3 SEPTEMBER Broughton. Drive in grey drizzle to Banbury. Feel, even just passing through the town, the rootless anonymity that has swamped the place, the centre still intact and even handsome, but ringed by superstores and huge drive-in centres that service the acres of fuck-hutch estates that house its expanded population. ‘Thriving’ as I suppose it’s called.
   Broughton, a mile or two away, could not be in sharper contrast: the most beautiful of houses, medieval in a sixteenth-or seventeenth-century shell with Gothick additions, entered across a moat and through a gatehouse – almost a standard kit for an idyll. There’s a formal garden, great plush borders along the old ramparts, and cows and sheep grazing in the water meadows beyond, and overlooking it all this rambling honey-coloured house.
   Onto this rural paradise the film unit has descended like an invading army. Twenty or so vans have ploughed up one of the meadows, thirty cars are parked under the trees; there are half a dozen caravans, two marquees and the sodden ground is rapidly turning into a quagmire. Churning up the edges of the perfect lawns, company cars ferry the actors to and from the location in the house where the sparks, who have seen it all before, lug their lights and tripods down the superb vaulted corridors.
   Seemingly unaffected by all this is the lady of the house, Mariette Saye … really Lady Saye and Sele (only nobody is quite sure whether one says Saye and Sele or just says Saye; say nothing the simplest). She’s tall, cheerful and wonderfully welcoming, happy to show anybody round the house, as magical inside as out, handsome rooms lined with linenfold panelling and a splendid drawing room overlooking the moat. My wonder at the place makes me foolish and I’m sure I gush, though it’s partly to offset the unimpressed one-location-very-much-like-another behaviour inseparable from film crews, who congregate at the door, having coffee and a cig and trampling on yet another bit of lawn.
   As always I find I’m pretty surplus to requirements, my only contribution a muttered suggestion to Nick Hytner that Rupert Graves’s ad lib, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ would be more in period if he said, ‘It is no matter, no matter.’ I watch Nigel H. rehearse the pisspot scene, then walk round the garden with Mark Thompson before buying some plants on sale in the potting shed and coming away. Except then I call in at the church, which is full of the sound of hoovering, a friendly grey-haired man, Welsh, who may be the vicar, though I don’t like to ask, seemingly vacuuming the altar. It’s the bats, he explains, the church disputed territory between English Heritage, who want them expelled, and English Nature, who don’t. In the meantime he hoovers.