Tragic stars of endless sitcom
OK, they’ve bolted, and now the rest are left, in all their oddness. What a family to marry into, in full public view all their lives, unable to nip out to a bookshop, or grab a table in a popular restaurant. Do they even read?
The bling surely can’t be worth it, but they’re brought up to their Truman Show life, making superficial conversation with strangers, alternately idolised or slagged in a media that trails after them like creepy ex-boyfriends.
There’s the 98-year-old Duke of Edinburgh, looking cadaverous, as a man of his age will, pranging his car a year ago and thinking neither to apologise to the other driver, nor to give up driving, though he’s since been made to.
A life of never having to justify yourself will do that to you. A life posing in uniforms, a Staffordshire figurine on the mantelpiece of a small and increasingly bewildered country with its grand history behind it.
The duke was said to be ‘‘spitting blood’’ when he learned the two sane ones had scarpered. And isn’t that the way in excessively controlled families who defer to some patriarch or matriarch in all matters? Even as adults, they’re not supposed to have minds of their own.
He’ll die soon. It’s inevitable. The Queen, now 93, will live to 150, increasingly wizened, a miracle product of lousy food and draughty habitations. But how sane is it to devote your life to being the matching ornament on a national mantlepiece, or more properly, the sacred idol brought out on special occasions and carried in religious procession to bless the crops?
I’ve seen The Crown so I know she’d much prefer to have lived among horses, a Hermes scarf knotted under her chin, and marry her trainer. They’d have talked night and day about hocks and withers, whatever they are, and breeding perfect animal offspring. She might have been happy.
So much more fun than breeding one’s own children, who can be quite unlovely. I’m thinking of Prince Andrew and his louche friends. He’s got to stand with his face in the corner for ages now and would be expelled if the royal family was a nursery school, which it almost is when servants do the grown-up stuff in life for them.
As in many families, the miscreant is his mother’s favourite, so he’s only been suspended. And how old is this naughty boy? 59. Nearly on the pension.
Prince Edward, 55, has not been expected to join the armed forces and cut a dash, so he doesn’t count.
Princess Anne, 69? On The Crown she’s my favourite. Twice married, and her children have no titles, so they’re doing their own thing while she does good works. Anne doesn’t have a camera thrust in her face everywhere she goes. She’s neither pretty nor glamorous, a lucky break.
Charles, 71 and eternally ill at ease, is miscast in his role of future king, and was even worse as cheating husband to the child bride who gave him two heirs. He waits for his mother to die. That’s his job. She will of course outlive him. It’s quite the sitcom.
Kate, William’s wife, clothes horse, future queen and model mother, has bought the whole play-acting scenario, witness her upright, anorexic body. William, next in line after Charles, admits to having experienced feelings, which is unroyal, and probably unBritish. When he says he can’t put his arm around Harry now, it’s sad, only because he can’t believe his brother wants independence and he doesn’t get why.
It took an actress to see the state of play and demand an indefinite intermission.