Thanks for the link. I hope it works out.
This is just on UK TV now..
Please don't be offended, it's more about Francis Falford then the USA. FF had most people in the UK stitched up in laughter for his shows, but you do have to be broad minded on just about every non politically correct subject out there.
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Francis Fulford: Why America Sucks
THURSDAY 8th DEC, 22:50
The opinionated aristocrat crosses the Atlantic to air his views on the United States. Travelling from east coast to west, he explains why he finds them so irritating.
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More on FF.
timesonline.co.uk
There is some good stuff on it though, what Americans really think. FF (the most opinionated person on planet earth imho) is giving it a good play.
If you want to see what a most ultra ultra posh (and broke) British aristocrat thinks of the USA, then give it a watch.
enjoy. -g-
pb.
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The aristocracy? we swear by it...
Hugo Rikind
Francis Fulford is an aristocrat as unreconstructed as his 800-year-old stately pile. He, his family and their colourful language are about to star in a documentary, The F***ing Fulfords
SOMEWHERE ON the battlements of his sprawling Devonshire family home, after leading me up many a rickety staircase, under many a flap of dangling wallpaper, and across several creaking, crumbling attic floors upon which I am careful only to tread where he has trod, Francis Fulford looks out over his 3,000 acres, and frowns. “Crisis point?” he drawls. “I wouldn’t call this a crisis point. One of my ancestors was hung, drawn and quartered in 1463. That’s what I call a f***ing crisis point.”
And then Francis Fulford laughs. A great spluttering heave of a laugh. A Blackadder character’s laugh. The kind of laugh that leads to class war. This 51-year-old is the patriarch of the 24th generation of Fulfords to have inhabited Great Fulford, a sprawling 800-year-old pile in Dunsford, near Cheriton Bishop, Devon. By his own estimation, he’s the sixth or so since things started to slide. And he’s the first, ever, to have dabbled in reality TV.
Fulford, his wife Kishanda and their four children are the stars of The F***ing Fulfords, a one-off Cutting Edge special, billed as “Devon’s answer to the Osbournes” and to be shown tomorrow. “We’re doing it for the money,” he tells me, frankly. It’s a maelstrom of f-words, political incorrectness and upper-crust family dysfunction. And it’s pretty good. Would it be nice to have a series, like the Osbournes? Fulford is non-committal, waiting to see how he is portrayed. “Worst that can happen is that I come across looking a fool,” he says. “My friends know me. What do I give a damn?”
Having seen a preview, I think it is fair to say that Fulford, a man as unreconstructed as his property, doesn’t come across altogether well. But it speaks volumes about the man that, even once he has seen it himself (and at the time of writing, he has not) he probably won’t realise this. Rattling around in this glorious pile of bricks, attended by wife, brood, and a horde of black labradors, Fulford is the last of a dying breed — the impossibly posh. Mind-numbingly posh. Almost so posh that you can’t make out a word he says. Too old to have been a Sloane, too young to have served in the war, Fulford exists in a state of denial; denial that time has marched on, and his world, like his home, is crumbling.
“Crumbling”, by the way, is no exaggeration. “Structural problem,” barks Fulford dismissively, when we pass a crack on the ground floor that I could wedge my hand into. There are yawning holes in upstairs floors, divots the size of footballs taken out of plasterwork. Peeling wallpaper hangs throughout. In the 15th-century stairwell, the stuff is made of felt, probably priceless, and covered with what looks like a fleur-de-lys. Above, it flaps loose, like interior sunburn.
There are cobwebs everywhere. There is Jacobean woodwork held fast with superglue. And the Fulfords don’t really seem to notice any of it. Part way through our tour, my host leads me through the children’s nursery. “Oh dear!” wails Kishanda Fulford, coming the other way in an apron. “You aren’t going to write about the nursery are you? I’d be so embarrassed. It’s such a mess.” She’s right. It is a mess. The walls look as if somebody has been firing at them with a musket. But so do the walls everywhere else. I decide she is talking about the few small toys, scattered on the floor. Fulford isn’t sure how long he has been married to Kishanda, but he thinks it’s about 13 years. “Met through friends,” he says as we pass the ping-pong table in the 13th-century hall, propped up on old Penguin books. “Social life can be like the Olympic rings,” he says, spitting on his finger, and drawing a Venn diagram in the dust. “I was here, she was here. Cost me five meals to get engaged. Bloody good value.” Cheaper than a housekeeper. I wonder if Kishanda has had the chance to remove her apron since.
Despite their striking grasp of Anglo-Saxon vernacular, the Fulfords are of Norman stock. The first, also called Francis, was given the land by Richard the Lionheart, in return for putting up a good show in the Crusades. The current Francis Fulford, is the 23rd Fulford of Great Fulford. He inherited this house when he was 17, when his father died. As befits his background, young Francis spent a few years in the Army, and a few in the City, before taking a wife and moving home. It’s hard to gauge what the place must have looked like.
He concedes that it is now a “little scruffier” than in his childhood, but also maintains that the major structural damage took place in the Civil War, when the house was fired upon, raided, garrisoned and looted by both sides. “They stole the lead from the roof,” he says, and he’s still angry about it. “All this fell into disrepair in the 1800s,” he says, as we stroll through a hall. He points out a window frame. “Look at that. Shoddy workmanship. Cowboy builders are nothing new. We’ll have to sort that out, someday.”
By “we”, Fulford is not talking about himself. He means his family, perhaps a few more generations down the line. He talks in this fashion relentlessly. The house faced a battering in the Civil War because “we were Royalists, of course”. There is no family title because “we have always been Tories, never Whigs”. The more recent this is, the weirder it sounds. Fulford tells me that “we put in electricity in 1948”, even though he wasn’ t born until a couple of years later. He does remember the installation of central heating and mains water, neither of which arrived until the 1960s. “My father made sure one tap still came from the well,” he recalls. “Health and Safety came round — you had the sods even then — and discovered that our water was being filtered through a dead rabbit. We didn’t care. At least it meant we could go to India and not get the shits, eh?”
I don’t see the well, but I do see the fresh water lake, beside the house. Chocolate brown, it is fresh water only in the same sense as the marshes of the Somme. This doesn’t stop the Fulfords from swimming in it. “Francis, come quickly!” calls Kishanda. “The children have found a carp. It’s dead. They want to perform an autopsy.”
“Seems a bloody good idea,” Fulford hollers. “Oh, Francis,” sighs Kishanda, still in her apron. “Not an autopsy.” Outside in the sunshine, a horde of semi-naked, mud-splattered kids are sprinting up the slope to the house, bearing a large dead fish as a trophy. Dogs, yipping and darting, are everywhere. “Bloody hell,” says Fulford. “That’s a big one. You want to get him on the f***ing scales.” “Darling,” protests Kishanda. “Not my f***ing scales. They’ll get terribly messy.”
Fulford ignores her. He prods the fish’s belly, pronounces it full of roe, and the children mill about, impressed and obscenely vocal. Kishanda decides that she will perform the autopsy, after all. It’s a rather touching family scene, if a little foul-mouthed. But there are only six of them living here. It’s almost inconceivable that such a huge and beautiful place could be allowed to rot like this. This is ten miles from Exeter. My journey, from London, took me just over three hours. Couldn’t it be a hotel? A conference centre? Anything at all?
My host disagrees. “You need that initial capital,” he says. “There’s a common misconception about places like this, that we survive through grants and handouts. Not true. Never had a penny.” Fulford’s father applied for a National Trust grant once, in the 1950s. The request was refused by the then Lord Euston. Since then, they haven’t asked again.
“There are a lot of hoops to jump through,” Fulford sighs. “And these people come crawling over you. They have to approve the architect, and the builders, and there’s a lot of extra cost. It’s not cheap, sorting out a place like this. Look at what the Rutlands went through, sorting out Belvoir Castle. Damn near had to sell off all of Hyde Park.” I don’t know about that, I tell him. Did it happen recently? Fulford says it did. In around 1800. The man is adrift in time.
As landowners, the Fulfords do have an income, through rents from tenant farmers and forestry. It’s not nearly enough, and the family is forever on the lookout for lucrative — and, it seems, effort-free — financial opportunities. Hence the Channel 4 documentary. In the past, he has bought a metal detector to hunt for buried treasure and rented out his house to Penthouse Magazine as a location for glamour photography. “That was fun,” he says. “The London girls were the best. Cockneys. Real characters. All said they were doing it so they could send their children to private school. Amazing. Like the London hookers. They all say that, don’t they?”
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Can't get to page 2 on the article, the news source has clammed up on me. The essential msg is shown here though.
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