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Oct. 15, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole

01:51:16

Jonathan Myles-Lea

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	I love Danny Poe!
	Come and subscribe to the podcast, baby!
	I love Danny Poe!
	Unless another time, subscribe with me!
	I love Danny Poe!
	Welcome to The Deling Pod, with me, James Delingpole.
	And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
	You do always say that.
	I do always say that.
	But in fact, I should get a bloody t-shirt made, shouldn't I?
	Definitely.
	Because, yeah.
	But before we're introduced, my guest has already spoken, so you know exactly who it is.
	No, you won't.
	People sometimes say to me, what is it that makes your podcast so different, so appealing?
	And what I haven't said them to before, but what I should say is that even though there's shed loads of podcasts out there now, and I've been in it for a long time, but since then an enormous quantity of competitors have come into the fray, And you do quite often see the same guests cropping up again and again.
	And what I think I'd like to offer is occasionally I will deliver a left-field guest.
	And this week's guest, actually, he's going to be so fantastic.
	I love him.
	I just know he's going to be brilliant.
	But he hasn't been on any other podcast or anything, have you Jonathan?
	No, no.
	His name is Jonathan Miles Lee and he was two years below me at school?
	Yeah, same house I think.
	Same house, but we didn't really know, one didn't know the little boys except to sort of bugger them.
	No, I saw you sort of drifting down a corridor occasionally.
	Exactly, I would have been like a god to you, wouldn't I?
	Kind of, yes, as was your brother.
	He was in your year, wasn't he?
	Yeah, he was the cool kid in the house.
	But what's quite interesting is that you found us out because basically I think you're a bit weird like us.
	Am I?
	Yeah, come on, don't say am I in that kind of... Really?
	You are quite eccentric and brilliant by the way.
	But I'm house-trained.
	Totally house-trained.
	You are probably one of the most house-trained people in Britain for reasons I'm about to explain.
	So how would you describe yourself?
	The kind of art that you do?
	Well I paint portraits of country houses and gardens usually from the air although I don't go up in the air and they're sort of biographical portraits of people's lives told through the properties they live in so they will include images of the owners and their cats and dogs and parts of the garden they perhaps planted for a birthday or a wedding and I've been doing that for 30 years.
	Did you... so... did you go to art school?
	No.
	Oh no, I'm glad you asked that.
	Very, very interesting.
	Yeah, I escaped art school.
	I think if I'd gone to art school, I would have ended up making piles of junk out of broken furniture and writing very pretentious artist statements.
	You might be richer though.
	No, no, no.
	My paintings are quite expensive.
	Oh, sorry, sorry.
	That was really impertinent of me to suggest that you're... That's alright.
	I'm glad I brought it up.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	That's brilliant.
	So, but yeah, you are...
	I suppose a society painter, aren't you?
	Yes, which used to be a term of abuse, but I think it's quite a flattering thing to say.
	You are the Rex Whistler de Nojour.
	Apparently so, yeah.
	I have been called the successor to Rex Whistler, which is very nice.
	And before that who would have been the... It's a really grand tradition that goes back to the 15th century so there would be sort of initially Flemish artists that came over and would have done paintings of great country estates in the early 18th century like Longleat and there were artists like Jan Syboreks and Kip and Niff who used to visit the country estates around the country and do depictions of them bird's-eye views really and that carried on right through up until what the 1920s or so
	And so I saw myself as somebody sort of trying to reinvigorate this tradition and I just happened upon the right sort of clients so people like Sir Roy Strong.
	I love this you've got to tell us this because this is this is interesting so this happened when you were 27 so just before that what were you doing before you were 27?
	Well, I did a History of Art and Architecture degree at London University because I'd been to visit quite a lot of art schools and I knew I wouldn't fit in.
	The look of contempt on their faces as I opened up my portfolio was enough to tell me.
	Because you could draw?
	Yeah.
	They said, oh, it's very slick and arty, isn't it?
	I think what they really were seeing, I was quite competent as a draftsman and that's not what they were looking for in places like the Slade or the Ruskin.
	What did they want?
	They wanted people, well I'd look through some of the studios, they would proudly show me around the studios and I noticed that there was more paint on the floor and the easel than there was on the canvases.
	This is not really the sort of place for me so I decided to do an academic degree and go and study the history of art and architecture.
	But that was a revelation to me as well because when I arrived at university I discovered that we weren't really being educated about the history of art.
	It was more a case of, you know, using this critical theory and pulling the art apart.
	So I was rather disappointed by that experience as well.
	Even then?
	Oh gosh!
	We're talking about 30 years ago?
	Yes, all that time ago.
	1989.
	I was thinking about this earlier.
	So I went to London University and the first, the very first lecture I had was with a man.
	Can I mention names?
	Yeah, of course you can.
	Because I googled him this morning.
	I googled him.
	Andrew Hemingway, I think he was called.
	And I thought something's wrong here.
	He was talking to us about the great artists.
	Ingres, you know, amazing neoclassical French artist.
	But instead of telling us all the wonderful things about this artist and how his technique was flawless and how his portraits were some of the best that have ever been painted in the history of art, he attacked him on the basis that he was what we'd call now culturally appropriating.
	Eastern themes.
	But what I realized later, he was quoting from a book that was written ten years before by Edward Said called Orientalism.
	The terrible book?
	Yeah.
	That no intelligent person takes seriously?
	Well, some did and some didn't.
	It was a controversial book even when it came out.
	It was Bernard Lewis, who was a historian, who called it anti-Western.
	And I picked up on this, even though I was only, what, 19.
	I thought, something's wrong, you know, this is harming my appreciation of art.
	And I actually made a pledge with myself not to attend any more of his lectures, and I didn't.
	So I managed to get through the degree but I went and got a job at Channel 4 television instead.
	That's a weird thing to do.
	It was.
	Well I wanted to be around real people rather than academics.
	That's a dangerous thing to say.
	But you know there was a sense of resentment and a contemptuous attitude directed towards the great history, the canon of Western art.
	And I didn't like that because I was very lucky like you.
	I went to Malvern and your brother sitting next to you... We might hear from him soon.
	Yes.
	He had the same art teacher as I did and he was called Bill Denny.
	And he would do something really magical.
	He would take us into the art department and close these black curtains around us and show us slides of great paintings and great architecture and sculpture and frescoes and you would light that blue touch paper of enthusiasm and there was something magical happening in those lessons I'm sure you felt the same thing yeah they were very very um there were only five or six of us in in the class for sort of a level history of art and I I think on some years even smaller.
	But very enthusiastic people.
	Everyone there wanted to be there.
	And Bill was giving you a no-nonsense, mostly a tour of the Renaissance, wasn't it?
	Yeah, it was a survey, wasn't it?
	From the classical period right up until maybe not the present day.
	But, you know, he would talk to us about what was remarkable about a classical temple.
	You know, he was opening our eyes and showing us something that would give us a sense of awe and appreciation of art.
	Do you know, weirdly, I am, my study mate, whatever they're called, the person who shared your study mate with me, this guy called Rupert Longmire, and he used to do an impersonation of Bill Denny's history of art classes.
	And the one he used to, you see, Hans Holbein was born in 1497.
	So, I've always known ever since that Hans Holbein was born in 1497, which is quite useful having these dates to hand.
	Good to know, good to know.
	Like, I also know from my prep school that the Battle of Blenheim, Ramleys and Oudenaarde and Malplaquet were in, well, Brom 4689, so 1704, 1706, 1708, 1709.
	These mnemonics are really useful, I think.
	They last you through life.
	Sorry about that.
	Thank you for that, James.
	Do you do that little trick when you're at the supermarket and, you know, the price comes up and it's a 10.66 and you say, I don't know what happened because it's the 6th.
	Oh!
	Stamford Bridge!
	No.
	I'd do that.
	I wouldn't go for the obvious one.
	But no, I was a bit disaffected with university, so I had far more fun playing around at Channel 4, which I would have paid them to work.
	Doing what?
	So I was taken on, I was telling Richard earlier, and I just walked into reception one day and said, I'm Jonathan, could I have a job please?
	Because I'd love Channel 4.
	I remember seeing the first broadcast in about 1981, was it?
	I remember sitting in front of the TV waiting for it to come on.
	At school?
	No, I think it must have been at home.
	So I thought, one day I'd like to work for Channel 4.
	I'm not sure what I'd like to do.
	But, so I walked into the reception and I spoke to a girl called Mina on the reception desk and I said, hello, I'm Jonathan, I would like to work here.
	What can you do?
	I said, well, I can deliver wine to the boardroom or, you know, I can, you know, go and buy photocopy paper.
	I came up with a few ideas.
	So the next day I had a phone call from the head of the administration department on the, on the phone.
	What do they call those, those pay phones?
	Yeah, which was in the halls of residence at London University.
	And she said, I'm Barbara Angel.
	I thought it was nice that she was called an angel.
	And she said, come and talk to me.
	So the next day I went to the offices of Channel 4 and she said, I've created a job for you.
	You're going to be a humper.
	So I said, what does a humper do?
	She said, well, I'll give you this little sort of clip on electronic device and anybody in the company can just ring it.
	And it will show a number.
	You phone that number and you go to their office and you have to do whatever they want to do.
	So I thought this sounded enormous fun.
	So the first time I switched it on a number came up and as I said to Rich earlier it was Michael Grade.
	So he said to come up to the second floor where he had a set of coffee cups which were a little worn.
	The gold rims around them were a little worn.
	I wonder if you could help me and go to Heels and buy a new set of coffee cups for me, which I did.
	And then within about a month, I'd met all the heads of department around the company.
	And I was, as you say, we're all a bit weird.
	You know, I was wearing a cravat while I was working on Channel 4 and pressed my shirt very neatly in the mornings.
	I ended up working in the press office and then as a continuity announcer.
	So I read the links in between the programs and would say things like, and now a striking adaptation of The Tempest by Derek Jarman.
	On four.
	And I loved this.
	I loved it.
	And sometimes I would do it through the night.
	But it was obviously, you know, it's quite difficult to stay awake if you're waiting to go live on something.
	Especially if you're in a little dark recording suite with foam covered walls.
	So I'd bring a friend from university with a large inflatable hammer.
	And then when it came to my time to make the recording, he would sort of hit me on the head to wake me up.
	And the four logo would come on, you know, all these little pieces, little bricks like Lego bricks would come on.
	And I would announce and say, and next the news, or next Roseanne.
	In those days, Channel 4 was still, had yet to become this creature of the left that it is today.
	Yeah, it was.
	Although eventually they did sack me because I sounded too posh.
	Funny that.
	Is that how they expressed it?
	More or less.
	Not in so many words.
	You're not one of us.
	But I mean, I had a great time there.
	It coincided with something which meant that I wanted to leave London anyway, which is connected to Channel 4.
	But my boss in the press office took me to the Colony Room, which I don't know if you've heard about it.
	It was this incredible private club that had been going since the 1950s in Soho.
	And it was started up by a woman called Muriel Belcher, which is quite good if you're working in a bar.
	And then she handed it over to Ian Board, her barman.
	So when I used to go there, it was Ian Board, who was a very colorful character, used to sit on top of a stool next to the bar, sipping vodka and orange, and would hand out insults to everybody who came in.
	And if you weren't insulted, you felt insulted.
	So my boss took me to see an exhibition at Birch and Conran, it was a small gallery next to the Colony Room.
	And within 10 minutes he took me up to the Colony Room, because you really wanted a drink, that's what you did in the Colony Room.
	And this was the place where the London School of Artists used to meet.
	Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, and lo and behold, there in that room were some of the most exciting people I felt in London at the time.
	Maggie Hamling was standing by the piano, George Melly was sitting on a stool in a sort of stripy red suit, and right in the middle of the room was Francis Bacon.
	Looking very narrow.
	I felt that his body looked very narrow with this big sort of shining head and he had a very tight leather jacket on.
	And my boss put his fist in the back of my back and pushed me into Francis Bacon so I was about six inches from him.
	I was all dressed in white like a little angel.
	I was only 20 years old.
	And I thought, this is extraordinary, you know, I'm at university, I'm studying the history of art, but I'm meeting a real artist who had had quite a big impact on me at Malvern.
	As you know, I used to take blurred photographs that looked a little bit like Francis Bacon's.
	So my boss Ken announced to the room, like throwing a grenade into the culinary room, this is Jonathan, he's a Christian.
	And of course the reaction was to be expected.
	Ian Board exploded.
	That's the man who owned the club at the time.
	He said, Oh no!
	We want no Christians in here!
	Get him out!
	Get him out!
	Disgusting!
	Francis Bacon leant forward and got hold of my forearm and said, oh no, I think it's fascinating if anybody believes in anything.
	He said, come over here with me.
	So he took me over to the window seat.
	He said, now you tell me all about yourself.
	And luckily, George Mallet was sitting on a seat nearby.
	I said, well, at that time I painted portraits.
	Francis said to George Melly, do you think he's any good?
	And George Melly said, yes, he's painted me actually, which was this strange coincidence because I'd been very interested, as Richard will know, in George Melly because he's such a colourful character and I used to impersonate him at school.
	Goodness knows why.
	It was a very unusual thing for a 16 year old to be even aware of George Melly, but you were obsessed with him.
	You'd done a fantastic painting of him and you did a very good impersonation of him.
	I have to move to do that.
	I'm not going to do it now.
	But he sang like Bessie Smith.
	What do you mean?
	Can't you stand up and do it?
	No, no.
	I'm trying to think what I did.
	It's 30 years ago.
	He would sing songs like, they call me good time George.
	Who is the rooster?
	Who is the hen?
	It was all quite fruity, sort of bawdy songs, but he would wear these second-hand American suits and wear sort of crimson trilbies.
	He was the most colourful thing I'd ever seen.
	And also he was very edgy, quite naughty humour.
	And I found him far more appealing than all the pop stars at the time.
	Although, I did find, you introduced me to the acoustic recordings of David Bowie when we were at school, which I thought was pretty amazing.
	But my focus really was George Melly.
	So there was George Melly sitting next to us.
	Francis said, do you think you can paint?
	And luckily, George said, yes, he painted my portrait.
	It was very good.
	Very good.
	So Francis then took me a little bit more seriously.
	He said, oh, you must bring some things to show me one day.
	Which I did, of course.
	I'm not backwards and coming forwards.
	So the very next day I went back to the Collier Room and Frances was there.
	She would tend to go there for a drink in the daytime and then paint at night.
	And we ended up across the road at L'Escargot, the restaurant.
	Eleanor Salvoni ran it then.
	And the day went on.
	It got longer later and later.
	We had lots of red wine and I think he knew what he was doing.
	I ended up passing out in the bathroom and then I remember hearing this thumping on the wall.
	What's going on?
	And I literally had passed out, locked myself in the bathroom.
	Should I be telling this story?
	Anyway, so I was rescued and thrown into a taxi.
	We'd only gone about half a block when I knocked very politely on the glass screen between the passenger side and the taxi and said, excuse me, could you stop the taxi?
	And I opened the door and was very sick in the gutter.
	Unfortunately right outside Ronnie Scott's there was a whole row of about 20 people who applauded!
	And then I think I must have passed out at that point and then woke up the next morning on the floor in Francis Bacon's studio next to this sort of portable radiator and there was this sort of dressing gown, red and blue dressing gown I remember, sort of thrown over me and I could hear this sort of noise and I thought, what, is it a mouse?
	Is it a rat?
	I don't know.
	Eventually I opened my eyes and I was spinning.
	Oh my gosh, I felt so ill.
	And there was Francis Bacon standing at the easel in front of me, painting, painting.
	Well, apparently very few people have ever seen him painting.
	And the significant thing that I remember was that in his left hand he was holding a postcard of one of his paintings.
	It had a lot of orange and purple on this postcard.
	And I said, he said, oh, good morning.
	And I said, Francis, what are you doing?
	Because he seemed to be copying the postcard.
	He said, oh, it's the bloody Marlborough.
	They want everything to look the same.
	Meaning the Marlborough Gallery.
	So, you know, he was on a roll doing all of these pictures.
	And, you know, they quite like the bright colors in the 80s, late 80s.
	Anyway, so, and then he decided to make me some breakfast.
	So we, I remember we had some baked beans, because I love baked beans.
	And the funniest thing, I went to see the reconstruction of Francis Bacon Studios in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, about two years ago.
	And there was the portable radiator.
	There was the dressing gown on a chair next to the radiator and there on the floor was an empty baked beans can full of paint brushes.
	Who knows?
	It could have been the one that he opened for me when I was having a hangover.
	You know, it was a spooky experience because there's a plate of glass on the floor in the Hugh Lane Gallery.
	When you look down it you see the staircase that I sort of pulled myself up.
	Every so often.
	So yeah, so it was extraordinary.
	Anyway, I went back to the university and I told one of my tutors.
	Oh, I was so full of excitement.
	I met Francis Bacon.
	I went to his studio.
	The look of contempt on their faces.
	They were furious.
	Why?
	Jealous?
	Well, now I realize that must have been what it was.
	It was jealousy.
	What did they mask it as?
	I've no idea.
	I was really crestfall and I thought they would just jump on me and say, tell us all about it.
	This is on your history of art course?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Right.
	This was, I think this is the same chap who I've just, I've Googled him and apparently he's, he specializes in European landscape paintings seen through the eyes of Marxism.
	Oh great, so it's critical theory?
	Critical theory, yeah.
	So of course that made me feel even less inclined to attend all the lectures.
	So I used to just run back to, oh my gosh, so much more going on at Channel 4 than there was at university.
	So I had this very rich experience where I was meeting producers and actors and, you know, having a really good time in London rather than doing what I should have been doing, which is write my essays.
	So did the friendship, if that's what it was, continue with?
	Yes, for about 18 months.
	So that's another significant thing.
	I wouldn't be a painter if it wasn't for Francis Bacon because I was offered a permanent position.
	I was always sort of floating between different departments at Channel 4 and then I was offered a permanent position in the presentation department where I would have been doing links and recordings for the voiceovers.
	And so I thought, I'm not sure whether I should do it.
	I'm not quite sure.
	So I spoke to my boss, and I spoke to Francis, who was sort of a shoulder to cry on.
	He was born the same year as my grandmother, we discovered, so he was quite maternal towards me.
	And he said, don't do it!
	He said, television's ephemeral.
	He said, nobody will remember anything.
	He said, you are a real artist, and unless you're a painter, you'll never be happy.
	He said, leave London now.
	Otherwise you'll end up like all of us!
	We were in the calling room and he pointed around meaning people like Geoffrey Barnard, Dan Fass and whatever and they were all rich colourful characters but they were all obviously alcoholic and you know rather self-destructive characters.
	So I did.
	I followed his advice.
	I left London and I think within about six months he was dead.
	He died in Madrid and that was so... but it was extraordinary.
	It was sort of saying go and I was devastated he was saying that at the time but it was obviously he knew what he was doing.
	In London it can be a toxic place especially if you're involved in the arts.
	You know it's full of How fantastic!
	So he passed on the torch in a way to you, in an odd way?
	I don't know, but I remember being in awe.
	I knew he'd done well and he'd sold a painting because there'd be champagne bottles lined up on all of the little ledges in the colony room because he'd just say champagne for everybody and everybody had just a bottle and he used to drink out of the bottle I think.
	I remember seeing him drinking out of a bottle.
	But he also was very protective of one moment.
	Are you sure you want me to go on?
	Yeah, this is just great.
	Go on.
	I was living in Belsize Park in a single room but it was a lovely sort of ground room with lots of light and for some reason the landlord never came to collect the rent and I thought well maybe he's letting me live here for free.
	It could be, it happens.
	And then one day I came back from university or wherever and there was a note under the door saying please pay us £4,500.
	And I was really panicked, you know, I thought, what am I going to do?
	So the first port of call, rather than phoning my parents or going to university, I went to the culinary room, you know, it seemed to be a place of wisdom.
	And Francis was, luckily he was there and I showed him this letter and he said, I'm going to send you to my lawyer in, I think it was in Golden Square and he'll sort you out.
	Don't worry, don't worry.
	So I think the same afternoon off I went and this man looked at the piece of paper, put it down, he said, my advice to you is do a runner.
	So I said seriously can I do that?
	He said yeah they'll never find you.
	So I went back to the colony room and there was Francis a little more worse for wear and I said he told me to do a runner.
	He said well there's only one thing we can do.
	He said you're just going to have to come and stay with me for a while.
	Oh my gosh, I knew, you know, how potent that was that, you know, I was being invited.
	But he was friends, was it Michael Edwards or what was his name, his partner at the time, he said, he will be very jealous, so we'll have to be very careful about this.
	Then I went back to Channel 4 and I told my boss, you know, Francis has invited me to go and stay with him and I was elated.
	And of course, Ken being very sort of protective said, that's not going to happen.
	Where's Francis?
	So we got in a cab, went back to the Colony Room and there was this strange dynamic, I remember it theatrically, laid out, blocked in my mind.
	Francis in one corner of the room, Ken on the other side of the room and me in the middle.
	And Ken's saying, I know what your plans are.
	He's not going to come and stay with you.
	Yes he is, it's fine.
	He's got nowhere else to go.
	Oh Ken, don't be such an old woman.
	Blah blah blah.
	Carried on like this.
	And then Francis said, look, he's got nothing to worry about from me.
	Pointed at me, sort of glanced at me for a moment and said, excuse me.
	He said, You know, Ken, I like a man to be a real man.
	Of course, I was deeply offended, you know.
	I was six foot three.
	Anyway, it didn't happen.
	All that was put an end to and I left and I went to live with a woman called Cornelia Bailey, who some people might have seen on television.
	She owns this big old Jacobean house in Wales, which is not too clean.
	It was cleaner when I lived there.
	Right.
	And it was a way of me avoiding having a proper job, you know.
	I didn't want to... I wanted to paint.
	I really wanted to paint.
	So we might talk about this.
	I sort of materialize things.
	I have this sort of magical view on life.
	I visualize things very, very clearly and then they materialize very quickly.
	So I imagined living in this house that was full of brocaded velvet and sort of ancient curtains and within a couple of weeks a friend of mine from school said, oh that sounds like Cornelia, I'm going to see her at the weekend, do you want to come?
	So I went with my mother and she went with her mother and we entered this sort of extraordinary house full of toucans and cockatoos and parrots that were just flying freely around the house.
	And there was a cockatoo called Grimston that lived on top of the library shelves that used to poo prodigiously down the architectural section.
	And Cornelia said, why don't you move in?
	She used to be an antiques dealer in the New King's Road and she'd bought and restored this big Jacobean house.
	And so within a couple of days I'd moved in and I thought I was going to have time to paint.
	Basically I was just a house slave who had to feed the numerous, the menagerie really.
	And I didn't really get very much time to paint.
	But eventually she said, why don't you do a painting of the outside of the house?
	So that's the painting which is in the kitchen which you've just seen.
	And it went really well.
	It looked as though it had perhaps been painted in 1700.
	And then I just put a little advert in Country Life magazine in 1991.
	It said, Jonathan Marsley, country house painter.
	My telephone number.
	And the morning it was printed, it was October 1991, I had five phone calls.
	From people who lived all over the country, Norfolk, North Wales, Cornwall.
	And I just put my only painting in the back of the car and I would go off to these owners of country houses, hold it up on the wall and say, I'll do something like that.
	And that's how the career started and I've never stopped for 30 years.
	There's never been a gap for 30 years.
	That's fantastic.
	Now you should speak!
	No, I feel I'm redundant in this podcast.
	I think I'm just going to... Well, I'm going to start a podcast, I think.
	I think you should.
	I think you should.
	I think you should just deliver anecdotes about Francis Bacon.
	That could be the next 30 years of your career.
	But can I just talk about Richard for a moment?
	Because Richard was the first artist I'd ever met.
	You see, I was brought up in the northwest of England and I won an art scholarship to go to Malvern.
	And I felt Richard was so exotic he wore a trilby and he had these beautiful shirts and he was painting a triptych I think in the art department.
	Do you remember what that was?
	I do.
	We did things on a grand scale at the art department at Malvern College.
	It was a very good art department.
	Essentially whatever you wanted to do they would make it happen.
	If you wanted to do a six foot by four foot canvas, or bigger, they would say, well, let's get the wood, let's get the canvas, let's show you how this is done.
	It was beyond what a lot of even art colleges were offering at the time.
	And this was just essentially for O-Levels and A-Levels.
	Yeah, it was.
	It was very advanced and they would, if you needed to learn a technique, they'd show you.
	We were in number nine.
	House nine.
	Referred to as number nine.
	And it was the house nearest to the Arts Centre.
	And it had the largest number of musicians, artists, cross-country runners and heavy metal fans.
	Yeah, it was amazing.
	Real world has been so disappointing since.
	Our house was particularly exotic and full of weirdos.
	And it was a house that you and I were both in, obviously.
	With a laissez-faire housemaster.
	With a very laissez-faire housemaster.
	We used to peripher on the stairs.
	He was a wonderful chap.
	But yes, the art department was a hop, skip and a jump across a field.
	And we wouldn't just go there for lessons.
	We'd go there in all our spare time.
	It was open at all hours.
	You could go in and just pick up your project where you left off.
	And the wonderful Dave Bennett, who is still a big, big friend of mine, lives in Worcester.
	I see him regularly.
	He would be the artist's assistant and he would be there to make sure, you want to do a screen print?
	We'll get it all set up and we'll do this together.
	A wonderful, wonderful time to be a young artist.
	Yeah, it was such a blessing to be there and in a very beautiful environment as well.
	The school's nestled against the Malvern Hills and the grounds are full of cedar trees.
	It's an exquisite place.
	I mean, physically it was an inspiring place to be, wasn't it?
	Yeah, and some really talented people around there who were given free reign to experiment, which almost it was a step down by the time one got to art college because it was never quite as good as Malvern.
	Well, that's what I felt.
	I felt that the university education I had was less uplifting than the one that I had at Malvern.
	I remember going with another of our friends from our house, Adam Norton, who was another regular at the art school.
	Adam got a place at the Ruskin in Oxford, so he went up the same year as me.
	And I remember going to the degree show and I remember thinking, this is absolute cack.
	This is nowhere near as good.
	It wasn't.
	It was nowhere near as good as the Morven College Art Studio.
	These were 16 year olds, not undergraduates doing this stuff.
	Can you remember what the artwork looked like?
	Was it made out of foam or something?
	I'll tell you what I remember vividly.
	I remember that the exegesis of the screed next door to the artwork, whatever it was, was more elaborate than the actual artwork.
	Oh gosh yeah, absolutely.
	All of those pretentious artists.
	They had to tell you what it was?
	Yeah.
	Because otherwise you'd have thought, this is shit.
	Well it's all about the idea and I think I've worked out what's going on because you've got hundreds of people who want to study art and obviously you want their payments, their payments for the, what do you call it, the arts funding.
	It only takes five minutes to say, make a happening, you know, buy a lot of food and watch it rot.
	It only takes five minutes to explain that that's what they should do as an artist, whereas it takes years and years and years to show them technique, how to paint and draw, which everybody needs no matter what sort of artist they're going to be in order to move away from, don't they?
	They need a grounding in something.
	But craft is now completely frowned upon across the board, isn't it?
	Not so much actually, things are really changing.
	Oh are they?
	Tell me.
	I don't know so much about England but I've spent a lot of time in Italy.
	So the Florence Academy of Art, I have friends there who teach and they're using the size method and they have life drawing classes every day and that's being picked up in America as well.
	They've always taught figurative art.
	What's the size method?
	Sight size is where you place either the subject of a portrait next to, at the same plane as the canvas, so you're looking, you're painting the same size, you know, or the same with still life.
	I generally don't paint from life, I paint from my drawings, but that was, you know, they're basically teaching the traditional craft techniques, how to use your paints and how to look after your studio rather than throwing the paint all over the place and having more on your clothes than on the So this is the backlash?
	There's definitely a reaction to it.
	Also I think because education has become so expensive, parents are checking out the courses, they want to get something for the money.
	So it's more important for them to send their child somewhere where they can see that they've at least mastered a craft or a skill in a particular area.
	And Florence Academy of Art has an amazing sculpture department as well, with casts.
	It's the first time I've seen the casts being used, casts of classical sculptures and busts.
	And for the first year, I think students there just do tonal studies in charcoal or paint from busts.
	So they're mastering how light and shade falls upon an object.
	So, whereas the British art schools, I think they're really driving them to create conceptual art right from the beginning.
	And so I've spoken to many people who've studied art and architecture in Britain who say their course began at the Bauhaus, or they began at sort of abstract expressionism, and they haven't had exposure even to earlier artists or earlier architecture, which is kind of sensationally bad, isn't it?
	So they began with the explosion that destroyed everything?
	Yeah.
	The reaction against all of the traditional art, yeah.
	So are there any, you say Florence has got it right, and parts of America have got it, are there any names in America that you can think of?
	I can't, to be honest.
	In Britain?
	They're usually small private galleries or private art schools or liberal arts colleges will run really good traditional art tuition.
	Right.
	But they're few and far between.
	I'm sure people will contact you and say where they all are.
	You can find these places.
	I wish I'd known when I was looking for an art school about Cecil Art Studios for instance in Florence because there are a lot of people who've been trained in portraiture there.
	And you know they're given a really amazing grounding in technique.
	But I went to the Ruskin and the Slade and the Royal College and I had interviews at all of them and it was sort of mutual dislike really.
	Thank goodness.
	Exactly.
	I think I had a narrow escape.
	Yeah, you'd have been...
	Now, we were talking earlier about my experience at Cheltenham College, which I think was three years from 89 to...
	No, 88 to 91.
	And then I went on to do an MA at Belfast.
	But...
	We did have some good craft lessons, as in learning about the use of paint, learning how to mix mediums, learning how to stretch a canvas properly, doing print, a bit of sculpture, that sort of stuff.
	I seem to have got off lightly because that was when the rot was setting in.
	But there was this underlying thing of postmodernism and you were taught you are, whether you like it or not, you are a postmodernist painter.
	This is what you do.
	You mix up the styles, reject the old.
	So they were sort of forcing the ideology onto you then?
	Didn't you say that somebody told you to go and read Derrida?
	Yeah.
	I was encouraged to do so.
	I never did out of pure laziness and I'm glad I didn't.
	But there was this thing going on.
	This is Cheltenham, the rural pleasant Cheltenham.
	But as you said, at the same time in London, I'd have been in, you know, in a pit of hell in comparison.
	Yeah, you wouldn't have had that broad experience I don't think.
	I was just thinking how lucky I was to come across writers like Roger Scruton later in life because as soon as I read, the first book I read by him was England and Elegy which I think is a masterpiece.
	His books on architecture and music are pretty difficult, a little bit impenetrable, they're very academic aren't they?
	I think most people have seen that TV broadcast you made called Why Beauty Matters and when you mention Roger Scruton to most people that's the thing that they mention rather than the books because it reached so many people.
	And he said that if you'd asked anybody between 1730 and 1930 what the purpose of art was, they would have said beauty.
	And if you asked them what was the purpose of beauty, they'd say that it was a value like truth and goodness.
	And that struck home to me.
	This ties back to Francis Bacon a little bit.
	The second question I remember ever asking him, I think for some reason I asked him when he was born, the second question was, what are you interested in?
	And he said, I'm interested in evil.
	And my boss who was sort of hovering behind us said, well Francis, that's not very nice.
	And I said, well I am.
	Well I am.
	And I think it's because he'd lived through two world wars and he wasn't obsessed by evil.
	He was confused why people can become evil.
	Which in a way is the same preoccupation that Roger Scruton had.
	Truth, goodness and beauty is something which all societies, all civilizations have striven for.
	over millennia.
	But there seems to be this virus that comes in every so often, which we probably would identify as communism or Marxism, which wants to undermine that.
	Or cultural relativism, I suppose.
	Critical theory is its modern form, isn't it?
	Which is more dangerous than the name would imply.
	So, even though I'm a painter, I take a great deal of interest in what's happening culturally.
	And I'm reading, at the moment, Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and Andrew Lindsay.
	And I think it's important to know the direction of the society.
	The society seems to be going in the direction of pulling apart all of tradition, dismissing it, finding reasons to label it as patriarchal or colonial.
	And that's a source of enormous sadness to me because everything that I've enjoyed throughout my entire life, whether it's public sculptures in London, or history paintings is being dismissed and I'm wondering what we're going to be left with because if you read people like Saul Alinsky who says the end justifies the means in his book what's it called?
	What?
	Rules for Radicals?
	Rules for Radicals yeah I just read it recently.
	Which he dedicated to Satan I think.
	He did!
	Can you believe it?
	I mean, the techniques he used were pretty revolting.
	He seemed to be obsessed with rather nasty techniques.
	It's funny you say that.
	I hear this more and more.
	People... I mean, you're religious.
	People do talk about what's going on in the world at the moment in terms of evil.
	There's a spiritual aspect to it.
	Yeah.
	There is something satanic, isn't there, about what you're doing?
	I'm afraid there is.
	Yeah, I mean...
	I feel as though you can almost taste it.
	I think if you're very grounded, you can tell when somebody's telling the truth.
	We were talking about this earlier.
	Even if you're watching a politician, Richard said you need to be in their presence, but I think still on television as well.
	You can feel truth with your whole body.
	You can sense when somebody's coming from a place of truth.
	But also you can tell, if you're sensitive, you can tell when somebody's coming from a place of darkness and they often use obfuscation, which is what all of these postmodernist academics use.
	They'll use the most convoluted gobbledygook in order to distract you from what their real purpose is, which is the pulling apart, the disintegrating of the Western tradition or whatever it is that's in their sights at the time.
	Interesting that you were talking about beauty, which you could argue that beauty is a manifestation of the divine.
	Yes, yeah.
	So you can see why.
	Oh yes, it's something that provokes awe in people who love the truth, but also a sense of disgust in people who don't.
	So I remember being told by an Irish academic that beauty was fascist.
	So they've been indoctrinated at university with this idea that anything which was attractive or symmetrical or harmonious was fascist.
	And so that's a terrible... I think that's like a virus that's got into their system.
	That's like a circuit breaker.
	It's affecting the way they relate to the world and sort of inhibiting them from feeling happiness.
	I think we need beauty, don't we?
	Well we do, and I wonder whether people who've studied the rise and fall of civilisations say that in the final stages, in the death throes of a civilisation, they turn towards decadence, they reject things like beauty in favour of the darker things.
	I've just been re-reading Oswald Spengler's book, The Decline of Civilisations.
	It's a big book.
	I should have brought the abridged version.
	But it's also something that Camille Paglia is really articulate in talking about.
	She was talking to Jordan Peterson and she said at the end stages of civilization some really weird things manifest.
	One is an obsession with celebrity chefs, which happened at the end of the Roman Empire and what's happening today.
	Marcus Opisius, was he?
	Who's that?
	He had some good clear race recipes.
	Did he?
	Blu-rays are dormice.
	Oh yes, yeah that sort of thing.
	And also a drifting towards androgyny and the mixing up of the sexes.
	No wonder we're so buggered because we three are such... Studs.
	Such studs, yeah.
	Absolutely.
	Well I do think it's important to be physically fit.
	I mean you, Richard, you went swimming this morning didn't you?
	You went shooting.
	I did my intervals this morning as well.
	What were those?
	Well, there's a track I run up and down.
	Oh, wow.
	Which actually is, I think, probably better.
	I do longer runs, you know, there's a five miler I do.
	But actually, I think in terms of pure fitness, you are better off doing sprints and then walking back, sprints and then walking back, sprints and then walking back.
	Yeah.
	I think because it's that, what's it called?
	Hit, isn't it?
	High intensity training.
	Exhaustion.
	No, we're all over 50, aren't we?
	We are, yeah, we are.
	Fighting off various ailments as well, so, you know.
	Oh my God, Dick, this is, it's so sad, isn't it?
	We are, we've all acquired, well, you have as well, you've got... Yeah, I'm a miracle survivor.
	Actually, before we go into that, I just want to say briefly, because I should do this in all my podcasts and I learned this from Ivor Cummings.
	You're listening to The Telling Pod and I really hope that you are able to support me on Patreon or Subscribestar because I'd like to really develop this side of my career.
	Yeah, I'd like to help you with that.
	I think it'd be, look, the more support I get, the more I can, the more of this stuff I can do.
	And I do think that actually, probably I am one of the better people at this.
	You're the best.
	Oh, thank you.
	I want a mug with your face on it.
	Maybe we can develop our merchandising range more.
	Once Dick gets better at promotion, he's gonna... This is the thing.
	Dick is really, really good.
	This is true, isn't it, Dick?
	You are absolutely brilliant at the conception and the designing stuff.
	And you're even quite organized.
	But, like me, you're not so good at the promo.
	Yeah, considering I've worked most of my life in advertising and marketing, I know what I have to do, but there's something that I can't bring myself to complete.
	I'm prep at it, but I can do a lot better.
	It's all coming together.
	It is coming together, and I know what has to be done, but sometimes I'd just rather play online tank games than design a new t-shirt.
	That's the thing.
	We're all about this.
	We're all about the escape that Actually, this reminds me something that the boy said to me the other day when we were we went we went shooting And there's a bit at the end where you you tip your your loader and the game keep you tip your loader and the gamekeeper and and You do it by you sort of shake their hands and you sort of put the money in the palm of your hand and boy said to me It's really weird, isn't it?
	It's a reflection of our attitude to money in this country, that we think it's somehow dirty and something secretive.
	I mean, it should be perfectly reasonable to reward somebody for his services, but no, we have to do it in this slightly embarrassed way.
	And I think maybe that's our problem, that maybe we're too English.
	Yeah, I'm a real evangelist.
	If you look at artists in the past, they were business people as well.
	You think of Rubens.
	He was a cultural ambassador for the Netherlands and he came to Britain and at the same time as meeting, I think it would have been Charles I, he managed to get a commission to paint the ceilings of the banqueting house.
	So there's no reason why being commercial cannot be connected with being creative.
	I've lived for four years in America, lived a year in New York, and I lived three years in Los Angeles.
	And there, there's no sense of guilt of associating creativity and profitability.
	People are more likely to ask you, you know, where are your houses if you're an artist in England?
	Whereas in England, if you explain you're an artist, they usually say, you poor thing, can you pay the bills?
	There's a big difference culturally in how creativity is regarded in the new world, I would say.
	It's the same in Australia and Canada and America.
	In Britain we feel as though we should be very modest and it's almost a badge of honour to live an impoverished artist's life.
	I was quite surprised when you mentioned earlier on, before we started recording this, how happy you'd been in LA and how nice the people were, which isn't what one generally hears about LA.
	So how come you had that experience?
	No, well, most people hear about America from the television, don't they, I suppose?
	But I think if you go and live there, you see what the country's really like.
	And it's an amazing place with vast landscapes.
	I was very lucky because I travelled all over the country.
	Illinois, Texas, everywhere.
	I drove down both coasts and right across the middle.
	Were you doing commissions?
	Yeah, on and off, yes.
	I went to America because, well, originally I went to New York.
	I forget the reason.
	Oh, it was Oprah Winfrey who wanted me to do a painting of her house in Montecito.
	She was very nice to me.
	Well I met her with David Linley in London who'd been supplying her with furniture.
	So he phoned me.
	I was living in Brussels.
	That's Lord Linley.
	Yeah.
	So I was living in Brussels at the time painting for the Queen of Belgium.
	Queen of the Belgians I think she's called.
	Doing the Royal Palace, Palais Royal.
	And David phoned me and said look I've got a really amazing client.
	This woman who would like a painting of the house.
	So I thought it's the Queen isn't it?
	But it wasn't.
	Because the Queen is his aunt, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	So I thought, well, he said, bring lots of lots of drawings over, bring them over to London.
	We're going to have dinner with her on this particular day in a restaurant across the road from the store in Pimlico Road.
	So I still didn't know until the day I got there.
	And he said, well, I'll tell you now, it's Oprah Winfrey.
	I said, oh my goodness, that's amazing.
	I sort of guessed something was happening because there were enormous bodyguards all around the shop.
	So, we went and had dinner together.
	I think there were just six of us.
	There was David Furnish, Elton John's partner.
	There was Andre Walker, her dresser, and Anthony Brown, her interior designer.
	And we got really drunk because we had a very light starter.
	It was asparagus.
	No, it was artichoke, which there's not a lot of food on an artichoke, is there?
	We were drinking quite a lot of champagne.
	So, by the main course, we were pretty gone.
	And so this thing that people do in America, they'll go around the table and say, okay, five people for dinner, who would you invite?
	Or was it six?
	I forget how many people were there.
	So we went around the table and she said to me, you know, so who would you invite for dinner?
	I said, it's easy, Charlie's Angels and the Jackson Five.
	And she said, I like that!
	At the end of the dinner she got hold of my hands and looked into my eyes and said, we're going to see you in California very soon.
	So I thought, I've made it.
	I've made it.
	It's fantastic.
	So yeah, I painted this house in Montecito from the air.
	And so that was why I went to New York.
	Sorry, digression.
	Right.
	So that was the first time I went to America.
	I just stayed for a year.
	Then, whilst there, I painted Evelyn Lauder, who was the wife of Leonard Lauder, who is Estée Lauder's son.
	So, daughter-in-law to Estée Lauder.
	I painted her portrait because my partner at the time worked for Estée Lauder.
	And then, many years later, the family got in touch with me and said, would I like to paint the rest of the family?
	Which was wonderful because the Lauders are major art collectors and they've established museums like the Neue Galerie and Fifth Avenue.
	So, I used this as the opportunity to apply for a three-year visa and I got it immediately.
	In fact, the immigration attorney in Montecito, in Encino, California said, I'll even write into your contract that if you don't get this visa, I'll give you the money back, which she did.
	Yeah.
	So I only paid something like $3,000.
	And she made this enormous document.
	And I thought it was very amusing.
	One of the pages was the Wikipedia page from the Queen she put in there.
	I said, is that really necessary?
	She said, oh, they'll love it!
	Because I painted the Queen, Richard said I should mention this.
	Well, I think people find it quite interesting that you painted the Queen.
	You see, I've hidden my light under a bushel for such a long time.
	That bushel's got so big.
	People listen to this podcast thinking, okay so I hadn't heard this guy and I suddenly realized he's about the most famous person I didn't know about.
	No, I've been hidden you see because I'm a traditionalist painter.
	I don't, you know, no journalist would want to write about me.
	That's true.
	I care.
	Do you?
	Thank you.
	I love you.
	I love you too.
	And you're so handsome.
	Thank you.
	No, I was at Burley House, which is a big sort of Elizabethan house in Stamford.
	And I was doing a series of paintings there and Victoria Letham said to me over breakfast one morning, Jonathan, do you know anyone who paints portraits?
	And I said, not really, not really.
	She said, well, the thing is, I'm looking for somebody to paint the Queen.
	And I said, oh, what a shame.
	Because I'm really a bit naive and a bit slow on the uptake sometimes.
	So I was in the car on the way back home.
	I was living in Sussex at the time.
	And I suddenly thought, oh my God, did I miss something really major here?
	Phoned her on my sort of rubber Nokia and said, Lady Victoria, when you were asking me, did I know anybody who would paint the Queen?
	Did you mean me?
	And she said, yes, dear, I did.
	I said, well, I'll have a go.
	I'll have a go.
	So this meeting was set up at St James's Palace, for some reason the sitting was to take place there.
	And her staff got in touch and said, you know, what would you like the Queen to wear?
	And I said, oh the garter robes, they're so fabulous, you know.
	And it was for the Draper's Hall, which is one of the livery companies in London.
	And it was the 500th anniversary of the land being given to the Draper's Hall by Henry VIII.
	So what they wanted was a painting for the entrance hall that would echo the painting, I think it's a Holbein, or after Holbein, of Henry VIII.
	So a flanking picture of the present Queen.
	That's why it looks the way it does.
	I thought it was quite Holbein-esque.
	Yes, it was consciously like that.
	Right.
	With a drape of green fabric in the background, yes, and she's seen in profile.
	Should we tell our special friend how to go about seeing these things because Jonathan's obviously got a marvellous website and I think really I'm guessing we should be actually looking these up while he's listening.
	Oh, you can have a look, yeah.
	It's Z, I think, because obviously as we know that the special friend has many avatars, some male, some female, some gender neutral.
	Quite.
	Are you talking about me?
	My website is www.miles-lea.com.
	I'm a fiend on Instagram.
	It's www.myles-lea.com.
	So that's Miles-Lee.
	But I also, I'm a fiend on Instagram.
	There's a tsunami of posts that I issue into the world every day.
	And I've got 25,000 followers on there.
	And that's Miles-Lee, M-Y-L-E-S-L-E-A.
	M-Y-L-E-S-L-E-A.
	And I say, it's quite an educational profile, but it's also a little bit provocative.
	I talk about issues like education and beauty, and it's a little bit fruity sometimes.
	It sounds good.
	I mean, I don't even use Instagram, but I'm now thinking of updating my Instagram.
	Oh, you must.
	You must join just to follow me.
	Just to follow you.
	To keep you busy, honestly.
	And when I joined Instagram and I started posting all these things, it's led to amazing opportunities, including the invitation to lecture at Harvard.
	So out of the blue, one morning I woke up, there was an email from a woman called Lisa Hughes, who's the admissions officer at Harvard Business School.
	She said, would you please come and lecture?
	Could you give us a lecture?
	I said, what about?
	She said, anything you like.
	So I put together a lecture called The Power of Beauty and the Inflection Point to give it a sort of business twist.
	And so I basically put in a lot of quotes by Jordan Peterson and Roger Scruton, just to see, you know, how much I could get away with.
	And, you know, they pretended not to have heard of him, which is impossible.
	But I basically bombarded them with beauty for an hour and a half.
	And how did it go down?
	Oh, it was amazing.
	I've never had this experience in a British university when I've given a lecture, but all of the attendees came and shook my hand afterwards.
	and wanted my signature, my autograph, which was really bizarre.
	But apparently everybody around the campus who was studying other courses heard about this lecture.
	I had some of them in tears, apparently.
	Did you enter their safe spaces?
	No, no.
	But it was a bit like being fed to the lions.
	So it was like a meeting of the UN.
	It's a horseshoe, beautifully crafted, wooden lecture hall with three screens and a laser pointer.
	It was being filmed by these robot cameras that were swiveling around in the walls.
	But it went really well.
	I was absolutely terrified when I was taken down to the room because they were all mid-career executives.
	They weren't undergraduates.
	They were people who were paying, I think it was £48,000 for a summer course and there were 13 lectures and I was the only person who wasn't an indentured professor.
	I said, does it matter?
	And they said, no, you're a good communicator.
	You'll be fine, but of course I was really terrified.
	But you must have prepared?
	Oh my gosh, three months!
	I mean, I didn't do any painting.
	I literally, I was writing it, I was reading it out to friends in England, I was preparing it, you know, very, very carefully.
	I'd got high-res images from the Ruskin library up in Lancaster, because I wanted all the images to be perfect.
	It was choreographed and also I watched lots of YouTube videos and TED talks about how to give lectures.
	TED's kind of evil isn't it?
	Well, it's a little bit simplified, isn't it?
	But one of the things I picked up from it was if you're giving a lecture, you have to make people feel all the emotions.
	You make them laugh, you know, make them feel contemplative and make them cry.
	And I did it all in the lecture.
	So that's all through Instagram.
	So I'm an evangelist for Instagram.
	First of all, I hope they paid you for this.
	Oh my gosh, yes.
	They paid me to go over to Boston for, I think, a week.
	And the food was amazing, and they paid me about 3,000 for the lecture, which you'd never get in England.
	Okay, but presumably you got some work as a result of that as well?
	I can't think of anything directly, but a lot of the students, they were between 35 and 55, a lot of them follow me on Instagram and send me things now and again.
	I don't think it's directly led to any commissions.
	Do you think, before we go on, we ought to have a cup of tea?
	Yes, definitely.
	I think we should.
	So I'm going to put it on pause and then nobody will know that we've had a cup of tea.
	No.
	It'll just be blump.
	But our mouths will sound more lubricated.
	I think they will.
	That's a word that I think my wife hates me using.
	Lubricated and moist.
	Her least favourite word.
	I can't think why.
	You can't even say a cake is moist, you know.
	Mmm, that cake's lovely and moist.
	No, I hate that word!
	Stop it!
	Stop it!
	Right, okay.
	Literally nobody knows that we've got some cups of tea now.
	Everybody knows.
	They'll hear the slurping noises, and that will be a clue.
	And also, as you say, I lubricated... Yeah, do you like your spode?
	Spode Italian, that.
	Oh, is that right?
	Yeah.
	Mine has the number 50 written on both sides, which I was a little embarrassed about when I was given it for my birthday.
	Because you were only 30 at the time.
	Well no, I was 50, but now I'm nearly 52, so I'm going to keep this.
	I'm going to use it ostentatiously.
	I think you're going to be 50 forever now, Jonathan.
	I think it would be very sad.
	I loved the story you told about, and this show, because you're quite a sort of, you're an odd mixture of modest and charming.
	I'm quite diverse, aren't I?
	You're quite, you are diverse!
	Yeah.
	I'd give you a job if I were looking for a, if I were the diversity department.
	Yes.
	But I'm not sure whether that definition of diversity would necessarily get you a job in most companies.
	It would, because I have a sub-personality with her own Instagram account called Dame Jenny Fulbrough.
	Yeah, did you not know about that?
	No, no, no.
	She's very popular.
	Have you not seen her?
	Yeah, she's called Dame Jenny Fulbright and she came into my life in 1997, but she's quite elderly now.
	She's the president of the International Makrami Foundation.
	Well, she's my PA.
	If I'm having a problem with a client, I've blown it now.
	A letter would be written by Dame Jenny Fulbright.
	So, for instance, Timothy Mole, who writes books on architecture, there's one there, The Architecture of John Wood, he used one of my paintings on the back of a book without asking permission.
	So I thought, well, I can't write to him, it seems a bit sort of rude.
	So Dame Jenny wrote and said, Oh, Jonathan's rather upset that you'll use one of his pictures on the back of your book and you haven't mentioned it to him.
	And so he wrote back, he said, oh well if you send me £25 I'll send you a copy of the book.
	And so Dame Jenny wrote back, she said, oh he's not feeling very well at the moment, wonder if you could just put one on the post?
	And one of my other clients said to me the other day, she said, oh, Timothy Mole was here the other day, and he said that, you know, he'd received rather a frosty letter from this lady, Dame Jenny Fulbright, and she seemed quite elderly and was quite bossy.
	So, yeah.
	She sounds... I'd like her as my... Shall I tell you why she exists?
	You're remotely interested.
	Yeah, yeah, of course I am.
	When I was living in battle in East Sussex in the mid 90s, My partner at the time, Edward, Edward, Edward, used to work across the road at Battle Abbey selling tickets.
	And I would phone him at work and say, you know, can you bring some milk home?
	And he would come back with the milk and say, please don't phone me at work, it's so embarrassing, you know, nobody knows that we live together.
	So I started phoning up initially as Barty.
	I said, hello is Edward there?
	Isn't he a lovely young man?
	I said, can you ask him to bring some cornplasters and a nimble loaf when he comes back?
	Because he passes the end of my garden.
	And so he would bring back, he said, there's your nimble loaf.
	I did this a few times and eventually he just said, he put his hands together in prayer and said, please, please, can you ask Barty never to phone again?
	It's so embarrassing, I can't bear it.
	So I said, you know, hand on heart, I would never, Barty would never phone again.
	But Jenny Fulber started phoning him.
	Usually after a few sherrys.
	Hello!
	Is Edward there?
	Lovely young man, lovely green eyes.
	I'd love to speak to him, but can you get him a message?
	Can you ask him to bring the observer back?
	Lovely thing, goodbye.
	Oh, by the way, what's your name?
	There was one guy who worked there called Graham, who was so polite he would never put the phone down on a member of the public.
	So it was a captive audience, and they'd say, oh, hello, Graham.
	Why don't we go on a picnic sometime?
	And he'd say, oh well, Jenny, I do have a lady friend.
	Oh no, I've brought no competition!
	What's her name?
	And this one honestly went on for months and I used to look at the rota, it was English Heritage that ran Battle Abbey, and there was a one-man site called Bayham Abbey.
	So I'd work out when Graham went to Bayham Abbey and I'd phone specifically on that day.
	So I'd say, hello Graham, do you like kiwi?
	Shall we have a picnic?
	He would be so polite.
	He couldn't say, look, stop phoning Jenny.
	It's not suitable.
	He would just say, well, I don't know.
	I'm not sure.
	So he actually, the way of getting around was by asking a woman called Annabelle to go and go and man the site with him.
	So you'd be less intimidated.
	And I'd still phone up and he would ask Annabelle to answer the phone.
	So she'd say, hello, Bear Mabby.
	I'd say, Who's that?
	Who is Fancy Woman?
	She'd say, if you phone again, we're going to have to call the police.
	No, no, boys in blue, not necessary at all.
	Absolutely not.
	No, no, no.
	So once, apparently they were arriving at the site early in the morning, they went to the local spa shop on the corner and they saw this elderly lady rustling through the carrots and she shot them a sort of dirty look and then ran out of the shop and they said, that's her!
	That's Jenny Fulbrough!
	So they believed that she really existed and then the door opened and the little bell rang above the door and the local vicar came in and they said, Vicar, does the name Jenny Fulbrough ring any bells?
	And he said, it does sound familiar.
	Let's go and check the church records.
	Can you believe it?
	There was a woman called Jenny Fulbrough.
	No.
	Yeah, yeah.
	No.
	Because I made up the name when I was looking at the Battle and Rye Observer, you know, when somebody said, oh Jenny, yes, what's your surname?
	And it was an article about Pulbrough.
	So I said, oh it's Jenny Fulbrough.
	But that is weird.
	You see, this is where your weird mystical psychic side must come from.
	You don't think it's normal?
	I don't think it's normal to invent somebody and then have them come to you.
	No, she's real.
	I'm just channeling her.
	Oh, I see.
	Yeah, so she has her own Instagram account and she did have her own Facebook for a while, but she's certainly on Hotmail.
	And if I do need to send a little reminder about a deposit, you know, it's Jenny who writes.
	Well, let's just hope that nobody listening to this I think they'll find it amusing.
	I hope.
	Yeah, no, it's not that.
	I just don't want to blow your... My cover.
	Your technique.
	Well, I just get Piers McLeod's phone instead.
	It's a bit fruity.
	Oh, jeez.
	That's lovely.
	A lovely old journey.
	Multiple bottom.
	Fabulous bottom.
	Yes.
	So, yeah.
	So, Piers McLeod, he's existed since about the same time.
	I used to phone my boss and say, hello, it's Piers here.
	Just back from fishing.
	It's Ken in the office.
	You know, so that was my way of asking Ken if he wanted to go for a drink down the road in Soho after work.
	I don't know how we got onto this.
	Well, we were talking about... I was leading up gently and this was a massive digression.
	I'm going to ask you straight so we don't get any more digressions.
	Tell me the story about how you... Tell me about Roy Strong, about how you... I will if you give me one of your badges.
	Yeah, of course you're going to...
	I want a special friend badge.
	I've been lusting after it on the website.
	Unlike, unlike that bitch, Douglas Murray.
	Don't call him that.
	No, but no, you, you, that moment.
	Well, I'll have his as well.
	I'll have two.
	I can wear them on.
	Do you know what?
	No, I'll tell you what happened about that.
	Somebody, somebody offered to buy Douglas Murray's rejected badge.
	And I communicated with him on Twitter about this.
	But unfortunately, I then didn't follow through.
	He was going to pay me a decent amount of money for it.
	And because I'm so crap, I just forgot his name.
	That was a great opportunity.
	Because even Lawrence Fox didn't tell you how much they cost.
	So you could, we could put these on eBay and keep out bidding other people.
	I'm thinking of having the equivalent of a Ritterkreuz version of the special film badge.
	I don't speak Swiss.
	The Ritterkreuz is like the iron cross with oak leaves, isn't it?
	It's the ultimate.
	I just want the one that looks like a prefix badge.
	The red one.
	Yeah, but you see the thing is that I reckon that the more exclusive model would be the black pill.
	Oh, yeah.
	Obviously.
	Black enamel.
	That's Hitchin's level.
	Yeah, it would go with all sorts of, you know, all sorts of suits, dinner wear, things like that.
	It would.
	But I read on your website that it's made by elves.
	Are these They are made by elves using anglo-saxon filigree sort of enamel work and yeah.
	And it's made out of material which is suspiciously like gold?
	Is that what it was?
	Or looks a little bit like gold?
	It is gold.
	It is gold, sorry.
	That's why they're so expensive.
	I was so cheap actually.
	I'm cheap at the prize.
	I don't have to pay for mine though, do I?
	No, no, no.
	I'm in the club now.
	Everyone who goes on the podcast, you automatically become a special friend.
	Oh my gosh.
	So that's why it was so upsetting when Douglas rejected his badge saying, I don't like badges.
	Utterly missing the point.
	Utterly missing the point.
	Whatever the point is.
	What was the question you were going to ask me?
	You were going to tell me about Roy Strong.
	Yes.
	Why?
	Because I quite like the story about how you got your job at Channel 4.
	And this is the same about Roy Strong.
	Yeah, I'm quite sort of, what would you say is the word?
	Pushy.
	Not pushy.
	Yeah, I've always been quite confident I suppose.
	Confident.
	Yeah, so Roy Strong was on television I remember as a child and he brought out of his pocket a small miniature of Elizabeth I by Isaac Oliver and he said, this is Elizabeth I by Isaac Oliver, or it might have been Nicholas Hilliard and I thought what an amazing way of demonstrating that a miniature is a miniature by bringing it out of your suit pocket.
	So he doesn't normally carry it in his suit pocket?
	No, I think it was probably in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
	It would be quite cool though, wouldn't it?
	Wandering around with a sort of Hilliard miniature.
	Yeah, in fact, for her 80th birthday, Roy commissioned a miniature on vellum by me of Antonia Fraser, who's an amazing historian, written all these books about Mary Queen of Scots.
	So I did make a miniature of her and he gave it to her for her 80th.
	So that's quite a nice sort of round robin, you know.
	Yeah, but so I met him because he'd written an article in Country Life magazine, 1994 or something like that, saying, I've just finished bleaching the limes in the Elizabeth Tudor Avenue and it's worthy of the brush of one of those 17th century artists who painted aerial views of country estate.
	So I thought, this is my man.
	That's me!
	So I immediately went to my word processor and typed this letter which said, I am destined to paint your garden.
	I didn't ask him, I just said, I am destined to paint your garden.
	And sent him a few postcards of paintings I'd done.
	And I have all of these postcards that we sent back and forth.
	And he said, how much on one postcard?
	I wrote back with the price.
	And he said, it's a deal.
	And then he said, come, I think it was my 24th birthday party, birthday.
	I went up to the Lascot in Herefordshire and I was very intimidated because he was a very famous art historian and the director of the National Portrait Gallery when he was 31 and the Victoria and Albert Museum until about 1986.
	So he was a very important figure in the cultural life of our country really, 70s and 80s.
	So, we had quite a formal dinner, lunch, with him and his wife, Julia Trevelyan-Owen, who was an opera designer for the Royal Opera House.
	And I remember at the end of the meal, I was quite surprised that he ate a banana with a knife and fork.
	I thought I'd never seen that before.
	So, I picked an apple.
	I thought that it looked a bit complicated.
	Anyway, I did the painting and it worked out really well.
	It had all the cats in the painting.
	I can remember the name.
	One was called the Reverend Wenceslas Muff.
	One was called Larkin.
	One was called Susie.
	And they're all buried in the garden now.
	But they appear in this sort of map that I painted of the garden.
	And he used it as the fly leaves of his diaries, which came out, what, 1986?
	Something like that.
	And he's used it in quite a number of books, including one from Yale University Press called The Artist in the Garden, which starts off with an anecdote about commissioning me to do the painting.
	He said, when I was 60, I was writing for Country Life, and a letter arrived from a 26-year-old young man who announced that he was destined to paint the garden.
	And taking a leap of faith in the young, we commissioned it for my birthday.
	And he said it was commissioning that painting which led him to write the book, asking the question, who are the other people and why are the other people throughout history commissioned paintings of their gardens and estates?
	Which was fantastic because it put me in this academic position as a painter of country art.
	Well it put you in the pantheon of artists.
	Yeah, so of course I double my prices.
	Actually, can I ask you, you don't necessarily have to name the price, but how did you know what price to quote?
	Well, I was very careful.
	Initially, I remember that a friend in Scotland, his mother used to go to Agnew's every year and bought a watercolour by a 19th century artist.
	You could get them for about £2,000 back then, a little Cotman sketch, and she was building up a collection.
	So I thought, well if that's her budget, £2,000 a year, and I'm not well known at all, but I'll charge 2,400 for the frame.
	So it was a lost leader basically?
	Yeah, just to get the commissions out there, yeah.
	Fantastic!
	And then it grew and grew and grew over 30 years.
	And how long does it take you to do one of these pictures?
	Sometimes up to a year.
	Oh good God!
	Yeah, because I like to see the garden at different times of the year anyway.
	You know, you can see the structure better in the winter and then you see all of the flowers and the foliage colours in the summer.
	So I sometimes do things, you know, overlapping pictures.
	But they're big paintings, they're 8 by 6.
	The last two I've done have been 8 by 6 feet.
	Which is what?
	3 meters?
	And the next one I'm doing is 3 meters.
	I think we prefer to keep it in feet and inches, thank you.
	Oh, thank you, yes.
	We'll be imperial.
	I don't know what these centimetres are, do you?
	But do you know that even the Europeans used to use feet?
	Did they?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, it was Napoleon who brought in a metric shape.
	Also in America, that was easy because everything's done in feet and injuries in America, which surprised me, I don't know why.
	Oh, Roy Strong, going back to Roy Strong.
	So yes, we became really great friends.
	After his wife died especially, he was reborn and sort of became more theatrical.
	I think she liked him to be seen only with academics and he started to spend more time with his friends who were artists and actors.
	And initially I just used to see him a couple of times a year for his birthday party up in Herefordshire and maybe once in London.
	And then in 2008 he said, oh, I'm wondering how I'm going to pay the gardeners, you know, during the financial crash.
	I said, well, the sensible thing is to open the garden to the public.
	And he said, oh no, Julia wouldn't have liked that.
	I said, well, she's been gone for 12 years.
	And over a couple of weeks, he started sending me pictures of sort of gift shops that he could order on eBay.
	He said, you won't like it, but we can tart it up.
	And I designed a range of merchandise to sell there.
	And we worked out a garden route and I drew a plan.
	And it ended up being a complete success.
	You know, it brought in quite a lot of money.
	Did it really?
	Oh, yeah.
	And then he did the audio tour.
	So you can go by these little posts in the garden and push in a number and it'll say, This is the birthday garden planted when we were 50 years old.
	This is the Elizabeth Tudor Avenue.
	And at the end you can see in the distance the Shakespeare Urn.
	Because every part of the garden told the story of his life.
	So he was given the Shakespeare Prize for Literature.
	I can't remember the year.
	So he would buy an urn and say, that's the Shakespeare urn.
	And his friendship with Cecil Beaton was celebrated by these Beaton steps.
	So for what I do, it was the perfect place to paint.
	It was a biographical garden.
	So you spend a year?
	Not there, but I would go and visit the clients maybe five or six times and I would stay for two or three nights and sing for my supper.
	So I would arrive at the client's house and I would expect just to be doing the drawing but very often they'll say, oh we've just invited a few friends for dinner and there'll be 12 people and I would Tell my anecdotes and then play the piano.
	Oh, you play piano as well?
	I do, yeah.
	Like sort of Cole Porter and as time goes by all that.
	And I sing as well.
	Oh my goodness!
	But I'm not going to do it now.
	But... Yeah, you are a bit like sort of Kit and the Willet.
	Yeah, I love them.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	But I used to, because I painted Burleigh for Victoria Lethem back in 1996.
	And her daughter Miranda lives now at Burleigh.
	And we've become great friends.
	So I go very regularly to stay at Burleigh.
	And very often she would say, oh do you want to just play a few tunes after dinner?
	Which I always do.
	And the last time I went she said, I think I'm getting to know your repertoire now.
	So don't play very many tunes.
	But this is quite a skill set you've got particularly in the circles you move in because I was... Well if I go blind I can move into nightclubs you see.
	I had this experience recently where I was invited on a grouse shoot and once you experience grouse shooting, your terror thereafter is How am I going to get invited back?
	What am I going to do?
	And somebody else explained to me that there are people who are just on the sort of country house circuit, on the sporting circuit, who get invitations.
	So one way you can do it is by being a very good shot, for example.
	Not being a good shot?
	No, being a very good shot.
	So there's always some of those on the shoot.
	And some people get it from having a massive estate where they can reciprocate.
	Oh yes, of course.
	And a title.
	I can't shoot.
	I haven't got a... Another way is, you know, being a very, very rich.
	I don't think, you know, I don't think I'm going to be able to do that.
	So you end up... You have to appeal to them as a kind of entertainer in some way.
	But you're, you know, mega famous.
	I don't think... You see, I'm not sure I am that famous.
	You are.
	You never know, you see.
	Everybody I speak to about you, they say, oh my gosh, we love his podcast.
	And we really want to buy one of those friendship badges.
	I think they're £25.
	Have you seen changes in your clientele over the 30 years?
	Yes, they've all gone mad.
	Have you seen changes in your clientele over 30 years?
	Yes, they've all gone mad.
	No, no, I'm joking.
	Originally, they were all landed gentry aristocrats back in the early 90s.
	But now most of them are hedge funders or people in business, politicians.
	Yeah, so it's changed periodically.
	People can't afford, the aristocracy can't afford to maintain their estates or what?
	No, they're basically struggling to afford to replace the lead on the roofs because it means constant restoration battle.
	But a lot of them are, you know, opening wedding venues.
	That's quite a lucrative way of supplementing the income.
	The estates that don't have a lot of farms and property to lease out tended to focus on weddings, you know, transforming part of the house into a wedding venue.
	Yeah.
	Which is fun because it brings in all sorts of different people who appreciate the place.
	There's a sense of celebration.
	I think it's probably a good thing more people are celebrating in these places again.
	Yeah.
	I was thinking when you mentioned Roy Strong and you were talking about his The National Portrait Gallery.
	Now you see, I suspect, and you can tell that I'm right here, that he was just about the last of an era that valued connoisseurship.
	Now you see, I suspect, and you can tell whether I'm right here, that he was just about the last of an era that valued connoisseurship.
	You look at the people who, well, I don't know who runs the National Portrait Gallery now.
	I imagine it's somebody woke, because they all are.
	But scholarship seems to have gone from all these positions.
	Look at the National Trust.
	Jervis Jackson-Stobbs was one of your patrons.
	Yeah, he was a chief advisor to the Trust and commissioned maps of places like Stowe Landscape Gardens and Clifton.
	And he said to me, we don't want something that looks like it's been made by the Ministry of Agriculture, we want something that's truly artistic and has a spirit of the period.
	So I took my influence from 18th century maps, early 18th century maps, and looked at engravings using a magnifying glass and replicated the marks, the dots and the wiggly lines in order to create something that looked like an engraving.
	And the way that I drew it on an enormous scale and it was reduced down in the printing so it looks like a period map.
	So that was exciting for me.
	He provoked me to do that.
	And it's significantly, it's something that's still used, whereas a lot of modern maps, you know, they've become ephemera, don't they?
	So I think it's always worth putting extra effort in to try and create something which has got a period feel.
	But I'm a traditionalist.
	But there you have it, that somebody with taste and connoisseurship approached an artist who was good and created something of beauty.
	I don't know how he found him.
	They'd be worried about whether the house was involved with the slave trade and they'd be wondering how they could shut it to the public lest they be exposed to this legacy.
	Well we've all had that experience haven't we?
	Going into our favourite National Trust property only to see photographs of TV personalities and quotes underneath them.
	Yeah, I mean, I spent my early life rushing around all of these country houses.
	I'm glad I saw them all then, before they were tainted by this overlay of identity politics.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Which nobody likes, and as Douglas Murray said on your last podcast, one of your recent ones, you know, we're all sick of it.
	We've all had enough.
	We are, and yet it still goes on.
	I know.
	That's the extraordinary thing.
	But there is a reaction against it, I mean.
	But how would you detoxify an institution like the National Trust?
	It seems to me that once it's been converged, SJW converged, as Fox Dave puts it, it's like once an apple's been eaten by worms.
	how does it become a tasty apple again?
	That's a big question.
	I've never been a director of a large organization, but I would imagine hitting them where it hurts.
	You know, if the money's not coming, if the subscriptions and the membership's going down, of course they have to start thinking about what the members actually want, which is go back to the original remit, which is the preservation of properties, which are of a great artistic value. which are of a great artistic value.
	You know, there was nothing more to it than that, really.
	There were properties that, after the Second World War, were impossible to maintain and run because of the scale of them.
	And so people like James Lees-Milne got on his bike and went round and talked to all of the owners of these properties and sort of persuaded them that if they were allowed to keep a small apartment within the building, you know, could they give it to the National Trust?
	So, I mean, bearing that in mind, it isn't really for the current management of the National Trust to start changing the remit and I would say misrepresenting The original owners, you know, there was that whole sort of, I thought it was a bit scandalous, over the last couple of years they had sort of gay themes so they would present Sissinghurst Gardens as, you know, the product of a gay and lesbian couple.
	Well that's never the way they would have thought of themselves at the time, is it?
	I mean they were a product of their period.
	Vitasakva West and Harold Nicholson.
	Yeah.
	So, I think that it's doing an enormous disservice to the memory of the people who created the places that the organisation survives from.
	I mean, Roy Strong was an important part of rescuing the English Country House.
	I think there was an exhibition that he organised with John Harris in 1979 called The Destruction of the English Country House.
	Simply because so many properties were being destroyed, you know, post-war.
	And that was another reason that I wanted to spend time with him because, for me, he was somebody who conserved and preserved the heritage of the country.
	Yeah.
	Sorry, no, I'm just staring at the... Am I rambling on too much?
	No, no, no, no, no, no, you're not.
	Stop that.
	The reason I'm just looking... Is it recording me?
	Yeah, I'm just terrified that we get a repeat of the Julie Hartley Brewer.
	Where you get back and you can't hear it?
	Well, yeah, the files were corrupt.
	I still don't think it was my fault.
	I think some glitch happened.
	But I didn't record a backup so that if...
	You know, it'd be awful.
	I'm sure it's not going to happen.
	Do you want to check it?
	Do you want to see?
	No, I don't know how to check it.
	Talk to me like I know what I'm doing.
	Stop that.
	Yeah, like I'm going to check.
	What would I do?
	Do you know what?
	I don't even know how to do playback on this thing.
	I've just mastered the skills necessary to transfer the files onto a computer so I can send them to my sound man.
	Oh, I see.
	So we won't know.
	No, I mean, I think it's fine.
	I think it's fine.
	What do you think, Richard?
	I think you should stop fretting.
	I think it'll all be alright.
	But you're still haunted by that one incident, aren't you?
	Yeah, I'm haunted by that one incident.
	We've got also to talk about your other great patron.
	I don't know.
	I signed a non-disclosure agreement.
	I'm not really sure.
	No, I did.
	I did a map of Highgrove for the Prince of Wales.
	I actually thought it was one of my friends phoning up with a joke.
	I was living in Wyndham Place in London and somebody phoned up and said, oh, would you be able to come to Highgrove and make a plan of the garden for the Prince of Wales?
	And I said, And I thought it was a friend, and I said, yes!
	I reined myself in.
	But then when he asked for the registration number of my car, I thought, oh my gosh, they may be serious.
	So they said, well, if you come at one o'clock next Thursday, the Prince likes to meet fellow artists.
	So I thought, this is fantastic.
	So I drove up from London in my new Range Rover, which I think I actually bought for the purpose, which is a very extravagant thing to do.
	But I thought, well, I have to turn up in a nice dark blue Range Rover.
	And he was waiting for me at the gate.
	Goodness me, this is amazing.
	And I walked up and he said, I'm your greatest fan.
	I said, goodness me, I'm your greatest fan too.
	Usually we all walk around the garden.
	So it's one o'clock and I thought, I'm actually starving.
	I'm really hungry.
	But what do you do?
	I just thought, I'll just have to cope, you know.
	So we walked around the garden for three hours.
	And by the time we got to the kitchen garden, I was wondering whether you could eat crab apples.
	He was very, very entertaining and he said, this is a beautiful tree.
	I said, it's a catalpa, isn't it?
	He said, yes, it's a catalpa.
	He said, it was given to me.
	By a man, a pop star.
	You might have heard of him.
	He's called Elton John.
	I said, I have heard of him.
	So we carried on and then we came to an area of lawn where there were some sort of little piles of soil which were obviously molehills.
	Can you put those in the picture?
	I said, yes, yes.
	He said, can you do me a favor?
	Can you make them a little bit smaller?
	I said, well, I could.
	They may not be visible on the map.
	He goes, it's a joke.
	But he took a great deal of interest in the map and at the end said something like, well, you really should have an award for this.
	I'm still waiting.
	But it's a very elaborate map with box views in this sort of 18th century style again and it's been used on tea towels in different colourways which are hanging on agas all around the country.
	I imagine if you had a percentage of the merchandising you'd have made a pretty penny from that.
	Oh no, I'm not worried.
	I mean they did pay me very well for the map.
	And then they wrapped it around a book about the garden.
	I forget what the title is, but it was a heavy leather book.
	It's over there.
	And they used the map on the box that goes around it.
	What's it called?
	The slip leaf.
	So that was 2009.
	I really felt as though I'd achieved what I'd set out to do, which was to gain recognition for my art.
	So whatever else comes after that is just a boon, really.
	Yeah you haven't really you didn't really tell us what it was like doing Oprah's garden because I mean that must have been I don't know.
	It was an unusual experience.
	It's an enormous property which she took on and renovated.
	It was, I think, built in 1920s and it has seven satellite properties around it, each with their own tennis courts and gardens.
	It's vast.
	Are those for her mates or what?
	Yeah, for her girlfriends to come, you know, from all the clan.
	Is she a billionaire?
	Oh yeah.
	Mmm I think no I can't tell you know she spent quite a lot a lot of money renovating it and at that time it was a guy called Anthony Brown who was the interior designer and then she brought on somebody else I think called Nate Burkus so this is a transition time so I painted it from from the air and there's a large lake at the back with a spout of water so I made it look a little bit like like the White House.
	How?
	When you say you do it from the air do you go up in the helicopter?
	I astrally project.
	I do.
	I have a mint tea and I sit and cross-legged on it.
	No, well, I have actually just recently bought a drone.
	I've lost two of them.
	One is stuck in a tree at Roy Strong's garden and the other one was blown out to sea off the coast of Scarborough.
	So, they sound good but unless you've got good weather you have to be quite careful.
	And I imagine you need sort of skills as well to fly the buggers?
	Yeah, no I've mastered that but the thing is aerial photographs don't look artistic so the trees that are in the foreground are enormous and the things that you want to see are, you know, photographic perspective is not what I'm after and if someone says my painting looks like a photograph I'm... You've failed.
	Yeah, I get really upset and go red in the face.
	So they're not supposed to look like photographs.
	I want them to look almost like those Chinese scroll paintings where you see everything from one particular angle.
	I manipulate space and time because I want them really to be memory images.
	An image of your memory of the place, not a literal representation of something.
	Something you can only do with a painting or a drawing, not with a camera.
	Do you have a favourite house that you've... That I've painted?
	Yeah.
	It would have to be Burley House, because it's the biggest, but it's also... it still has the atmosphere of a family home, because the family still live there.
	So... So presumably it was... was it built by Cecil Lord Burley?
	Queen Elizabeth's... what was he?
	I mean he was... Secretary.
	Secretary.
	Elizabeth I, yeah.
	So it was designed in the 1580s and I think most of the masonry was cut in Flanders and shipped over.
	But it's an amazing property.
	It stands in an enormous park by Capability Brown and it has the best collection of Italian art outside Italy.
	Does it really?
	Yeah.
	Bought in the 1680s when the, you know, what would he call Exeter, Marcus of Exeter, went on his grand tour and came back with a lot of Italian art.
	So all the interiors were then made Baroque in the 1680s.
	So it's different from the outside.
	The outside remains as it looked in the 1580s.
	But how amazing that they've managed to preserve it for all that time.
	They must be quite canny.
	Aren't they famously canny?
	Well I mean it's a it's a family they've had two I think two Prime Ministers in the history and also the the Miranda's grandfather was the chap who the Chariots of Fire movie was based upon you know he run he ran did he run the minute mile or do you know the Chariots of Fire movie?
	Yes yeah yeah of course yeah when he trains over the hurdles over the champagne glasses or something Yeah, and they filmed part of that there, I think.
	Right, yes, that would make sense.
	But when I first went there, again, it was a phone call out of the blue.
	No, it wasn't.
	I wrote to them and said, I would like to paint Burley.
	And a year later, I had a phone call from Simon Leetham, this was in the 90s, and saying, would you like to come and paint the house?
	Because we don't have any really big serious paintings of the house.
	So I said, yes, come at one o'clock.
	I expected we were going to have a sort of baked potato in the back kitchen, but we had sort of quite a grand dinner.
	Back in those days there were still footmen who stood by the doors.
	So all the silver was out and it was a fantastic tapestry, Mortlake tapestry, in the dining room full of parrots and gilded blackamoors at either end of the table.
	I mean, really, really lush.
	I'm waving my hands around rather a lot, aren't I?
	I'm describing these parrots on the Mortlake Tetris.
	And then we went for a drive around the park and I remember him grabbing some foliage from outside the door.
	I think it was Philadelphus.
	It had this beautiful smell.
	And I stuck it into my journal and I still have it from this first trip.
	Philadelphus, grabbed from the bush.
	So I did a series, I think, of three paintings of the property from the air.
	Elevated views that look as though they were perhaps painted in the 17th century.
	And they're so accurate.
	The drawing, I spent a week on the roof surveying all the chimneys.
	And the guys on the roof who are replacing the lead do it in a series of five years.
	They keep constantly going around.
	And they use my plans.
	of the roof because I drew it so accurately, apparently.
	So John Culverhouse, who's the curator, has this drawing on the wall in the estate office.
	Fantastic.
	So yeah, obsessive.
	Quite tough on the eyes, but yeah, obsessive.
	Do you have any, you must be in a perfect position to give tips on how to behave at, how to get on, how to not stick out like a sore thumb or whatever, making a dick of yourself at great country houses.
	Let me think, don't answer the phone if it rings.
	I once did that, not a good idea.
	A long time ago.
	Oh gosh, what else would I say?
	Don't talk business at breakfast.
	That's another one.
	Right.
	What else can I say?
	Well, people in those positions appreciate discretion.
	So never do a podcast and talk about them.
	Okay.
	You've been perfect so far.
	Yeah.
	I think that's it.
	I think just be yourself.
	I mean I can't imagine many other people having a career quite like mine because most of the time if you make things for a family you wouldn't go and stay with them.
	So what I've fallen into almost is this very antiquated way of dealing with a client.
	So in the 18th century for instance Lord Burlington who was trying to bring classicism back to Britain would take
	William Kent, his friend, off on his grand tour, and then he would go and live at, where was it, they lived, Burlington, Lord Burlington, and he would design furniture, paintings, architecture, and so he became almost part of the family, which is, which I think is a really interesting, there's a symbiosis going on between the client and the artist, and that's something that I don't think happens very often these days.
	Yes, you would be several notches above even the head of the household staff, wouldn't you?
	You'd be more like a member of the family than one of the servants.
	When I go to stay?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I get the grand bedrooms and four poster beds.
	You've had a good life!
	I get my bed turned down in the evening.
	I even had a bottle of champagne in all today's newspapers on the bath rack in my latest client's house, with a little lit candle.
	I thought that was really gilding the lily.
	It was fantastic though.
	It is kind of addictive that whole world, isn't it?
	When you realise that there is this world out there beyond the ken of normal folk.
	It's lovely.
	It's lovely.
	Well, it takes the pressure off me having a lovely country house.
	I can just stay in other people's.
	This is what I was saying to a friend who was staying at this... We were staying in a castle.
	Yeah.
	And I said, you know, I said, when I grow up, I want to... I said, don't you worry that we're running out of time to acquire one of these places.
	I don't know how we're going to make our fortune.
	He said, no, no, you don't understand.
	You don't understand that you don't need to own one of these things.
	It's a headache.
	Yes.
	Oh gosh.
	You just need to, which is when the conversation cropped up about like, what skill set can you bring to the party?
	I can't sing Cole Porter.
	I can teach you.
	Yeah, right.
	I think you should record a new ident for your podcast.
	No, do you know what?
	I think actually...
	Sit back and relax.
	Yeah you could do that.
	That might help Jonathan.
	It might.
	Time for a cup of tea.
	Time to donate to the Patreon or Subscribestar.
	Just check the website.
	Yeah.
	Actually, because that would be a good way to, instead of sounding like a kind of naked, naked begging moment.
	I never pictured you naked and begging.
	If we had your voice saying something gently, gently suggestive.
	Yeah, well, you'd have to be a special friend to get that.
	How would you do it?
	I'd say, turn over, darling.
	Yeah, that's true.
	What is the way of getting people to give you money without them feeling like you're importuning them?
	Well, I think, for you, people love being part of this community, don't they?
	I think that's what everybody wants.
	They want a sense of belonging with groups of people that they chime with.
	Do you know what?
	I think I am like a living English country house.
	Are you?
	Well, maybe, maybe.
	A bit leaky, a bit damp.
	No, no, stop that.
	I'm one of the ones that belongs to a family which has got, got shed loads of money.
	Yeah.
	And they, because, because the good ones, you see, when you say, the crap ones.
	I mean, I sound like I've said them a lot.
	But have you noticed how actually the, the sort of fittings and, and, and the They haven't got rotting window frames, for example, and actually the carpets are quite new and quite clean.
	Is this how you see yourself?
	Well, I was just trying to counter your suggestion that I was full of mould and whatever.
	And also, my baths have, like, they're huge, those huge ones with... Oh yes, oh yes, where you push your feet against them and you drift to the other end.
	I like that, yeah.
	But I see you more of a guru than as a country house.
	What, a Maharishi, kind of?
	Yeah, that sort of thing.
	I think you should maybe have some Nehru shirts made.
	I'd then look like Willie Hamilton at Dalrymple, wouldn't I?
	Who?
	Willie Dalrymple.
	He's gone native.
	Has he?
	Oh, right.
	Totally native.
	No, I think people just like you as you are.
	When we were in the kitchen earlier, I was looking at your... What fabric is that that your beautiful jacket is made out of?
	Oh, Keeper's Tweed.
	Keeper's Tweed.
	And I can reveal that it was... Who darned the arm?
	Because it was beautifully darned.
	It was a cat.
	A cat did it?
	Yeah.
	So it's not darning, it's just... It's a cat.
	A hole.
	Cat, cat, cat.
	Well, I love that.
	I love that.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	You see, I'm not sure whether cats are a bit kind of SJW, aren't they?
	Are they?
	Oh, the blue ones are.
	Oh, I've got to tell you about what happened outside.
	Oh, tell me, yeah.
	So, we haven't mentioned that we're sitting in my gracious apartments in the Royal Crescent in Bath.
	Yes, I'm actually, this is unusual, I've actually, I was so keen to do you.
	Really?
	Yep.
	You shouldn't say that in public.
	I have, I've been looking across at you thinking how, yeah.
	No, I drove down to, to Bath.
	Yes.
	Which is kind of Jane Austen country isn't it?
	Well I mean she came late, it was a Georgian city and then she came in what's 1800, 1810.
	It's a beautiful place, I mean the architecture is stunning as you can see, the Royal Crescentism, it's a bit like living in a monument though I must say.
	People stand outside and take photographs of the building all day and we were looking at my jacket earlier, it's a Welsh Guardsman's jacket and occasionally I put that on and sort of put some flour on my face so that they can take a photograph of the facade and then later say Look, there's a ghost in the window!
	So I do that.
	But they do.
	But it's a really fun place to live because sometimes I'll see protest groups coming out and standing along the ha-ha, there's a ha-ha here, ha-ha here, at the end of the private part of the garden.
	And one day I saw this enormous group of 20 protesters from, what's it called, Extinction Rebellion.
	Yeah, Extinction Rebellion.
	I could see their sort of putrid green flag and I thought, ooh, goody.
	So I rushed outside with my phone switched to video and I thought I'd speak to them all one by one, which took a while because they were socially distanced by about 25 feet and they were all wearing masks in the broad sunlight and the sunshine.
	And I walked up to the first one and I said, hello, have you met the Doom Goblin?
	And she said, what?
	I said, the Doom Goblin, Greta Thunberg.
	No, no humour at all.
	So I went to the next one.
	Have you met the Doom Goblin?
	No?
	Here's the Doom Goblin.
	I said, Greta Thunberg.
	I said, she's a bit of an evangelist.
	You know, she's a bit of a catastrophist, isn't it?
	A bit apocalyptic.
	And of course she probably... I think she speaks truth to power.
	I thought, oh great.
	Next cliche, please.
	So the next guy, oh apparently they'd all had bikes, they'd all arrived from Bristol on bikes with flasks of fair trade coffee with soy milk.
	And so the next one I went to, I said, you want to stop me travelling don't you?
	He said, no only frequent flyers.
	I said, well I'm a frequent flyer, I loved going to Rome all the time.
	He said, well there are other ways of getting there.
	And I said, what on a Segway?
	A donkey?
	He said, you could walk.
	I said, how long would it take to walk to Rome?
	Anyway, so I was just being a bit provocative but I think I was doing it in quite a professional way because the leader of the gang said, which organisation do you work for?
	I said, I'm just me.
	I live over there.
	I live in the one in the middle.
	So it is quite amusing.
	Is that very naughty of me to say?
	Have you kept the video?
	Yeah, I think I've still got it on my phone.
	I hope I have.
	Shouldn't you stick it up on the internet?
	Yeah, if it's still on my phone.
	I mean, I think it's unlikely.
	Really?
	Really.
	But the problem was they didn't have anything to say.
	Because I said, you want to bring in carbon taxes, don't you?
	And they admitted it was really what they were after.
	So...
	No, and we've had all sorts of different protest groups arrive.
	And also a lot of filming.
	So you never know what you're going to see out the window, honestly.
	I woke up one morning and I opened the shutters and there was this enormous hot air balloon, literally 50 feet from the window.
	And that was for a BBC film.
	And the week before we had Lily James here filming a Nancy Mitford drama, which was much more my scene.
	Lots of lovely vintage cars.
	We like Lily James, or at least we do.
	I mean, I just like looking at her.
	She's gorgeous.
	But I don't know whether... I imagine her politics are as woke as any... Well, she's an actress.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Well, I was thinking, you're an artist.
	You must be just about the only artist with your... Yeah, somebody said that in London the other day.
	It's pretty unusual to have...
	Well my politics is complex now because, you know, I've spent all this time complaining about wokeism in the left but now we have a Conservative Party which I don't really agree with the policies, the lockdown policies.
	No!
	No, so I don't know what I am.
	They've united the country in hatred and misery.
	And misery, and hypoxia.
	Is it called hypoxia, Richard?
	Hypoxia.
	What does it mean when you have hypoxia?
	It's oxygen starvation from breathing in your own CO2 and a rather wonderful reason for giving for the condition that prevents you from wearing a mask.
	Yeah.
	I can't wear one.
	Hypoxia.
	Yeah.
	Oh, dick.
	That is even better than I'm mask exempt.
	That's just like, no.
	Hat tip to Andy from the third Wednesday group for that.
	Hypoxia.
	That's the excuse.
	I just say I'm exempt and it doesn't go any further.
	It normally doesn't.
	You almost want to volunteer, I promise you.
	I know, I'm just thinking.
	Actually, I was slightly ashamed of myself when I went up north recently.
	Although I did it in some of the places, like the service station, I didn't do it in all the places.
	I didn't do that I'm mask exempt, because I thought it's the north and they're trying to run a business.
	But actually I should have done, because they're really eager for an excuse, for a bit of normality.
	Yes, you represent normality, yeah?
	I, do you know, it's, it's, it's, it's like, um, it's, it's the sign that, of end times when the lunatics are the same.
	Yes.
	Oh yeah.
	I think we are, we are the same ones.
	Yeah.
	Hang on, can I get this straight?
	You were in the North and they're locking down the North now?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Are the two things perhaps related?
	You remembered it.
	Have you infected them?
	I was, I was, no, I was the Durham super spreader.
	And I did my best.
	That sounds like manspreading.
	What I don't understand is if I was the Durham super spreader in February and only now they're locking down Durham, that suggests to me that I didn't do a very good job or that maybe there's a lot of people who are asymptomatic.
	Yes, well there are lots of different types of this virus as we know.
	It can be more or less anything actually.
	Yeah, again, including last year's cold bug.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Well, um, yeah.
	I've never actually worn a mask.
	Yeah, well obviously you've got hypoxia.
	Yeah, I do.
	I do, I get a bit short of breath.
	What is your circle of friends?
	I don't have one, I'm a total hermit.
	Are you?
	Yeah.
	So I'm quite lucky to get this exclusive access to you.
	Yeah, you're only the third person to come into this apartment since March.
	Yeah, you are.
	Do you remember that term, Barty?
	You missed that.
	You obviously just missed that.
	There was a well-meaning, typical sort of Reverend JC Flannel kind of chaplain.
	And he was trying to give a sermon one day or talk to the boys on how not to bully other boys because bullying is bad apparently.
	And so he told this sort of parable about this boy whose name was Barty.
	Barty got bullied.
	And instantly thereafter, if you wanted to ruin somebody's life, you would just call them Barty and tease them mercilessly.
	And I just thought this is just a fantastic example of why it's a well-meaning... It's the same as the Joey Deacon thing, isn't it?
	Yeah, it is.
	I mean, when Joey Deacon was featured on, I think, Blue Peter, wasn't it?
	He was, whatever it was that was wrong, a severely mentally disabled older boy.
	And Joey just became the standard school ground insult.
	It completely failed to do what it was intended to do.
	The law of unintended consequences, isn't it?
	But Barty was our very own Malvern College term for a friendless individual.
	Oh no, I didn't mean that.
	I mean, I am Herbert, but I do, I go into... No!
	I'm actually quite popular.
	I've been getting in my 17 year old Toyota Land Cruiser, which I've called Melania.
	I thought you were about to say 17 year old toy boy.
	No, that's not legal.
	No, I trundle off in this.
	In much the same way as you wear a jacket with lots of sort of cat darnings on it.
	I drive this rather rusty old Jeep type of thing.
	Oh, you've got rid of the Land Rover?
	The Range Rover?
	Oh yeah, that went many, many years ago.
	The blue Range Rover?
	Yeah, that was far too clean and nice.
	It had little blue lights in it.
	No, this is something I can throw nine foot lengths of wood inside because I make my own picture frames as well.
	Yeah, and then it doesn't matter.
	I think there's something quite nice about having, well it has wood effect inside which I love.
	Oh, I like that.
	Yeah, it feels like you're driving a sofa.
	No, that's good.
	How many commissions do you do a year?
	It depends how I'm feeling, but the most I've done is five in a year, and recently, because they've become bigger and bigger, about two.
	But I've done 90 altogether.
	And do you have a good lifestyle?
	I think so.
	I mean, I can do everything that I want to do.
	I travel, I love Italy, so I go to Italy as often as I can.
	I mean, I think yes, I feel as though I'm the luckiest man alive because I get to do what I want.
	I'm not particularly materialistic, you know, I don't yearn for anything in particular.
	I feel very content.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	And also I've learned from, this is something you said earlier, it's an enormous millstone to have one of these big country houses.
	And a few friends have said to me, say, I remember Lord Bernard at, what's it called?
	The castle up in Northumberland.
	Raby Castle.
	Yeah.
	He said, you're the luckiest man alive.
	He said, you know, imagine the responsibility of taking on, it's not just the building, it's the estate as well.
	The maintenance and you're basically looking after a whole community of people who look to you for, you know, renovating their properties and things like that.
	So I wouldn't want to be doing all that.
	No.
	That's why I didn't have children.
	Yes.
	That's why, by the way, I'm 51 but look 36.
	Very good.
	It's the elixir.
	It's a sacred elixir of being childless.
	Can we talk?
	Dick's uncomfortable at this point.
	And that's it.
	That, believe it or not, is the sudden and unexpected end to my, I think you'll agree, brilliantly enjoyable podcast with the fantastic, adorable Jonathan Myles-Lee.
	Now, if I were to tell you why it came to a sudden end, You wouldn't believe me if I told you.
	It is the most extraordinary story and maybe, maybe Jonathan will talk about it another time.
	Well, maybe he'll never feel like it, but it is just... Yeah, amazing.
	Anyway, I really hope you enjoyed the podcast and please remember to support me on Patreon or on Subscribestar.
	Things are getting really serious right now, I think you'll agree.
	Call it what you will, call it the big tech, the deep state, whatever, the system is working harder and harder to suppress voices like mine and the voices of the kind of people that I want to have on the podcast.
	I'm going to become more and more isolated and I need your help.
	I would really appreciate it.
	Thank you very much.
	Thank you for listening and see you next week.

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