Staying in Touch with The Aristocrats
Geordie Hospital
Mick Jagger will call you, so make sure to have lots of biscuits.
The skinny Stone wasn’t happy when he dropped in at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, looked in the biscuit barrel and found it empty.
‘Oi Keef,’ he wailed. ‘I can’t get no . . . snackie action!’
Oh all right, I’m making up that last bit. But the denizens of Renishaw, Rick and Alexandra — descendants of the infamous artistic Sitwell siblings — insist it’s true that Mick came to visit.
A lid was lifted from an old soup pot, and the contents were expected to contain biccies. The ITV series Keeping Up With The Aristocrats is filled with stories similar to the one in the National Trust Guidebook.
It is a joke that while stately homes look regal, it is actually a normal life.
Lady Emma Fitzalan-Howard, whose father-in-law was the Duke of Norfolk, spends much of her time at Carlton Towers in Yorkshire ironing her husband Gerald’s linen shirts.

Dave (pictured), Alexandra and Rick’s butler, compares his work to his father’s pig farmer occupation.

The stately homes in Keeping Up With The Aristocrats are lordly, though life life behind the facade is anything but

ITV’s reality TV show, Keeping Up With The Aristocrats shows a glimpse into English nobility’s lives.
He seems to be able to deal with a lot. Most of the time, he’s pottering outdoors, trying to coax grapes from their chilly vineyard or smoking bits of trout in a converted garden shed.
Lord Ivar Mountbatten (a relative of the Queen and Prince Philip) runs a cafe in his Devon mansion, Bridwell. They are both experts at cupcakes together with James.
Princess Olga Romanoff conducts her own guided tours of her half-timbered country house in Kent, at £14 a head.
She was a charming flirt who could be trusted to ensure Mick Jagger received his cookies.
She likes the more macho type, though — military men, ‘trained killers’ in her words, preferably blond and tall.
Her father was Tsar Nicholas II’s nephew and her mother wanted to see her marry Prince Charles. Unfortunately for the British monarchy she chose the wrong religion.
‘He definitely had a lucky escape,’ she mused. We all did — Princess Olga makes Sarah Ferguson look like Sister Julienne from Call The Midwife.
It was all great fun, and the producers didn’t need to over-egg it with a string quartet on the soundtrack, scraping their way through hits by Abba and Lady Gaga.
Downton Abbey was not aware of this fact, although Renishaw Hall does indeed have a butler. His father was a farmer of pigs.
‘It’s the same thing,’ he said. ‘You feed them when they’re hungry and clean up their mess.’
Geordie Hospital (C4) was not short of one-liners and wisecracks. It was filmed at the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle and the Royal Victoria Infirmary.

Geordie Hospital follows life on the wards of the Freeman Hospital and the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle
‘We’re a bunch of oddbods, laughing morning, noon and night,’ declared one surgeon. ‘They have a sense of humour that is second to none,’ said another.
The nurses were chatting up the man on the fruit stall in the car park and the clinicians were giggling about their diets — it was non-stop fun and games.
That’s all very well, but it was a relief when transplant surgeon Colin Wilson, a miner’s grandson, spoke up in the operating theatre during a tricky procedure: ‘Jokes stop, banter stops, this is a serious job.’
Some were very serious. Kit, four years old, was waiting to receive a transplant.
The only thing that kept him alive was his massive battery pack. It powered the mechanical pump located in his small chest.
His parents, inevitably, looked wrung out. The only thing that keeps you going in that circumstance is light-hearted moments.
Hurrah, then, for Poppy Jingles, the ‘staff welfare hound’ who was back at work after being unable to come in to the hospitals during lockdown. She was ‘furryloughed’.