A wistful programme on Penge’s glass Versailles, the Crystal Palace (25 August, 8.45pm), pushed its patron, Prince Albert, as a man with a wholly consuming passion for cultural progress through material inventiveness. Tuttingly described by John Ruskin as “a cucumber frame between two chimneys”, the vast building once housed dog shows, food festivals, exhibitions from Japan and Switzerland and hundreds of British manufacturers displaying their products.
The prince consort was adoringly talked about here as a man with “a thirst for information, and faith in commerce and industry and technical energy and tenacity”, who brought “German high culture into our British midst”. He embraced the Crystal Palace project from its 1851 Hyde Park origins as whoopingly as a teenage boy given a bag of weed and a set of car keys.
The first thing the 20-year-old Albert did when he got to Buckingham Palace in 1839 was to replace the honking palace brass band with a string ensemble, determined to establish that while he was around, “art mattered”. But famously he didn’t stop at this kind of thing. In the 2009 film The Young Victoria, Albert is shown frowningly poring over his plans for social housing, spreading papers across the gilded desks and tables as though Buckers were the admin building at a small Midwestern college. Emily Blunt’s Victoria is filmed staring at him during these moments evidently with more in mind than her husband’s moral goodness and faith in the improving power of culture only.
The most telling bit of the current coronation exhibition at Buckingham Palace is when – dozy-dead on Duchy Originals at the garden café – you’re ushered out down a long-defunct corridor littered with vases, plant pots and bits and bobs that didn’t make it into the state rooms, or even the rooms off the state rooms, and you notice several slightly pervy marble statues of some Greek god sucking the face off a dryad and they all turn out to be gifts from Victoria to Albert.
You spare a thought for the poor man, unwrapping yet another Christmas present, worrying about whether it was going to be something suitable for the children to look at, and then catching Victoria’s eye and understanding that it was going to be another very long night not-in-Penge.
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