Some films ought to be kept away from impressionable teenagers. The Shooting Party, for instance. I remember being hypnotised by the creamy, languid drawl of James Mason, who played Sir Randolph Nettleby, in the 1985 film adaptation of Isabel Colegate’s novel. It’s a terrible thing for a 13-year-old lower-middle-class kid from suburbia to discover that he should have been born a country squire a century before. It’s not something that a careers adviser can help you with.
Sir Randolph, owner of Nettleby Park in Oxfordshire (the old pile is probably now a health farm for Cotswold sloanes), is a superb creation. Eccentric, whimsically detached, a loving husband, paternal towards his staff and tenants, a clear-eyed observer of the foibles of others, and deeply, deeply
