakers.
So let me just show you some things here
in the South Library that are quite interesting.
This is Faraday's wheelchair.
Faraday, our great scientist, was also the honorary secretary
just at the very beginning of the club's history.
And there we have Dickens' chair.
And this incredibly tall arrangement,
with the three tiers, was the cheapest way
of accommodating this huge number of books in one room.
The only problem is that a lot of older members who have
vertigo are terrified of going up there,
so we send the library staff up to find the books.
I can well imagine that.
The Athenaeum does have
an amazing role of honor.
Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Churchill,
J.M.W. Turner, who does those wonderful interiors,
member of the club.
Wherever you look in a way.
The clubs went through a very hard time
in Pall Mall and in St James'.
And they were out of favor,
they were old fashioned, they were seen to be a relic
of the 19th century.
If you read the novels of Dickens and Thackeray,
there always seemed to be somebody going off to the club
and somebody coming back from Parliament to report
over a nice glass of Port.
I've been a member of a private members club
purely and simply because
I've got it as part of a promotion
and part of my work and what I was doing.
But average person, private member's club, is irrelevant.
That's out of our league.
- Yeah. - That's out of our league.
We are just London boys.
That's another...
It's another world for us.
Another world, exactly, yeah.
But they're lovely places.
- Apparently. - Yeah.
We only go to the main door,
we don't get invited in, we just drop off.
It's a very useful way of making sure
that you can meet someone and entertain them
in the middle of London,
but I would say it's more a functional thing for me
than part of my being and identity.
The only real advantage of a club
would be that it'd be a place
where you could go and sit quietly.
But who might come up to you
and want to have a good long chat?
Actors have a number of clubs
that they could be expected to join.
The Garrick, but women aren't allowed to be members
of the Garrick Club.
Why would I want to go to a club
that wouldn't have women in it? I don't know.
The men's clubs, they can go there,
they can sit, they can talk about racing
and Backgammon and things
and I don't necessarily want to do that.
You also know where they are.
That's probably quite positive.
You shouldn't regard them as exclusive,
just an opportunity to meet other people
and to widen your own circle of friends
and the bonhomie and the banter that can arise from it.
It's fun.
It's quite British.
John Wilson Croker,
he saw that in London, there were lots of political clubs,
there were lots of what were known as fashionable clubs,
really, for the aristocracy, if you like.
But what was needed perhaps was a club for writers
and artists and scientists,
which would not be about politics
and would not be about class.
The club built this Grecian temple
and under the auspices of Athena
and that sense of classical wisdom,
the scientists, artists,
writers, judges, cabinet ministers,
bishops, whatever their views, they could get along together.
A place at the Athenaeum was like gold.
This is a very British institution,
which suits me very well.
It reflects aspects of Britain
and its history that I warm to.
You know, inclusiveness, liberalism and conservatism.
And one of the things you have to be very careful about here,
at club table when you don't know whose opposite you,
is you might be sounding off about some subject
and you find the person opposite you,
is the world's leading expert in it.
So you tend to find people around here are quite cautious
to check on who's present.
That's happened to me.
Terrifying.
In terms of the membership of this club,
what I've tracked is the story of Britain,
because Britain has become much more dominated
by the middle class than by the upper class.
You're aware of classes.
You know Shaw said, "When an Englishman opens his mouth..."
"people judge him."
The Americans are quite good at class, actually.
Particularly among the upper echelons.
But the British have been very class-conscious
and some still are.
But I think there's been a big change there.
I think there's been a big change there.
Has the class system changed so sufficiently
that we're able to move forward?
It probably has, because probably there's more people
from various backgrounds making vast amounts of money.
I suppose that's the new class system
now in our country, isn't it?
People who have money. People don't have money.
Neil.
How are you?
Frank, nice to see you again.
Nice to see you too, absolutely.
Okay Frank, so here we are,
all ready for your second fitting.
You'll see a slight difference
to when you were last here in so much
as we've now made the bespoke shoe trees.
Which my younger brother made in our tree making section.
He's a fairly new... New character.
He's only been here 30 years or so, so yes,
we're still trying to train him.
He's a lifer, he's a lifer.
For sure, but most of us are, most of us are so, yes.
So the trees are also bespoke
and we're left with this beautifully varnished shoe tree,
which is an exact replica of your foot also.
So, it's got the correct width and contours that your foot has,
so the shoe will never shrink back,
you'd always maintain that size and shape,
which is very important for the longevity of the shoe.
The double monk is a shoe
that's been part of the firm's history
since it was created by my grandfather.
It has a sort of timeless quality to it.
So you've got the oak bark sole hammered
and shaped to your last and hand-stitched onto the weld.
The heel was built up with...
There's no block heel, this is individual layers of leather.
Every pair of shoes goes through
four different craftsman's hands.
We've got the closer who makes the beautiful uppers,
the shoemaker who's stitched all the sole
and the heel together.
And then the tree makers who make the wooden inserts
to go in afterwards.
So all these guys are highly trained, highly skilled.
It's very much a team collective effort.
I get to see you and get all praise
what a beautiful shoe it is,
so I get the glory when they fit well,
but by the same token,
I also get the grief if they don't.
So I guess it's a double-edged sword.
I kind of feel like
I'd want to sleep in them if I could.
If you're invited to one of our many amazing country houses
for the weekend, you wouldn't go wrong
by wearing a Henry Poole suit
and a John Lobb shoe for your arrival.
I'm sure you recognize this room.
Oh wow. I do, the library.
Well, there are many portraits in it.
There's one there of the 1st Earl of Carnarvon.
Obviously, Geordie and I have got to number eight.
What's quite special about Highclere,
is there has been an estate here, a home here,
if you like, for at least 1200 years.
So one of the most special things about this building,
heritage, gardens, home is the longevity.
I think the idea that you have this great perspective
looking backwards, a sense of an anchor,
perhaps a sense of reassurance in quite a changeable world.
We've been here a while.
In 1922, Lord Carnarvon and Highclere Castle
were front page news around the world.
Against all the odds, Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter,
two maverick Englishmen, discovered the steps,
the 22 steps which led down to the Tomb of Tutankhamun.
That glint of gold.
That glimpse back into a Pharaonic world 3500 years old,
captured the whole world's imagination.
What a story to have at Highclere Castle.
My father-in-law had always told me the story,
the end of World War II, he and some of his Army friends
with Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret ran around
the streets of London and did the conga
and just celebrated the end of World War II.
And they were all standing outside the black gates
of Buckingham Palace.
My father-in-law with Princess Elizabeth
and Margaret shouting up to the King and Queen,
"Long live the King and Queen."
They'd always remained friends
and she had a love of racing,
so he was her racing manager,
but her racing friend above all.
Geordie, my husband, and I took over the Castle
after his father had sadly died.
His parents had never lived in it.
It reminds you that a home
is about welcoming friends to the door.
Julian and Emma Fellowes were good friends
and I thought it'd be fun
and I love putting together weekend house parties,
it was where this house started in Victorian times.
So Julian Fellowes said that he wrote Downton
with Highclere in mind.
None of us dreamt or guessed how successful
Downton Abbey would be,
how we'd all fall in love with the different characters,
whether it's Bates or Anne or Lady Mary.
It's really Julian Fellowes' excellent writing
and I guess the way Maggie Smith delivers all her lines
so perfectly.
It's just making people happy.
That's all Highclere wants to do.
Hats have almost disappeared.
Ties have almost disappeared.
Well, we'll be naked next I should think.
Lock's dates back to 1676.
We're the oldest hat shop in the world
and one of the oldest still family-owned businesses
in the world as well.
We originally opened on the other side of the street.
This is the sunny side of the street.
You always do more business on the sunny side of the street,
because that's where people want to walk.
My great, great, great,
however many great-grandfathers it is,
was a gentleman called James Benning
and he is famous as he is the original Mad Hatter
that Lewis Carroll based the character on
in Alice in Wonderland.
So I am a direct descendant of the original Mad Hatter.
I'm very proud of that.
We've got a great connection with James Bond.
We hatted Sean Connery in the '60s.
In Dr. No, he famously wore a Trilby.
In Goldfinger, Oddjob wore a,
what we call a square crown Coke
and that was the one with the reinforced brim,
which he used to throw at his victims
and sliced their heads off and all sorts.
Famously, the square crown Coke was also worn
by Winston Churchill.
We were very proud that Winston Churchill
was a big customer of ours,
before and during and after the war.
When the war was taking a turn for the worse,
you'd find that when you look in the ledgers,
there'd be an insertion for Winston Churchill for a new hat,
because it was a way of him lifting his spirits
when the chips were down.
One of the moments in history
that my family are very proud of,
is that my grandfather fitted the crown
for the Queen's coronation.
We were commissioned by Garrards, the Queen's jewellers.
To make a velvet pad that went inside the crown,
so it would size it down,
so it would fit the Queen on her coronation day.
So we use a machine called a conformateur,
a French invention, dates back to 1849
and we still use the same machine today.
We haven't found a better way of doing it.
Looks like an instrument of torture.
I think someone described it as quite steampunk
and I quite like that.
Right, okay, so if you look straight ahead for me.
Plonk the old girl on, get it centred for you
and then just pushes down.
Looks like it should hurt, but it doesn't hurt at all.
And then we just give that a squeeze.
There we go, lift that off.
It's little bit of an old girl,
so we have to give it a little bit of gentle persuasion.
And then hopefully, there's an imprint of your head shape.
There you go, sir.
That is amazing and it's an exotic looking egg.
Yes, yes.
What I love is when I get a customer coming in here,
a young guy comes in and says,
"I've always wanted a Lock hat
"because my grandfather wore one."
♪♪♪
Frank, you've been very patient
for the various visits to here
and today's visit is to see the outfit completed now.
I am very, very pleased as how it's turned out.
My son being a racehorse trainer...
I mean, he's had as many as over 100 horses in training
at any one time and quite how he manages
to know which horse to run, in which race,
in which country, I don't know.
And of course, a lot of staff here follow Hugo.
Quite often. I'm stopped in the passage and they go,
"Hello, my Lord, I'm 100 pounds better off
than when I last saw you."
won by the favourite, Chauncery House!
Trained by Nicky Henderson.
Ridden by Nico De Boinville.
We're here at Sandown Park,
a quintessential British racecourse.
We try and come as much as we can,
we absolutely love horses.
We have a share in a couple of horses as well,
so it's our favourite place to be.
Yeah.
Sandown Park has always been a favourite racecourse
of the Royal Family.
Indeed, the Queen Mother used to say
it was her favourite racecourse.
And Nicky Henderson, who trains for the Queen,
is here today.
I know people don't like two-horse races.
I love them, in fact, one-horse races.
Concorde used to come over
5 to 11 every morning.
You could set your clock by it.
Right, we're going again.
I'm Nicky Henderson, a racehorse trainer.
I was always equestrian-minded, if you like.
Even from school days and at Eton in those days,
racing was about the biggest crime.
To be caught on a racecourse was a heinous crime.
Well, I was very lucky actually,
because the Queen Mother's horses came here
and we had some wonderful times.
I mean, she was a spectacular lady.
I think she really enjoyed the people
that were involved in racing.
Racing's full of characters.
Some good, some bad, mostly good.
The Queen took over the Queen Mother's horses
and all the mares that were breeding.
She toured the horses and she loved to come down
and see them.
And it's lovely that she takes such an interest in it all
and as you know,
racing is probably her number one relaxation, hobby, passion.
Both the Queen Mother and the Queen, they're A,
very knowledgeable, but B,
terribly easy to work with and talk to about something
that we both love.
The Gold Cup, the Champion Hurdle, the Champion Chase,
they are the pinnacle, the Oscar, if you like,
of the racing world.
Over the years, there've been some good days
and I suppose these are the special ones,
because these are Bobs Worth and Long Run's Gold Cups.
2012 was a particularly good Cheltenham festival.
Horse's feet vary in size quite considerably
and as you can see, there are big ones
and there are little ones.
This is actually a youngster of Her Majesty's,
called Rapid Flight.
He's... They're all homebred.
And he's a rather sweet horse.
He won the other day and he's due to run again this weekend,
if he doesn't eat the door.
But he's just a nice youngster,
his life's in front of him, so who knows?
And what is the breakfast of champions?
Well, this morning he... What?
- What he's actually had to eat? - Yes.
He's had a bowl of nuts, he's had some hay,
he's been out,
he's been actually jumping this morning.
Wow, so beautiful.
So, Rapid Flight.
He's called Rapid Flight.
I don't know how rapid he is, but he won the other day
and I hope you win again this weekend.
Have you ever been to the Proms?
I haven't, no.
I'm not very British, am I?
♪♪♪
Could I tempt you with a programme, sir?
Oh my goodness me, yes of course.
Yes, it's £5 and it goes to support our charities
and we've just surpassed a million pounds
raised for charity.
I'm Susie Gregson, founder and Chief Executive
of Proms at St Jude's.
I think you're missing
three very important letters there, Susie.
MBE. I was awarded an MBE by Her Majesty, the Queen.
I was awarded it for services to the community.
Pretty much for founding Proms at St Jude's
and for keeping it going for so many years.
♪♪♪
Proms was set up almost 30 years ago.
I don't think any of us anticipated
that it would last as long as it did
and be as much loved as it is.
By pulling together, we've become a community
and over the years,
we've consistently raised money for good causes.
It's almost entirely run by volunteers of all ages.
Proms isn't a new concept.
It started, I think, in the mid-18th century
and it started with pleasure gardens,
where people could stroll around while musicians played.
Well, tonight we've got a wonderful concert
with Braimah and Konya Kanneh-Mason.
The Kanneh-Masons will be playing Elgar's Sospiri
and Elgar, of course,
was actually living in Hampstead when he wrote it.
So really, we're playing it on his doorstep.
♪♪♪
It was special to play a piece
in Hampstead knowing that it was written so close
to where we were performing.
We both live in West Hampstead.
It was a really lovely atmosphere for us to play in.
If Elgar was sat in the audience,
I would love to speak to him afterwards
and ask how he thinks we did
and what he thinks we should do or change.
I grew up with music around the house.
It was always there,
so I think that's how I naturally gravitated towards it,
because then I was just immersed in music
from a very early age.
We were extremely lucky
to have parents who grew up loving music.
They really believed that it was an essential part
of the education, and we've just been really, really lucky
to have had incredible opportunities
and an amazing support network.
♪♪♪
My name is Dylan Kawende.
I'm the British-born son of Congolese Rwandan refugees.
I set up the #GetDyl2Cambridge campaign
to pursue my dream of becoming a lawyer.
So my dad received an offer to study at Cambridge University,
but he couldn't take up the place
because he didn't have the funding.
Back in the '90s, my parents migrated to the UK
during a time of chaos and disorder.
They always dreamed of a better future for myself
and my four siblings. So when they came over here,
the aspiration was that we would all benefit society.
And that has helped me to forge my own path
and despite the financial hurdles
of studying law at Cambridge University,
I've been able to pursue my dream.
Lots of people will recognise my campaign,
my #GetDyl2Cambridge campaign.
An arduous effort, but definitely worth it
and I wouldn't have had all these resources
if not for the people who believed in me.
It's been an amazing journey, an amazing experience.
There is still that feeling in rural England.
There's something rather lovely about it.
I love going into old churches in little villages
and sensing the history and the sense of peace and quiet.
I love going to Grantchester
and having cream tea in the orchard tea rooms.
Is that the whole of modern Britain?
No, of course not. But it's part of the whole.
Chocolate box, Christmas card, the village.
I'm not a villager,
I'm a provincial urban lad,
so I get much more sentimental
about the paintings of L.S. Lowry.
Lowry painted the now demolished cityscapes of the North.
The mean little houses and streets
and the big overpowering factories and churches.
Smoke in the air.
Damp. Dirty.
Well, the North was a bit like that
when I was growing up and I can get sentimental about that,
rather than...
anything down at Grantchester with all those posh people.
You know, the mountains of the Lake District,
the mountains of the Highlands of Scotland,
they are some of the oldest landmasses in the world.
The Himalayas, the tall mountains these days are new,
they've just arrived.
The Pennines have been here since time immemorial
and I get sentimental about that.
If I am trying to think what it is to be British
is to have lived in the variable landscapes.
Which people down South here on this little island,
people who live in London, they don't know about mountains.
There aren't any mountains here, there're a few hills.
No mountains.
I don't think there's a direct link between us
today living in London and the London where Shakespeare lived.
I mean that's long, long ago and it was very, very different.
Very violent, horrible place, actually.
Cruelty on the streets.
Deaths in the air.
Short lives.
Dirty. Disease-ridden.
Mmm-mmm.
You're at Bekonscot Model Village,
the oldest model village in the world.
This is where we got the quirky names.
The fruiter is, You Are A Peach, Heavenly Soles
and this is the smallest Marks, Spencers in the world.
What did they sell in the '30s?
And they sent us all the information.
And basically they just sold hats, stockings, shoes,
gloves and scarves.
Things like that. Not like they do today.
This is a little memorial to our founder, Roland Callingham.
People think he's buried there, but he's not.
Why do you think the 1930s was chosen
as the period?
I think it was the time was just about right,
because then after that, everything sort of changed.
I think we got it just right.
So it was almost like an idyllic,
quintessentially British time?
Oh, I think so. No doubt about that. Yes.
Yes, it was. It was.
That is English.
Even now you go out and about on a Saturday and Sunday,
they're playing cricket.
One thing we can't get to scale are the fish.
These are enormous, mutant whales in scale, so yes.
Do you think the trains run on time here?
Oh, definitely.
No leaves on the line or anything like that, no.
Hiya.
Why are Pixar movies so successful?
Because Pixar works for kids and it works for adults.
Maybe that's the secret success formula for Bekonscot.
Yes, I think it is, yes.
You come as a child, you bring your children,
you then bring the grandchildren and it starts all over again.
And you've got Ascot Racecourse, as it was in the 1930s.
One of our model makers who got the MBE,
he went up to meet the Queen.
He actually spoke to the Queen
for it seems a lot longer than everyone else,
because she said, "Oh, I came such and such a year."
And he said, "Excuse me, Mom, you came in," whatever.
And they chatted, you know.
If it'd been anyone else,
it'd been off with his head, you know.
Her Majesty came with Queen Mary in '34 and '39.
The Royal Family has decided that it will define itself
through its theatrical presentation of itself.
And a parade, a royal parade,
is something quite remarkable and it's very British.
This is the first time we've had an opportunity
to celebrate a Platinum Jubilee.
The first time in all our history
that somebody should be on the throne for 70 years.
How fantastic is that?
Without a doubt, over the last few years,
the most extraordinary person, not just who is British,
is of course, Her Majesty the Queen.
What an amazing woman.
Well, she means the glue that holds the nation together.
Because if you look back,
she's been one of the most effective
and best monarchs we've ever had.
The Queen means everything. She's iconic.
She is an incredible role model.
She's been a fantastic public servant.
The sport of kings, it has to be renamed the sport of queens.
She's a star. Like you know,
Queen is someone everyone has to look up to.
Oh, I love the Queen.
We'll raise a glass to the Queen.
Yeah, without the Queen being here,
this country wouldn't be what it is.
Exactly.
But the Royal Family,
aren't they German in origin?
We don't... Well...
We don't look at them like that.
No. No.
They've become British,
I'm not sure whether one would call them English.
Oh, they're English, they're not German,
they are Anglo-Saxon.
Well, where did the Anglo-Saxons come from?
The reason they are very British,
is that they are very British.
They're hugely valued for what they offer
and for what they represent.
The monarch has to be apolitical.
But it doesn't stop us, the world,
the papers analysing, perhaps,
some moments that seem slightly more provocative.
Her most marked sartorial choices,
was at the State Opening of Parliament in 2017.
She came in steadfast in a beautiful mid-blue suit,
matching hat with a perhaps
not too subtle circular formation
of star-like yellow flowers, resembling the European flag.
Part of me thinks if she was allowed to talk,
she would be disappointed
that we were breaking our ties with Europe,
but only she knows and maybe her dresser.
♪♪♪
I was 20-years-old.
I remember all the people in the street, myself included,
to see the car and the Queen.
Everybody was amazed by that.
That was an amazing day.
So you saw the Queen go by?
Absolutely.
Were there are George's crosses
on the streets then?
Oh, that's a good question.
I don't remember that.
As a country, we're pretty good at friendly appropriation
of other people's property.
I mean, St. George,
I don't think St. George was actually an Englishman.
I don't know too much about him.
I'm pretty sure he is the saint,
the personification of Britain.
So, yeah.
The Genoese in the north of Italy,
their state flag was the white and red flag
that we know is the English flag.
From a footballer perspective,
you know, we look at that flag with real pride
and as something to fight for
and as something that we want to kind of take across
and do the best we could.
So I always had a lot of love and pride
towards St George's Cross.
I'm very pleased to have a conversation with you guys,
because you asked me a good question.
Why there are very little Italian flag here
and there is also St George flag?
St George's flag was adopted in Genoa immediately
after the first crusade.
The King of England decided to ask the permission
to the Genoa Republic to use the Genoa flag
in order to be safe cruising in Mediterranean area.
Our so-called English flag,
we were actually shelling out the reddies
year by year saying,
"Hello Genoa, sorry, we owe you a bit of money
"for our national flag, here you are, darling."
I was not able to understand why they stopped in 1599.
Our King or Queen said, "I think we've had enough
"of paying out for this Genoese flag and I like the flag,
"let's keep it."
So this is really our flag.
We wrote down a letter to the Queen, to Buckingham Palace.
We received a very good letter back from Buckingham Palace,
I'm very proud of that, saying, "Big thanks."
Maybe one day with all the money coming from the flag,
we may reconstruct the Republic of Genoa.
That could be a good idea.
Don't say here, because this is illegal,
so I'm not going to say that. Okay.
We need to have a conversation about the St George flag.
We love it and I'm sure you guys love too.
We can decide that April 23rd
we should have a celebration all together.
People from England and people from Genoa.
I, before starting this documentary,
thought that the St George's flag
is a quintessentially English flag,
but filming this documentary,
we discovered that the English stole it
from the Italians, from the Genoese.
Well, to be honest, it doesn't really surprise me.
We're quite a thievery nation, I suppose.
Is that so?
I'm not surprised to learn that as a story.
What you've just told me is all brand new information,
but very interesting that maybe comes up
in a quiz one day I might use.
What is actually British?
Think about it, fish and chips isn't, tea isn't.
A cup of tea, "Cuppa cha, sir, cuppa cha."
Lovely Cockney, "Cuppa cha."
It's not a Cockney word at all, "cha."
"Cha" is a Mandarin Chinese word.
Tea is from China.
Yes so, I think that's something
to link the two cultures together.
Three times the number of British people
have an Indian dish every week.
Wow, that's great, okay.
Which dish in Indian, like, what do they like?
They say chicken tikka masala.
Wow, chicken tikka masala, nice.
That's my favourite too.
Juana, what's the national dish?
Well, we definitely at home still have fish and chips
every Friday evening from the local fish and chip shop.
Fish and chips.
That is the quintessential English dish.
Thank you very much to those Jewish immigrants from Europe,
who brought the idea of fried fish with them.
Beef, of course, is a French word, boeuf.
Mutton and lamb comes from the Normans.
Oh and thank you very much to the Vikings,
because they brought this idea
of smoking fish and preserving fish,
so smoked salmon and smoked haddock and kippers.
Thank you very much to the Vikings.
Pork, not pig, pork.
Foreign word. Because the French were better cooks.
That's the reason.
Imagine the UK without any Caribbean influence.
Rum punch, jerk chicken, Red Stripe,
like, a British person, one of their favourite beers
is generally a Red Stripe, everyone knows it.
Beer. English bitter beer,
one of the most famous in the world.
That's not English.
500 years ago, we didn't have any hops.
They came from the Netherlands,
from what is now Belgium and Holland.
They had hops.
They showed us how to make beer.
Cider, cider, English cider's lovely.
Thank you, the Normans.
Thank you, William the Conqueror,
for bringing all your apples over
and showing us how to make cider.
Whiskey. Now, that'll be British. Would it?
Why don't you ask the Irish?
Because it's probably the Irish who invented whiskey.
Gin. Now gin, the quintessential English drink.
No, it isn't.
We got the idea from Holland
and they got the idea from North Africa via Italy.
Not English at all.
Where did the sausage come from? The British sausage.
You can't get those abroad.
And there's nothing like one.
A British sausage.
Superior to any sausage I've ever had
anywhere else in the world.
Now, is that not quintessentially British?
♪♪♪
Who are really English is very hard to say,
really, if you look at the history.
The more you look back, the more interesting it gets
and the more different peoples come into the equation.
It's so fascinating to see one wave of immigrants
after another so...
And it's still continuing of course.
We've had to face our, you know, all our phobias, haven't we?
Our racisms and our fears and our anxieties about the other,
but we're all the other.
We are the other. Of course, we're mongrels.
That's what's so absolutely wonderful.
This has, in some ways,
always been a multicultural society.
It's more evident now,
because of obviously the end of empire
and the whole impact of a Commonwealth
and all of those things.
It's been very interesting to see
how many people have been very keen to live in Britain.
Is it just about there being a national health system
and there being a social security system,
of a kind that you certainly don't get
in the United States?
No, it's about more than that.
It's about people being attracted
to certain assumptions about the way we live.
I come... My family come from Ireland.
We know all about wanting to be accepted as foreigners
in this country.
It takes a while, but we do integrate,
we do welcome people from abroad.
We always have.
Churchill?
- He was half American. - Hm?
He was half... His mother was American.
Well, maybe that's quintessentially British
that in fact you're not local at all,
you're an invader or an immigrant
or started from somewhere else, why not?
I love the idea of this country being multiracial,
which it gloriously is.
In an ideal world, I like the sense
that anybody could consider themselves to...
call Britain home, because I think that its...
At its best when it celebrates how cosmopolitan it is.
I get frustrated when British people think
we're not inclusive and that we're not all embracing,
because from what I've seen from my travels, is that we are.
We really are.
Your surname is Petrucci.
Mm-hm.
Is that an English surname?
It's Italian. Sicilian. My Grandad.
Launer is a truly British company
and I'm very proud of the fact,
because of course my background was originally from Germany.
Jacob Dege came over from Germany in 1855.
My great-great-grandfather was also a tailor in London.
His son and Mr. Dege's, or now it's pronounced Dege,
their two sons got on very well,
so they actually started up on their own.
Culturally, I think because of the richness
of people's experiences from the Caribbean, from India,
from Africa, from Europe obviously makes it far richer
and there is really something for everyone.
Oh, we are in Chinatown, phenomenonal.
Amazing place, yes.
It's a good place to mix with British culture
and international culture and Oriental,
Chinese culture as well.
There's so many Indians over here
and I don't feel like I'm an outsider.
I feel like I belong to this place.
British Asians are definitely a huge part of Britain
with our cuisines, with our commerce, with our cricket.
There are a lot of dishes in our culture
to have worth celebrating that.
When I was retraining my career
in horticulture, Leonardslee was kind of spoken of
in hushed terms then, it was the lost hidden gem,
it was shut for, you know, eight to ten years.
Ironically, for a quintessentially English
woodland garden,
it was saved by a South African-born family.
So Penny Streeter and her family bought it,
reopened it and are driving it forward,
making it what it is today.
Elgar was...
He was often considered quintessentially English,
but a lot of his influences were European.
It's not unusual for foreign influences
to find their way into British culture or British society.
Same is true of cricket.
It probably originated in South East England,
but there is a competing theory
which suggests the game was imported by Flemish weavers,
who arrived in this country in the 16th and 17th century.
So, foreign influences have made their way
into English cricket, just as they have
into every other aspect of British life.
Britishness, for me, is not about being insular.
It's about being open to the world,
absorbing influences and being able, in turn, to influence.
And that, I think, is one of the things
that makes us special.
Britain, 300 years old,
England, 1,100 years old.
They're very different things historically.
They often say about England
that it's really the history of the shires.
Back in the mists of time is where we come from, as it were.
It's very interesting that the British
are often called the English,
which extremely annoys members of the other nations.
Now where I come from is extremely English.
On all sides of my family, English.
You have Irish ancestry as well.
I do.
Do you consider yourself
quintessentially English or British?
It's very interesting you should ask that,
because I've just done that programme
Who Do You Think You Are?
There is a huge slice of me that is Irish.
And I was born in England.
And then there's a lot of something elsewhere, as well.
I can't say anymore.
I'm like a kind of fruitcake.
Yes, and I discovered
when I did the same program
that I had quite a recent relative
who was a professional actor.
I could feel myself to be a Kiwi,
having worked there for quite a lot.
Sean, born and bred in Swansea in South Wales
and lived in London most of his life,
still feels he's abroad when he's in London.
I think I've brought my Welshness with me
throughout my whole life, everywhere I've been.
But I've lived in South Africa, I've lived in America,
I've lived in England, so I've lived all over the world.
And if you ask me in ten years,
I'll probably be clearer, but at the moment,
I'm certainly feeling very Welsh, yes.
Blood wise, I'm half Irish,
so I feel like I'm a bit of everything.
But I guess I quite enjoy playing up
to being a little bit of a stereotype of somebody
who's English, but you know, and sort of sounding posh,
but I'm not really posh either.
I just happen to have a posh voice.
But my parents are from South East London,
so they talk like that.
So I don't know what I am,
but I quite enjoy playing a bit of a character.
And if I'm really feeling it,
I like to pretend I'm in Downton Abbey.
That's usually when I'm at home.
Ooh, quintessentially British, I think. Yes.
Yes, I'd like to think.
I think British is probably how I would identify myself with,
purely and simply because
of the diverse nature of where I'm from.
You know, my dad's from Jamaica, my mum's from England and Wales
and you know I think to encapsulate
as many of the islands
as I possibly can and areas within myself,
that's why I would probably call myself British
over just English.
English. Yes.
Why?
Um... I don't really know, to be honest.
British is a bit, maybe, sensitive at the moment.
- English. - English.
And why so decisively?
Why? Because that's our origin. We are English.
Yep, definitely.
I feel I completely identify as a very British person.
Yes, I'm very much a proud Brit. Absolutely.
I'm from Monmouthshire, the border of Wales,
so I think I always sounded very English
to the Welsh people and Welsh to the English people.
So I think I've always had
a slightly mongrelised accent, so...
You're not born British, you have it thrust upon you.
I would consider myself English,
though my parents were both from Glasgow.
Yes, I think I do consider myself quintessentially English.
I would consider myself British.
The connotations of being considered English
are fairly negative, I still feel.
I am English, I am British, I am Congolese, I am Rwandan,
I'm a Christian, I'm black, you know,
I'm happy to wear that complexity with pride.
When people ask me where I'm from,
I say I'm from the Caribbean.
Because like I am and I'm very proud
to be from the Caribbean.
I am English and proudly English
and I am Irish and proudly Irish.
Quintessentially British,
I've never thought of myself as English.
I think we're a generation
that have grown up being Brits rather than...
English in a way.
If not more European.
I am English, I was born in England.
But I also consider myself British and to be honest,
in the current political climate,
I consider myself European as well.
I'm not allowed to say I consider myself European.
Delete that bit from the...
I consider myself British.
I'm Lancashire all the way through.
I'm Chorley all the way through.
We've got great sport, we've got great food.
Morecambe Bay Shrimps, Bury Black Pudding,
Uncle Joe's Mint Balls from Wigan.
With all this coming out of Lancashire,
we have so much to offer.
So what do I call myself?
A Lancastrian.
Proud to be a Lancastrian,
proud of my accent, proud of the North of England.
And of course, yes I'm English.
But I'm British as well.
And I represent a parliament
that covers the United Kingdom and that matters to me.
So of course, yes, I am British, I am English,
but I'm a true Lancastrian.
I was born in England.
I have a deep attachment to England.
But I want to be part of an internationalist future,
not an English past.
I spent a lot of my school days and university time being taught
that nationalism had been a very bad, narrow thing
which was now extinct.
And yet we now see a new brand of narrow Englishness
that I think is terribly sad.
And I think it should be possible both to celebrate a,
yes, quintessentially British
or quintessentially English occasion like this
without wanting to take the whole country
into standing on the white cliffs of Dover,
giving two fingers to Johnny Foreigner.
Okay?
If I go home and tell my wife
that I've ended up talking about spies,
she'll just roll her eyes completely,
because that's one of my...
I actually write spy fiction in my spare time.
And it bores her to tears.
My immediate predecessor as Master of Pembroke,
was Sir Richard Dearlove, who had been head of MI6,
known as C rather than M in the James Bond films.
So, yes, there have been people
from the world of espionage or counter-espionage here,
but only in an official capacity these days.
We did have a previous Master who was burned at the stake.
I hope this isn't a pattern
that will be repeated for present and future Masters.
I think Frank, it's gin o'clock,
so it's been so nice meeting you.
And then this is what we have very much enjoyed...
creating, making, and then drinking.
Mind you, it was four years of making
and it was nine months of tasting gin.
Can you think
of any Shakespearean expressions off the top of your head?
"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well."
Not me.
- That's good, Fred, eh? - Not bad.
I'm educated, bruv. London taxi driver, see?
We know a bit about everything, a bit about everything.
I like to use, "Therein lies the rub,"
when I'm often making a joke about something where,
you know, it just maybe doesn't work properly
or whatever is not a big deal. "Therein lies the rub."
But of course, you know, when it was used
in a play originally,
it was for a very, very tragic situation, you know,
probably something life and death,
it usually is in Shakespeare.
"To be, or not to be, that is the question."
"Wherefore art thou Romeo?"
"She who doth protest," you know that sometimes gets said
in a bit of a joking way when you're like,
"Well, I'm really not bothered about this, but..."
Personally, I didn't like Shakespeare.
You know, the British have Shakespeare
and us Chinese have Confucius.
"Though this is madness, there is method in it."
"Such sweet sorrow."
It's like, she sells seashells on the seashore.
The shells she sells are seashells, I'm sure,
but if she sells seashells on the seashore,
then I'm sure she sells seashore shells
and I bet Ian McKellen can't do that.
Shakespeare knew and said often through his characters that,
"All the world's a stage,
"and all the men and women merely players."
We're all acting.