The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
ANITA SINGH SCREENGRAB
Jeremy Paxman may have been more corgi than Rottweiler, but his royal documentary was a cut above
Channel 5, Tuesday
I’ve missed Jeremy Paxman. He’s still there on University Challenge, of course, doing his crotchety aunt routine, and he pops up on documentaries about Empire and art and whatnot. But there hasn’t been a proper Paxo savaging since he left Newsnight in 2014. So Paxman on the Queen’s Children sounded a delicious prospect. I had visions of him cornering Prince Edward at a charity function and barking the same question a dozen times: “Why on earth did you think the royal It’s A Knockout tournament was a good idea?”
Alas, it was not to be. “I used to believe that Britain should be a republic,” Paxman said in his introduction. Hang on, used to? “Now, though, I’m a monarchist.” Oh. Luckily he hadn’t turned into a royal toady with a subscription to Majesty magazine, instead providing the rationale that “years and years of interviewing people making their way up the greasy pole of politics led me to the conclusion that representing the country should be kept out of the hands of those who want the job”.
What followed was a cut above the reverential royal documentaries that we’re used to. Paxman set out his stall – arguing that the Palace thrust the Queen’s children into the limelight from birth as a PR strategy, and the royal offspring can’t really be blamed for the string of PR disasters that followed – and whipped us through the lives of Charles, Anne, Andrew and Edward with nice detail: Edward turning up for his first day of work experience clutching a box of PG Tips, Andrew achieving such heart-throb status that he was immortalised in song by a Nolan sister.
Paxman extracted decent nuggets of gossip from his interviewees, notably Charles’s friend Broderick Munro-Wilson, who recalled a despairing Prince of Wales asking: “Shall I go gay?” after seeing a list of prospective brides plastered all over the papers. And there was a bit of sneering, but it was more nippy corgi than Newsnight Rottweiler, mostly reserved for Charles getting into Cambridge despite an underwhelming academic record. What did other undergraduates think of him having got there on pretty indifferent A-levels, Paxman asked Munro-Wilson. “I don’t think anybody gave a monkey’s,” came the reply.
Amore genial host could be found on Martin Clunes: Islands of America. We may as well surrender to the idea that travel programmes now come with a celebrity embedded, and Clunes is as good a guide as any. The premise was that we would see “a different USA”, but the show took no chances, starting with the most familiar island of all, Hawaii.
The history was brisk – “They attacked and killed Captain Cook and then, so the story goes, they ate him” – and Clunes made a decent effort to go beyond the tourist image and explain the significance of the Aloha shirt (as Hawaiian shirts are properly known), and the ukulele, but the lush imagery stole the show. Forget Clunes: it was the director of photography, Richard Ranken, who deserved his name in the title.
Every so often a documentary has a breakout star. Jamie Oliver was doing his lovely jubbly thing in the background of a River Café documentary when he was spotted. Humpback Whales: A Detective Story gave us Prof Joy Reidenberg, who may have been cast as a bit part player but romped away with the whole thing.
Prof Joy conducts whale autopsies, happily chomping on a banana, while thousands of pounds of whale guts spill on to the ground beside her (“I get hungry!”). She was on TV some years back on a programme called Inside Nature’s Giants, but since then we have been Joy-less. If Silent Witness can wring 22 series out of Amanda Burton and Emilia Fox looking glum in badly-lit rooms, this lady deserves her own show. I’ve never seen someone wave giant lice in front of a camera with such gusto.
This documentary was made by Tom Mustill, who found fame in 2015 when a whale breached and landed smack on top of his kayak in Monterey Bay. Mustill and his companion, Charlotte Kinloch, were miraculously unscathed. The heart-in-mouth moment was captured on film and went viral.
Mustill is a wildlife film-maker and decided to go back to California in search of his whale. He had become a little bit obsessed with whales, specifically that one. Had it landed on them on purpose? Or did it do its best to avoid them? Anyone who has seen Orca, the Seventies film in which Richard Harris is stalked by an aggrieved killer whale, knows they can hold grudges. The film
Edward turned up for his first day of work experience clutching a box of PG Tips