Score!

Meredith’s minions were already busy dusting the arctic white marble chimneypiece, and touching up gilt cherubs, who were getting up to no good in the frieze running round the white walls. The prop table groaned with priceless ornaments, which Rannaldini intended to keep after filming and which Meredith kept rearranging, driving tiny Simone crackers.

Griselda had agonized long and loudly over what a king should wear in bed and settled for a magnificent Turnbull & Asser dressing-gown in pink and purple stripes, which Alpheus was equally determined to hang on to after filming. Having spent a duty fortnight in the Caribbean with his wife, Cheryl, he was also frantic to screw Chloe.

Filming began with the insomniac Philip’s great soliloquy. Even though he had played the part twenty times, Alpheus was avid to know his motivation.

‘The candles are guttering,’ said Tristan. ‘It is the heure de loup just before dawn, when man’s resistance is at its lowest. You feel old and threatened because your ravishing young wife and your sexy, demanding mistress are both madly in love with your son. You are also deeply hurt and raging with jealousy.’

‘Too right,’ agreed Sylvestre, dropping a cold microphone down Alpheus’s hairy chest, which had just been greyed up by Lucy. ‘I would be peesed off with scenario like that.’

‘No-one asked your opinion,’ snapped Bernard. ‘All right. Quiet, please, we’re going for a take.’

‘How d’you get a pompous ass like Alpheus to act devastated?’ muttered Meredith.

‘Show him a seven-figure tax bill,’ muttered back Granny.

‘Quiet!’ thundered Bernard.

In the heartbreakingly beautiful cello solo, which sets the mood of the aria, Alpheus wandered dazedly round the room, then plundered Elisabetta’s desk, which was rumoured once to have belonged to Louis XIV. As he riffled through her diary, scrutinized her itemized telephone and Amex bills, and finally rooted under the mattress of the big double bed for love letters, Rozzy Pringle gave a groan. How often had she done that at home, praying she wouldn’t stumble on more evidence of her feckless husband Glyn’s infidelities?

Alpheus then sang the first part of the aria so beautifully, and with such an air of nobility and resignation, that the crew gave him a rare round of applause.

Alpheus can act and his nose looks fine. Naughty Granny, thought Lucy indignantly.

If only it were me singing that aria, thought Granny.

Tristan was going to use the rest of the aria as voiceover when he filmed Philip forcing himself on a young, unresponsive bride.

Suddenly at the prospect of watching Alpheus and Hermione in the sack, the number of people on the set seemed to have quadrupled. Mr Brimscombe, Rannaldini’s gardener, who was always leering into the female extras’ changing room, was pretending to trim back the famous Paradise Pearl wisteria so that he could peer in through a high stained-glass window depicting St Cecilia at her organ.

The weather was still bitterly cold and the cost of heating the hall alone was putting Liberty Productions over budget. There was no way, however, that Hermione was going to risk turning blue in a shove-and-grunt scene.

Howie Denston hadn’t quite screwed up enough courage to tell Sexton and Tristan that she wouldn’t be filming in the mornings any more, but she made him ring in now to say that she had a cold. Everyone was less than amused when she promptly whizzed off to sing in an arena concert in New York, except Rannaldini who was already there and was taking a fat percentage of her hundred-thousand-pound fee. Far from chiding her, he sent the Gulf to collect her.

A demented Tristan was forced once more to reschedule. Granny, who’d been planning to go to Sense and Sensibility with Chloe, was livid to be dragged into filming the blind Inquisitor’s great dialogue with Philip and insisted on upstaging Alpheus by feeding Bonios to his guide dog, who was being played quite excellently by Sharon the Labrador.

Granny’s make-up, beetle-browed above black glasses, made him look so menacingly like Gordon Dillon that, after crossing themselves, the crew also gave Lucy a round of applause. Sexton, who’d rushed down from London to have a butcher’s at a naked Hermione, felt Granny’s makeover was so realistic that they’d better watch out for an injunction from the Scorpion.

The power struggle between Granny and Alpheus was so crucial to the plot that it took four days to film, by which time Sharon, egged on by Granny, had chewed up both of Alpheus’s blue velvet crested slippers.

Alpheus had not endeared himself to the crew. Regally bidding them all to drinks in the Pearly Gates, leading the stampede, he would grind to a halt just outside the pub to admire the mullioned windows and the variegated skyline of turrets.

‘You Brits are so lucky, your history is so old.’