Here's Stuart Lee's mixed thoughts on the national trust in 2011 - i've been a bit selective on pulling bits out (its basically having a go at the talking benches), but there's some interesting things in there..
"I joined the National Trust in a spirit of class hatred, and keep my membership card on a shelf next to my CD reissues of the first four Crass albums. I used to be breathless with pleasure at the thought that these massive country piles no longer belonged fully to the bucktoothed scum who inherited them, living in poverty in one wing while Daily Mail readers stamped dog muck and Shippams paste into their carpets. The professional posh man Julian Fellowes last week identified such prejudice as the last acceptable hatred. Hostility he and his oyster-guzzling friends experience would be unacceptable if directed towards the poor. But making jokes at Fellowes's expense is quite different to mocking the disenfranchised. Like all posh people, he was utterly delightful and entirely incapable of deliberate malice. Why, one could listen to them for hours, going on about what they imagine life is like.
"I have mellowed over the years, and now part of what lures me to National Trust properties is not hatred of the posh, but the sadness of these places and their stories, their quiet and dignified tragedy. Fellowes says he believes that the quest for social equality is a pointless folly. Certainly, the cultural and political achievements of the denizens of the Trust's inherited homes, understood through the artefacts they left behind, would seem to reveal them as our natural betters, if only because they had the resources to pursue finer things for their own sake.."
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