A wickedly witty royal send up, but are the Windsors watching?
CHANNeL 4’s antimonarchist Telly Trendies have always had a bit of a problem with their attitude to the royals. History documentaries about forgotten palace scandals, and wedding celebrations such as last month’s When Harry Met Meghan, are surefire ratings winners.
But the snobbish C4 execs are also precious about their reputation as iconoclasts, screening the ‘alternative’ Queen’s Speech every year. It’s all slightly awkward.
The Windsors (C4) has solved their problem neatly. It’s a wicked send-up, the most ruthless caricature of the royal Family since Spitting Image portrayed the Queen Mum as a gin- swilling, chain-smoking Brummie.
But it’s also hugely affectionate. Yes, Kate (Louise Ford) is a gipsy’s daughter, but she’s sweetly naive too. Harry (richard Goulding) is hopelessly thick, and Charles (Harry enfield) is so nutty that he talks to aliens — but it’s done without malice, playing up aspects of the royals that endear them to us.
At heart it’s an old-fashioned sitcom, a sort of Some Monarchs Do Have ’em.
The women are firmly in charge: Camilla lounges on the Queen Anne sofa, watching the racing and flicking her fag-ash on the carpet, while the Princess royal floats
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through the palace like a spectre all in black.
The comedy was shaky when it launched two years ago, but it hit its stride in its second series, as it focused on the soapier angles of the story — Pippa’s lingering lust for Harry, Camilla’s endless plots to become Queen.
This royal Wedding special was bursting with ideas like a box of exploding confetti, as the Trampcatcher (Paul Kaye) cleared the homeless off Windsor’s streets with his net, and Jeremy Corbyn (Tom Basden) tried to indoctrinate Princess Beatrice (ellie White).
Dim Bea was soon denouncing her family as ‘ puppets of the bourgeois oppressors’, though Jezza kept getting distracted by phone calls: ‘ Oh, it’s Hezbollah, best not to keep them waiting.’
There have been plenty of previous attempts to write royal comedies, from that hammy business with Liz Hurley as the Queen on the e! channel, to a bestforgotten Nineties movie starring John Goodman as an American who is crowned King ralph.
The Windsors succeeds because it plays into a public desire to imagine life in Buckingham Palace, as The Crown did on Netflix. Backstairs, both shows are doubtless compulsive viewing.
If it’s not quite unmissable, Innocent (ITV) has done enough to keep us watching every night. This tightly written drama, about a man (Lee Ingleby) who walks free on a technicality after his wife is murdered, has settled down to become a straightforward police procedural, mapping every step of the investigation.
Angel Coulby is the detective inspector clearing up the mess created during the first police inquiry by her boyfriend, who is also her senior officer. He talks breezily about brushing aside ‘inconvenient bits of evidence’, which is a worry. At the core is Ingleby’s powerhouse performance, full of repressed nerves and frustration that can boil over into unrestrained violence at the slightest provocation.
He sat at a seaside picnic table, leg twitching as he waited to see his estranged son, struggling so hard to keep his emotions in check that it came little surprise to see him beating a man senseless at the water’s edge.
That man, it turned out, had been having an affair with the murdered woman. He made a police statement, his face a mass of cuts and bruises, and no one thought to ask what happened.
Maybe that counts as an ‘inconvenient bit of evidence’.