28 JULY Thame Park. From the outside the house looks pleasantly dilapidated, with a handsome eighteenth-century front, behind that a Tudor house which in its turn incorporates the quite substantial remains of a medieval priory. It’s a country house out of a novel and in its lost park scattered with ancient oaks an easy metaphor for England.
   And maybe it still is because until ten years or so ago it was lived in by the descendants of the original owners, then was bought at the height of the Thatcherite boom by a Japanese consortium to turn into a country club. So step inside and one finds all the period features intact, a magnificent staircase, fine fireplaces, the original doors, but all so spick and span and squared off they might have been designed by Quinlan Terry. And (the metaphor still holding) work is at a standstill: having done a radical conversion job, the consortium ran out of money and now the house is empty, just rented out from time to time for films such as ours or as a setting for commercials.
   In yesterday’s morning mist, when we started shooting, it must have looked like the park and mansion in Le Grand Meaulnes but Ken Adam, our designer, has had a hard job taking the new look off the interior. The house is standing in for Kew Palace, where George III was briefly confined during his illness. The requirements of the script mean that it should look cold and uncared for, so the air of dereliction the Japanese so ruthlessly banished is being just as ruthlessly reintroduced, our painters still hard at work distressing the walls and pasting on peeling wallpaper. Incurious, careless, mildly destructive, the crew isn’t much concerned about the house; and though Thame Park isn’t Brideshead, film units nowadays are not unlike the units of a different sort that were billeted in such places fifty years ago.