How the establishment spied on the future king
Not goggled at enough royals yet? No sooner has Channel 4 wrapped up the six-part series The Royal House of Windsor than it unveils Spying on the Royals. It’s as if their commissioning policy takes its cue from online algorithms: people who watched this royal programme also watched that royal programme. What next? An appreciation of Diana, Princess of Wales’ fashion sense? Oh no, BBC Two just did that.
In fact, Spying on the Royals (Sunday) was not without actual shock value. It opened with the usual grandstanding boasts about classified documents being released for the first time in many aeons, of shocking revelations that would shiver your timbers. Like the boy who cried wolf, one has rather heard all this before. And yet it seems a bit of a scoop to claim that Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin ordered Special Branch and MI5 to spy on the heir to the throne, latterly King Edward VIII.
What Superintendent Albert Canning of Scotland Yard found out was nothing that hasn’t been in the public domain for decades. The POW (Prince of Wales), as the quarry was imaginatively code-named, moved in a fast set hell-bent on bedhopping and sympathising with Nazis, and that he was pathetically in the thrall of a twice-divorced, jewel-obsessive sexual adventuress. But crikey, how they went about it. There was a pair of historians on hand to comment and their eyes spent the hour on stalks.
These programmes stand or fall on their star witnesses. Spying on the Royals targeted a smattering of high-value crusties. John Julius Norwich was agog at the Prince’s “rather small pair of sailing pants”. George V’s godson Lord Wigram remembers being told with a sigh that the Prince “was living a funny sort of life”.
The cloak-and-dagger atmospherics were trowelled on. To help with the visuals, wordless scenes were reenacted with actors playing Canning and Baldwin with heavyweight moustaches Velcroed on. Ultimately this was a diverting story about a noxious smell under the nose of the English establishment, and the lengths it went to get rid of it. The thought of Queen Wallis chilled Whitehall to the very marrow.
The right gut instinct, the wrong guest star. Line of Duty (BBC One, Sunday) has form as a drama that hires big names and then offs them after an episode or two. Until the last second of the first episode, it looked as if it would be Thandie Newton taking an early bath. But Jed Mercurio knows how to blindside and it turned out that Jason Watkins is the actor who signed the short-term contract.
It’s not yet clear how it happened, but somehow DCI Roz Huntley (Newton), despite significant blood loss from a head wound, managed to overcome forensics specialist Tim Ifield (Watkins), who was straddled across her and armed with an electric saw, insert a knife into his neck and amputate his fingertips. Then tidy up.
Poor old Ifield, who is now posthumously – and perhaps correctly – thought to be a double murderer. It would have been fun to see Watkins go head to head with AC-12 members in the interview room but that privilege fell to Newton in a scene that was the episode’s meaty centrepiece.
Newton is giving the performance of her career as she chicanes around Operation Trapdoor’s many sinkholes while coolly requesting to be addressed in gender-neutral language. She even had time for a private weep at the ghastliness of her plight.
This is shaping up to be a cautionary story of a high-flying woman trapped by ambition in a man’s world. When D S Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure) faked sisterly solidarity with Huntley, it was just to maintain her cover. But Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) seems pre-programmed to think of younger women as “wee girls” or members of Pan’s People, and just passed Fleming over for promotion in favour of D S Steve Arnott (Martin Compston). By next week maybe the two detective sergeants won’t be addressing each other as “mate”.
Meanwhile, Huntley was replaced by someone called Buckles, a nonentity with a joke for a surname. And Paul Higgins is deliberately playing ACC Derek Hilton as a limp biscuit. Is it so very wrong to root for a bent copper who kills to cover her tracks? That’s the canny genius of Line of Duty.