Night the Queen let her hair down — and got ticked off by a Grenadier
On one BBC channel, six celebs were clambering over a mountain of dung in a Victorian dustyard, in search of scraps. on another, Wastemen was starting, a three-part documentary about bin collections. Honestly, the rubbish you get on TV these days.
And now the obvious joke is done, let’s have a party — perhaps the most extravagant street party the country has ever seen. The Queen’s Big Night Out (C4) told the story of Ve Day 1945, when the young Princesses elizabeth and Margaret slipped out of Buckingham Palace to join in the celebrations.
Ve Day is May 8, but this year that’s the day after the General election and the telly schedules will be full of political analysis. So this exuberant bit of history screened early, with the Queen herself setting the scene.
In a radio interview from decades ago, the monarch told how she and her younger sister, with a crowd of ladies-in-waiting and equerries, joined a million or more people thronging the streets: ‘All of us just swept along on a tide of happiness and relief.’
Though the Princesses were first and second in line to the Throne, they had the King’s blessing for the jaunt. The country had just survived nearly six years of nazi onslaught, after all — how dangerous could a street party be?
Pretty boisterous, was the answer. Some revellers were killed falling off the top of double- deckers, while others were scaling lamp-posts with a skinful of booze and a bottle in each hand. Many pubs had run out of beer before sunset.
The marvellous Baroness Trumpington, who spent the war at the code-breaking HQ Bletchley Park, revealed that she was chaperoned by a gallant sailor, whom she had never met before and who confined himself to stealing a few kisses.
Amid so much roistering, she mused, her guardian protected her from what she called ‘knicker trouble’, or unwanted male attention.
To ensure the Princesses were kept safe, King George despatched his youngest and most dashing equerry, a RAF war hero called Group Captain Peter Townsend. He was twice the age of young Margaret, but so heroic that any girl could fall for him in a heartbeat — and lots did.
This night might have marked the beginning of a royal love affair that was to threaten national scandal.
As the Palace partygoers were carried down towards Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, the future queen — in her Auxillary Territorial Service uniform — tried to hide in the crowd. ‘We were terrified of being recognised so I pulled my cap well down over my eyes,’ she said.
The ruse didn’t work — one of her Grenadier Guard escorts told her to straighten it. ‘He refused to be seen with an officer improperly dressed,’ she laughed.
The recollections of her friends 70 years on were joyous, and the archive footage was amazing. Surely the capital has never been so crammed. The whole of the Mall was as packed as a Tube carriage, and every face was smiling.
A century earlier, London was not quite such fun, as Ann Widdecombe was finding out on 24 Hours In The Past (BBC1). She was joined by impressionist Alistair McGowan, young actor Tyger Drew- Honey from outnumbered and a few others as they donned Victorian clothes and tackled the 19th century’s nastiest jobs.
The atmosphere was revoltingly authentic. Thank heavens we couldn’t smell them scraping cartloads of horse muck off the streets before they spent hours up to their waists in waste on a stinking salvage heap. This was recycling, Dickensian style.
The show worked well, because all six were eager for the experience. If these had been work-shy airheads, the kind of instant celebs bred by reality shows, they would have been begging to leave within minutes, and we would have learned nothing.
Instead, this lot got stuck in, even if it was nothing like what they had expected. ‘I wanted to ride a penny-farthing,’ sighed McGowan plaintively, as he hunkered down fully clothed for a few hours’ sleep on a flagstone floor.
Modern-day recycling with the dreaded green bins suddenly doesn’t look so bad.