A Mills & Boon impression of the postwar Windsors
One rather thought that
The Crown had enjoyed the last word on the private doings of their royal highnesses. There’s a whole generation of Netflix binge-watchers for whom Peter Morgan (also writer of The Queen and The Audience) is the go-to authority on the Windsors. But appetites having been whetted, The
Royal House of Windsor (Channel 4) muscled in on the same territory promising revelations from an archive of documents kept under lock, key and portcullis.
This second episode (of six) focused on the royal tour of South Africa in 1947. While Britain froze to the bone in the worst winter in living memory, king, queen and princesses took ship for a hotter hemisphere, causing George VI much anguish.
This mulch of history and gossip fell short on both counts. The promise of archival revelations turned out to feature little more than a few epistolary indiscretions from Sir Alan “Tommy” Lascelles (whom Pip Torrens played so beautifully in The
Crown). The king’s tantrums were codenamed “Nashville” because they involved much gnashing of teeth, while his older daughter Elizabeth’s unselfishness was, Lascelles deemed, “not a normal characteristic of that family”.
The voice-over hyped up minor dramas as major ones. The King’s worry about the weather in England was translated into despair. As for the Mills & Boonish sidebar involving Elizabeth’s betrothal to her so-called Greek god Philip, no documentary evidence was presented to suggest that it caused deep family tension, nor for the bold claim that the tour was all about shoring up the Empire.
Instead, there were the usual popup historians, for whom there must be a collective noun (A soundbite of historians? A waffle? A faucet?). The programme also panned for gold by interviewing a vast array of nabobs, toffs and grandchildren of the main players. Few got more than 20 seconds’ airtime.
The freshest perspective came from South African historians. The crown was surprisingly seen as “a force of enlightenment” by black South Africans, explained Dr Wayne Dooling. The king was kept from pinning medals on non-whites by handlers he compared to the Gestapo. “I’d like to shoot them all,” he grumbled. It wasn’t quite clear if he meant all whites or all whites and blacks.
When a series keeps coming back year after year, it must be doing something right.
Benidorm (ITV) has booked in for a ninth series of cheerful antics on the Costa del Crud. The principal ingredients are sun, sea and a seemingly limitless supply of lame gags about bodily functions.
Characters are bursting to go, or letting off, or emitting foul smells. The look features a swatch of in-your-face colours. One codger spent half of this episode in a Day-Glo kaftan after his luggage was lost. It was as if he was wearing the script.
Oddly for a show set on holiday, no one wears sunglasses because actors need eyes to do all those emoji faces. The various expressions say things like phwoar, miaow, duh, cheeky wink, I’m thick as a plank me. One of the new faces, rather astoundingly, belonged to Nigel Havers, who normally plays cads in posh dramas but here played a cad in a package holiday sitcom. Benidorm scholars will also note the return of Shelley Longworth, last seen on her hols in the fifth series, now back as a rep.
It’s not easy cooking up this recipe or everyone would do it. When Alan Yentob took over at BBC One, he introduced the legendary misfire Eldorado, which was basically
EastEnders with sangria. The creators of Benidorm understand that viewers don’t want Spain to be a place of anguish and aggro. They want politically incorrect escapism and recycled jokes. They want hot-to-trot grannies, thick teenagers, and exceptionally gay hairdressers. In Benidorm they get all this in buckets and spades.
Rumour has it that Brendan O’Carroll from Mrs Brown’s Boys has requested a Benidorm cameo. That makes all too much sense. Tim Healy, a Geordie with a face like a slapped rump in make-up, is the resident transvestite. But there’s always room for more cross-dressing.
It’s perfectly unspeakable but, a bit like Brexit, Benidorm is a cheap-as-chips fantasyland for which a quiet majority have expressed a preference.