“That did not go well at all for him, did it?” said Nigel Arthur, features editor of The Independent. “Fortunately, we caught it all on film – you’ll see it on the front page tomorrow!”
Fans of the show voted online last week to have the final four contestants sit for a formal royal portrait. Peter Thistle, George Tompkins, Rosalind Watkins and Mary Willoughby chose their costume from among the castle’s historic collection. Watkins selected a lavender gown worn by Lady Augusta Pemberly on Christmas Day in 1835.
“I feel like a princess,” Watkins whispered as she took her seat. “Isn’t this the loveliest dress you’ve ever seen?”
Mary Willoughby, 33, manager of a riverfront restaurant in Cambridge, chose a midnight blue Empire waist gown with matching slippers, a fur-trimmed reticule and pearl and diamond ear-bobs.
“I wish I could wear something like this during Regatta,” she said as she glanced at herself in a mirror. “I can hardly believe it’s me!”
Contestants were seated on makeshift thrones in the four corners of the grand ballroom at Pemberly Castle, surrounded by screens so only the artist, Hugh Ferris, could see them. Ferris moved among them, paint brush and palette in hand.
Prior to the portrait sitting, the quiet and unassuming Thistle, 51-year-old skilled decorator at the Wedgwood Factory in Stoke-on-Trent, had completed all the challenges with dignity and grace. After more than five hours, he was allowed to look at what Ferris had pai
nted: Thistle’s head was made to look like a Wedgwood blue china cup, and the collar of his shirt was made to look like a matching saucer.“This was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back,” Arthur said. “I feel a bit sorry for the poor bloke. I didn’t think he ‘ad it in ‘im to make such a rumpus!”
Thistle grabbed the wig off his head and threw it at Ferris, which caused several open containers of paint to topple and spill all over the floor. Thistle then picked up a full palette of paint and threw it at Ferris – missing him but splattering executive producer Hyacinth Marple-Holmes with a dozen different hues. Programme security tackled Thistle before he could run the portrait through with a sword he wrested from a nearby suit of armour.
“I was quite looking forward to the portrait sitting, being an artist myself,” said Thistle as he stood outside in the rain, waiting for the local constables to arrive and presumably place him under arrest. “But that man was abominably obnoxious. Who on earth would want to be painted like that?”
Ferris is know to be a bit controversial. When his latest exhibition, “Mind Under Matter,” opened at Pinwheels Gallery in Soho, scores of people protested against what they viewed was his “warped look at the human form and the world as we know it.” He took no responsibility for the disaster at the castle.
“I captured his true essence,” he said of Thistle’s portrait.
“His true essence is an arse,” Thistle responded. “I need a pint.”
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