Everyone knows and loves Lancelot Capability Brown, the man who sounds like some kind of amazing exotic Knight-Cowboy from India, but is in fact a gardener with not much going on in the chin department. But what Capability Brown lacks in chin, he more than makes up for with his extremely green fingers and Bassett Hound jowls!
His adventures with his many dim-witted but loveable offspring would one day become a beloved ITV comedy show. The script for which is coming up, if you’d just give me fucking moment
CAPABILITY BROWN
Ah sure hello, I didn’t see ye come in there. My name’s Capability Brown, the 18th century English landscape architect responsible for many of the parks and gardens renowned across this fine country’s treasured National Trust parks and houses.
JOE
Excuse me mammy, it’s me. One of your many hundreds of boys, and I am hungry for chips.
CAPABILITY BROWN
Would you feck off, can’t you see I’m in the middle of damming the River Glyme at Blenheim Palace to ornament a series of cascades which will divert and then reconverge upon Vanbrugh’s grand bridge, submerging the lower stories of the structure in a spectacle many will one day regard as the quintessential English landscape?
JOE
Aw sorry mammy, it’s just that I would really, really like a chip.
LOG
Excuse me mammy, it’s me, another boy. And I’ve heard over the transom that there’s talk of chips. Now listen here mammy, if you are disbursing chips to your beloved boys I wish to be compensated appropriately. Please allocate me a chip or two, mammy. I am not greedy.
CAPABILITY BROWN
You two really are a pair of insufferable, feckin eejits. If it’s not enough I have to orient the natural amphitheatre of the surrounding gardens of Belvoir Castle in a manner that not only supports the perennial blooming plants throughout the year, but hydrates them using the natural moraines that run beneath the southwest range, I have to be a constant source of bleedin’ chips for you pair of wandering incalculable gobshites.
JOE
Sorry mammy, it’s just that by the time I navigate the many rings of recessed ha-ha walls that surround our house in order to preserve the illusion of an unbroken lawn stretching out to the horizon, while simultaneously providing defence against intruders and boundaries for grazing livestock, I am very hungry for a chopahchop for meeee.
LOG
And that goes double for me, mammy. MAMMY. Mammy, I have just descended from the lavish stateroom of the east wing and I could not help but fixate upon our grade two listed formal gardens, whose impossibly straight, three mile driveway bisects the landscape so perfectly that it encourages me to a ravenous hunger. Hunger for a single chip, mammy. Mammy mammy give me a chip immediately, or murder me right now where I stand.
CAPABILITY BROWN
Ah for feck’s sake, I don’t have any chips. All I’ve got is my passion for bounded lawns, formal structure and painterly serpentine lakes that will define English gardens for centuries to come and will not, as soon as I die, become reflexely reviled by a new generation of landscape architects who criticise my work as failing to convey the dramatic conflict of order and nature so that they may differentiate their own style from the hegemony of my work.
JOE
Okay well I smell a chip.
LOG
I smell a chip too.
CAPABILITY BROWN
Have you checked your pockets?
JOE
Oh, my pockets are full of chips!
LOG and JOE
Hooray! Hooray hooray chips etc etc. just cheer constantly over one another while I speak it’s fine we can fade everyone in and out in the edit.
CAPABILITY BROWN
What a pair of inconceivable smears I’ve raised. Ah, but I do love them. Good night!