The king has cancer, long live ‘The Crown’
The royal drama allows no peace for the underwhelming king with surprising ears and a troublesome son, writes
They have to make another season of The Crown. “Not The Crown”, you cry! Haven’t they milked those poor blue bloods with questionable access to their emotions enough?
But this stuff is too good not to be televised — practically in real time.
Last week, King Charles was diagnosed with cancer.
You’d be hard pressed to have missed this news. Though, to be fair, it is the kind of plot twist that reads more like a midweek episode on the Beautiful and Damned. News outlets are dedicated to real-time coverage of the story. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East pale into insignificance when this human tragedy unfolds at a palace near you.
The leads in this royal telenovela are like the wind-up ghosts of Christmas present, haunting the same places where their ancestors left pieces of their brittle hearts years ago in Christmas past — except the current cast has renewed vigour with which to shake their chains.
At the head of this sorry carousel of privilege and fading empire is King Charles, newly in focus as a lead in his own right — diagnosed with the dread disease. Tragic. You can see why this story grabs the public imagination.
It’s a tale as old as time. A slightly underwhelming son with surprising ears waits patiently in the wings for his mother to shuffle off her mortal coil so he can step up and into the role he’d understudied for a lifetime. But the mother, aka the late queen, is living her golden era. She’s managed to snatch public opinion back from the jaws of defeat — or rather from the hungry maw of unbridled and unquestioning Princess Diana adulation.
You can’t really claim to be beloved by “the people” when their princess has been hounded to her death — probably by your cold, hard indifference to her marital plight.
I can just imagine the internal dialogue knocking about in the queen’s noggin during those dark days when she was just an evil mother-in-law, manifesting as an old lady with very low ratings.
“Suck it up, what goes around comes around. This too shall pass. Yes, there may be some frenzied channelling of public emotion onto the sloe-eyed, blonde virgin — and the palace gates are littered with a veritable mountain of rotting flowers and cheap Chinese teddy bears, but they will clean them up eventually and will see you for who you are — a stoic granny-in-chief, dressed in primary colours.
A queen with a hapless son who you’re keeping from the throne until your dying breath to save the nation from the prince’s eternal stiff upper lip, environmentally friendly campaigning and lustful talk of tampons. I mean really!
And then, as always, the wheel does turn.
And the prince, who may have been having a similar internal narrative to his mummy’s, particularly in reference to the flowers and teddy bears at the palace gates, when Lillibet finally acquiesced to the fact that she too was the “quintessence of dust”.
Our dithering Hamlet at last stepped into his God-given role — a crown-bearing figurehead for ideas from another era like the Commonwealth (yeah right), glad handing, mumbling sweet nothings to the adoring plebs, signing documents that come in a little red box every day. Just being king for once in his life. Is it too much to ask?
The hand of fate — you can’t keep it down. Just when he’d finally stilled the voice of dissent from his troublesome younger son — first toying with the Nazis (like his great uncle) and then taking up with his sanctimonious American divorcee (also like his great uncle), stealing the limelight from his reign with his pesky recriminations and constant carping about his mental health — now this!
Is a king to have no peace to just enjoy his country estates in the sun (or the drizzle, to be fair to the British climate)?
Well, you know what they say — when you get lemons, make lemonade. No glass halffull for this king. Charlie knows a good storyline when he sees one.
If you needed public sympathy — and a way to shut up Harry and Meghan’s whingeing once and for all — there’s nothing like the Big C to take the wind out of their Californian sails. Put that in your ayahuasca pipe and smoke it, Prince Hazzles!
I can’t wait to see how the reunion episode, where the prodigal Prince returns to visit his ailing father, plays out . I hear it is only 30 minutes long!
I, for one, wish him a speedy recovery —I need many more episodes.