Inside the contemptuous mind of Edward VIII
‘After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself within 12 months,” King George V complained of his son David, soon to be Edward VIII, in a letter to his Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in 1934. How right he was.
It was this kind of prophetic insight, gleaned from royal archives and private correspondence, that made The Royal House of Windsor (Channel 4) such a fascinating delve into history. This is not only because of its acuity, but because we got the spoiled prince’s opposing point of view as well; how he had hated his “rotten father” and “loathed and despised” his family, and the life of public duty imposed on him by his royal status, long before he met Wallis Simpson and abdicated.
Despite George V’s keen understanding of his son’s character, the king was portrayed here as a plodding monarch whose dullness was the key to his surviving tumultuous times that had done for other European dynasties. The man credited with saving Britain’s Germanic royalty from a similar fate was Lord Stamfordham, a private secretary so devoted to monarchy that he searched tirelessly for the means to rebrand it.
If little of the wider history revealed here was news, Stamfordham’s pivotal role in it has not been widely acknowledged in previous television histories. It was his instinct that the survival of the monarchy was dependent on the love of the people. It was he who came up with that brilliant idea of adopting the innocuous name of Windsor (after such history-freighted surnames as Tudor, Stuart and Plantagenet had been rejected) and putting it about “that Queen Victoria should be regarded as having founded the House of Windsor”. A scheme that drew a letter of congratulations from a former prime minister.
“Do you realise you have christened a dynasty?” wrote the 5th Earl of Rosebery admiringly, and not a little enviously.
Still, the man who emerged most vividly in this opening feature-length episode, of six, was undoubtedly the gilded, spoilt and contemptuous Edward VIII. Fans of Netflix’s The
Crown, intrigued by glimpses of this acerbic and bitter man in his treacherous post-abdication guise as the Duke of Windsor, will have gleaned everything they needed to know about him here. Through his own correspondence we saw his collision course with fate.
“The day for kings and princes is past, monarchies are out of date,” he whinged, in a letter to a married mistress, as far back as 1919. Sometimes, a man’s own words really are the best means of condemning him.
Television regularly invites us to admire the achievements of humanity’s more talented and courageous members. Quite a few of these featured in Incredible Medicine: Dr Weston’s Casebook (BBC Two), a very watchable series about cutting-edge medical science. Presented by surgeon and author Gabriel Weston, it was unusual in putting the focus primarily on the individuals whose unique physiologies and conditions have led to farreaching medical breakthroughs. Weston, previously seen on Trust
Me, I’m a Doctor, was a congenial host, at her best putting across complex medical issues in easily decipherable terms. Why, for example, might isolating the one-in-six-billion genetic mutations responsible for an American woman’s ultra-rare connective tissue disorder provide a cure for more common conditions like osteoporosis?
Occasionally, the format veered towards the uncomfortable, such as the item on a seven-year-old Russian girl whose heart developed outside her rib cage, and could be seen beating like a supple ostrich egg on her tummy. Here, the camera’s lingering gaze felt distinctly voyeuristic.
But mostly the programme fulfilled its brief admirably. Neuroscientist VS Ramachandran’s discovery that the “phantom” pain felt by amputees in missing limbs could be treated simply, with mirrors was particularly affecting.
Most inspiring was the closing piece on quadriplegic Ian Burkhart who let a team of electrical engineers and neuroscientists implant a chip in his brain to test a pioneering new treatment for spinal injury. Footage of him regaining movement in his fingers and arm with the help of a computer was extraordinary. But what was truly astonishing was the idea that his courage could make the devastating disabilities caused by spinal injuries a thing of the past.