Wag Weekly: Bendtner bags himself a beauty

The first cracks began appearing in Baroness Caroline’s marriage to Rory Fleming in 2007 when the couple appeared, as I’m sure you’re aware, alongside each other in a Danish reality TV show charged with the task of renovating their Valdemars castle property into a museum.

So far, so familiar: Denmark, like England, was, in 2008, hit hard by a national recession.  Bleak times and, for lots of us, a period of traumatic adjustment:  some, having lost their jobs, found themselves chronically ill-equipped to meet their monthly mortgage payments and, alongside their families, were evicted from their own homes; others decided to give the east wing a bit of a spruce up and convert the smaller library into a gift shop for the tourists.

Touched at this initial feeling of kinship, we were always likely to sympathise when Fleming and the Baroness’ relationship became strained during the renovation (with the Daily Express noting Fleming’s ‘discomfort’ contrasting sharply with Luel-Brockdorff ‘spoilt and brat like behaviour’.)   The stresses of home decoration are familiar to anybody that has ever spent an uncomfortable night on a fold out sofa following a sourly protracted disagreement over whether it’s best to move the coffee table more in line with the mantle or just leave it as it is (that is to say, anybody that has ever tried home decorating). Imagine doing it with the glaring lights of the camera adding ten pounds and melting your eye makeup.  Then imagine having to do it all over again because your mic kept slipping during the last take.  It’s easy to see voices getting raised, even if they’re not caught properly in the first run through.

But did it make good television?  After all, domestic disharmony is, it must be conceded, a overly trod theme of reality television and using it as a key subject matter in their inaugural fly-on-the-wall run out brought with it accusations of the Flemings shamelessly covering old ground.  We, though, would hesitate to see covering old ground as a bad thing is this instance- dustcovers work best and can be bought cheaply at your local Wilkinsons, but, if there’s none knocking about, ruining a few old sheets is probably preferable to getting paint everywhere.

So they can illuminate and they can also advise, they can make us laugh and they can make us cry. But where the story of the James Bond creator’s nephew and his marriage to a Danish Baroness with remote blood links to our own Royal family (and their subsequent divorce- reported to have cost Fleming in the region of four hundred million pounds) begins to stray from its otherwise stunningly relatable and largely castle based narrative is in its aftermath, wherein Nicklas Bendtner enters the fray- displaying, it should be noted, significantly more urgency than he’s hitherto yet to display chasing down a loose ball in an Arsenal shirt- and is spotted walking and playing football in Hyde park with Luel-Brockdorff and her children.

All very sweet, but also a useful training exercise for Bendtner:  Brockdorff’s children, at six and three, work out at roughly the same average age as the Arsenal team Bendtner will soon be again a part of, competing in the Carling Cup.   And, with the ever expanding Champions’ League, it’s probably useful for him to get used to names like Luel-Brockdorff, which, give or take an ‘AK’ of ‘FC’ prefix, sounds exactly like something you expect to come across on a Tuesday night ITV2 highlights package propping up the rest of Group G.

More Baroness Caroline images: Caroline Luel-Brockdorff WAG Gallery.