With a star turn by the Queen, this BBC scoop was a real gem
Royal rumour says Prince Philip is a fan of Game of Thrones. Quite what it is that he relishes about all the raunchy, bloodthirsty, back-stabbing palace plots, we can only guess — but he thoroughly enjoyed a tour of the studios in Belfast, a few years ago.
as for the Queen, she likes nothing better than settling down to watch the antiques Roadshow. and as we discovered during her extraordinary appearance on The Coronation (BBC1), she has the connoisseur’s eye and depth of knowledge to earn her a place among the show’s resident experts.
Examining the Crown Jewels, as she reminisced about the 1953 ceremony that ordained her as Queen, Her Majesty displayed an art lover’s enthusiasm for the stones themselves.
Stroking the pair of teardrop pearls that once belonged to Mary Queen of Scots, which are now fixed below the orb and sceptre that top the Imperial State Crown, she mused: ‘They don’t look very happy now. Most pearls like to be living creatures — pearls are live things and they need warming.’
Then she turned the crown, which she wears at the State opening of Parliament, to examine a gigantic ruby, into which a feather had been set by the Black Prince in the 15th century.
Her grimace told us that she thought this gimmick was a tad common, but at least, she admitted, it helped her to tell the front of the crown from the back.
Her favourite tale concerned the Cullinan diamond, a jewel the size of a brick, sent from South africa to Edward VII in 1905 via parcel post. Even if it went by recorded delivery, that seems risky — though probably the Royal Mail was more reliable in Edwardian days.
The giant diamond was broken up for jewels by a cutter in amsterdam. ‘I always wish I had been there when they smashed it into pieces,’ smiled the Queen. She was wearing two Cullinan lumps, big as Milky Way chocolate bars, on her jacket. another, the size of a Wagon Wheel, adorned the crown.
There is a regal protocol, of course, that the Queen doesn’t do interviews. She certainly appeared to bristle faintly when presenter alastair Bruce asked direct questions rather than offering gentle prompts.
Without the royal contributions, however, this competent documentary — with its humdrum reminiscences from elderly choirboys and pompous courtiers — would probably have ended up on BBC4.
To have the Queen’s own memories of Coronation Day transformed it, especially as she was far less reverential than the rest. ‘awful lot of walking backwards, wasn’t there,’ she murmured, watching a flickering film of the dress rehearsal.
Most of the walking is more like staggering on Hard Sun (BBC1), the utterly dire, ultra-violent, sci-fi police thriller. Characters stricken with fear or emotion adopt a sort of zombie trudge.
Whenever the detectives Renko and Hicks (agyness Deyn and Jim Sturgess) encounter a goresoaked murder scene, which is every few minutes, they slow to a shuffle. Even when rescuing two sleeping children from the house of a maniac with a shotgun, they stumbled along like drunks.
Renko and Hicks are being hunted by MI5 assassins, to prevent them from releasing secret documents — which have already been published in the national Press, though nobody took much notice the first time.
If that makes no sense, neither does anything else in this heap of melodramatic stodge. The kindest criticism is that it looks like a youTube movie by a film studies undergraduate on a multi-million-pound budget.