Television: Posh? That's a four-letter word round here...

A 51-year-old man once told an interviewer that he'd had one German friend at school and that this friend's nickname was "Nazi". The same man's son, when four years old, reported to his father that a pizza restaurant had been "full of Germans". "But there was some good news Daddy," he added. "One of them was disabled." If that sounds like a prime piece of Alan Clark folklore then you're in the right country park (and the same gene pool, I'd hazard, such is the physical resemblance). The father in question was Francis Fulford (the 23rd Francis Fulford), patriarch of the ancient clan profiled on Channel 4's The F***ing Fulfords. The first Francis Fulford was, in 1199, granted 3,000 acres and a stately pile for services to the King during the Crusades. Now Francis the 23rd finds himself in charge of a building in need of such extensive fixing that it is on the verge of becoming a stately pile of bricks. Unless, that is, he can find pounds 1m to kick-start the reconstruction. (Francis himself is so far beyond reconstruction that upon Taki's demise, a column in The Spectator must surely be his.)

He's also in charge of an old English family with a habit of using an old English expletive at every possible juncture. (It is not this paper's policy to use asterisks in place of swear-words, however "F***ing..." is the proper title of the programme and the programme- makers milked the Fulford's potty-mouthed propensities to the full at the editing stage, including second son Humphrey saying "fuck off Mummy" with perfect prep- school diction.) As in everything else, Francis set the precedent: when he greeted his friend Nazi at school, his pal was as likely to hail him with the soubriquet "Fucker", his most favoured nickname. Their encounters must have sounded like a Tourette's sufferers convention. I'm not entirely convinced that most families, across class boundaries, don't swear like troopers most of the time. We just like to think we don't and throw up our hands in shock when we hear others at it, particularly if they're posh. Seeing a member of the Royal Family taking a pee would have a similar effect. And if there's one thing more shocking than finding out that one's lords and masters are as foul-mouthed as a field full of football fans, it's the suggestion that they might be skint.

Of course the Fulfords aren't really impoverished. Francis could sell off a big chunk of his 300 acres and put the house in order. And the rental income from the 12 farms and 12 cottages on the land plus the value of the property allow him to run a hefty pounds 200,000 overdraft every year. He could even flog the whole lot and move into a perfectly nice cottage somewhere in the grounds.

But that wouldn't be the Fulford way. Fulford land is Fulford land and even renovation grants would mean surrendering independence. After all, "English Heritage and the like are a bunch of wankers," he brayed. Instead, we got to see the family's dotty efforts at raising funds themselves. ("If we were rich, you fuckers wouldn't be here!" he told the film crew.) Francis bought a metal detector advertised in the pages of The Daily Telegraph on the presumption that one of his more illustrious ancestors "must have dropped a gold coin somewhere". He found one penny. A guided tour for a coach-load of tourists raised pounds 100. His wife, Kishanda, promptly turned it into pounds 1,000 with a quick call to her turf accountant, but then disappeared to London in the 4x4 like a fox who's just nabbed a rabbit from under the nose of the gamekeeper. Earlier, she had explored long-deserted rooms in the hope of finding treasure. ("Someone was in here in 1968 and they didn't tidy it up," she moaned as she stumbled through decades' worth of rubble.)

If the Fulfords are, as has been suggested, the game pie equivalent of the Osbournes then let's not waste time following them around for weeks on end. The F***ing Fulfords worked fine as a documentary and would be diminished if turned wholesale into "reality TV". But there is one reality format that could genuinely unite these two nuclear families: Wife Swap.

Sharon Osbourne would turn a quick profit from Francis's splenetic eccentricity. And Kishanda's hostility to her children's TV watching habits (she threw their set in the lake) would solve Ozzy's remote control anxiety once and for all. Don't bet on it not happening.

In our television listings pages last week, we mistakenly added asterisks to Who You Callin' a Nigger? Unlike The F***ing Fulfords, Channel 4 used the N-word in full in the title, perhaps on the grounds that its appearance in print was as attention grabbing as the starred-out swearing of the toffs. But the film didn't need shock tactics to be depressingly compelling, following Darcus Howe as he travelled the country, exploring why ethnic communities are becoming increasingly disparaging of and even violent towards each other.

If Howe didn't have the patience to be the perfectly detached interviewer then it wasn't the worst that might have happened. Perhaps he shouldn't have walked away muttering what sounded like "arseholes" when two Asian youths in Walsall got lippy with him when he started an interview. In the end he left it to his (Asian) producer to get their disturbing views on tape. But he made up for it when he worked overtime to bring together a black British youth and a Somalian immigrant in Woolwich, in South London, after the former had been beaten up by a Somalian gang.

But perhaps Howe's most trenchant observation was that when he was a young activist, black and Asian workers "would have joined the trade unions together [and] joined the Labour Party together." When the disaffected (and I don't mean Francis Fulford and his ilk) have no common political rallying point, then exclusion and alienation can only lead to a form of civil war. What chance of any of them seeing New Labour or watered- down Trade Unionism as being their best- chance for change?

Television's increasing appetite for self-consumption continues apace - way up in the high numbers on digital satellite, one can now find The Advert Channel. I was very excited about this. Michael Portillo with his Ribena, shaking and vaccing hell's angels, wondering where the yellow went - it was bound to be the TV heaven equivalent of the bevvy of unsullied young women that confused young Muslims believe await them after "martyrdom". But it was all a cheap swizz. There were no bloody ads. They call themselves The Advert Channel and they can't even show an ad. There wasn't even an ad break. But if you surf to the channel's website you can download ringtones from your favourite advert. Can it really be the case that there now exists an audience for four talking heads reminiscing about being sold things who will then go to a website to make their phones warble that annoying NatWest leitmotif? Perhaps Francis Fulford isn't so eccentric after all. Compared to such creatures as these, he's as normal as ninepence.

i.millar@independent.co.uk

Charlie Courtauld is away

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