Swearing is not big and it’s not clever. We know that, right? But foul-mouthed landed gentry can be very entertaining, as we discovered 10 years ago with Cutting Edge’s documentry about the Flipping Fulfords.

This is a family newspaper, so I’ll find alternative, milder expletives to replace the real ones (you can use your imagination to work out what the words in itallics really are).

But swearing is, let’s face it, still central to the appeal of watching the Fulford family, who are the subject of BBC3’s six-parter Life Is Toff.

If you haven’t yet tuned in, Life Is Toff (Tuesdays, 10pm) zones back on the owners of the 3,000 acre estate and stately Devon pile. Scion of the Fulford dynasty is the admirably nutty Francis (a real-life version of Harry Enfield’s Tim Nice-But-Dim) and his four children: heir and eldest son Arthur and “the spares”, Humphrey, Edmund and Matilda. If you wonder what the aristocracy get up to in their downtime (away from the fantasy of Downton Abbey), here’s your source.

We commoners get anarchic montages of the toffs swearing, smoking, beating each other up and practising shooting while a younger brother chucks the family crockery from the bridge over the moat. Smashing.

In the second episode last Sunday, we were introduced to likeable teen Edmund who has left his £30,000-a-year boarding school to weigh up his career prospects armed with zero qualifications. Youth work appeals, as his bro Arthur charmingly puts it: “I think Edmund would quite like to do a job where he’s the cleverest there... so working with children makes sense to him.”

Cue the arrival of a van-load of disadvantaged Bideford youths, for whom Edmund has, somewhat entrepreneurially, arranged a day of survival skills at the family seat.

The interviewer quizzes Papa Fulford on whether he’s nervous about hosting these kids; after all, they’re hardly Milford Abbey alumni are they? “That’s a typical stupid flipping ignorant remark from a stupid man, isn’t it?” fumes Francis.

And he’s right. It is petty bourgeois snobbery to assume these young ’uns will have wildly different aspirations from the young Fulfords.

“Why is this house set out in a square with a big flip-off gate?” asks Francis, rhetorically, as he welcomes the naughty and somewhat bemused teenagers to his home. “To keep the flipping Cornish out!” After a brief tour of the stately pile, during which Edmund gets antsy about the youths around the family silver, there are team-bonding exercises such as skinning rabbits, crawling through obstacle courses and sitting around a campfire.

And, as ever, those at the top end of the social hierarchy and those at the bottom, unsurprisingly have a great deal in common, beyond the fact that both share a two-fingered attitude to authority, live on an estate and love a drink and a smoke.

Meanwhile, Channel Four on Monday night offered a very different look at wealth inequality. Richard Bacon hosted How Rich Are You? to highlight how we all compare, earnings-wise, to our peers.

And it was hard to figure out what made me more angry. Was it the bankers and CEOs who occupy the top percentile for wealth (which adds up to the same as the bottom 55 per cent) or the patronising hosts? No, it was the audience, who barked and clapped at the proceedings like a colony of circus sea lions.

At one point, the audience, displaying sub-Jeremy Kyle levels of morality, wildy cheer aristocratic Sir Benjamin when he says “get off your flipping bottom and work”.

It’s a thoroughly depressing and shallow analysis of an important issue. You’ll learn more from the Fulfords.

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