Dirty Work

Countryfile presenter Julia Bradbury

Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts laconic response when asked to describe 25 years with ‘the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band ™’ was “5 years playing and 20 years hanging around”. That’s pretty much how I felt yesterday filming with the BBC’s Countryfile team at Chatsworth House, except there were no groupies, no drugs and I didn’t play the drums.

But I did do a lot of hanging around. And fetching and carrying and organising to keep to the tight filming schedule.

The ‘palace of the peaks’ is undergoing its biggest restoration in more than 150 years so we’ve been extremely busy trying to persuade our friends in the media that it’s something they should take a big interest in. And they have. Aside from Countryfile, GMTV, The Daily Telegraph, The Mail on Sunday, The Sunday Times, The Times and BBC Front Row have all run features as well as a whole host of regional broadcast, print and web media.

Of course, it’s a success that has been a long time in the making. The team here began developing different storylines, identifying key media, targeting specific journalists and feeding through information months ago.

Chatsworth has always been progressive and keen to stay out of the decaying, musty and dusty stately home ghetto so while it has history and grandeur in abundance the unveiling of new galleries is just as important. The Duke of Devonshire has a passion for modern art and is now able to display, in one place and for the first time, works by artists such as Lucian Freud and Allen Jones as well as a new, computerised animation of his daughter-in-law Laura Burlington by Michael Craig-Martin.

Those expecting rural staples such as farming and forestry on Countryfile (broadcast 28 March, BBC1) will actually get both sides of an institution in glorious transition including the chance to see the House as it was when it was first built as the stonework is given its first clean in 300 years.

“Ah, all things come to those who wait” and at the end of a day spent planting trees, sheep-herding and tromping through the mud of rural Derbyshire I did at least have the pleasure of 30 minutes driving much-admired Countryfile presenter Julia Bradbury to Chesterfield station to catch a train back to the glitz and glamour of London – and a party with the Rolling Stones. Maybe.