Three cheers for gloriously funny royal wedding spoof
The ginger-haired actor Richard Goulding wants to watch it. If not, he may become surgically attached to a single real-life character. In the play King Charles III, later adapted for television, he movingly conveyed the anguish of Prince Harry trapped in a gilded cage and denied the right to marry the young working-class woman of his dreams. The comic flip side was scabrously explored in The Windsors: Royal Wedding Special (Channel 4) as he prepared to wed a woman to whom he was constitutionally unsuited.
The insurrectionary sitcom has been making merciless fun of Britain’s first family since 2016, but until now there’s been no major royal event to latch on to. The joke in this double-length episode helping was that Harry had fallen for a devotee of fatuous New-age speak. Before he could even finish popping the question she was melodramatically screaming, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
Notwithstanding the rumour that Her Majesty is a fan, I’ve a hunch that the royals are discouraged from viewing The Crown. “I never realised how bloody important we are!” drawled Princes Eugenie (Celeste Dring) when she binged on it here. But one or two might sneak a peak at The Windsors without taking offence at the programme’s parade of posh vowels and entitled scheming.
The ladies were all at one another’s throats: Pippa (Morgana Robinson) fattening up Kate (Louise Ford) with doughnut juice, Camilla (Haydn Gwynne) setting Meghan (Kathryn Drysdale) against Kate, Anne (Vicki Pepperdine) barking orders like a bossy Hogwarts ghoul. There were witty allusions to film. The child catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (a lovely turn from Paul Kaye) swooped down on Windsor to impound undesirable down-and-outs. Beatrice (Ellie White) cast herself as Bridget Jones without the money worries until she fell for the charms of Jeremy Corbyn (Tom Basden), who received a call and said, “that’s Hizbollac [Hizbollah], I better get this”.
The script by George Jeffrie and Bert Tyler-moore fizzed and popped with one-liners, including a filthy Eurovision joke about the Greek entry. All the regular performers were a hoot. This OTT spoof was so gloriously on the nose that, at the mention of Meghan Markle, I fear I am inadvertently starting to picture not the real thing but her earnest avatar played by Drysdale. May they all be summoned to the palace to receive well-earned gongs.
The hashtag #Bringbackourgirls helped jolt the Nigerian government into negotiating with Boko Haram, the militant Islamist group that kidnapped 276 Chibok schoolgirls in 2014. As told in Nigeria’s
Stolen Daughters (BBC Two), the 103 who were freed were schooled in a high-security boarding block in Abuja, then sent on to university.
But how free is free? There seemed to be an insidious project to suppress the girls’ memories. “Don’t waste your time thinking about the negative side of life,” a teacher told Hannatu, whose her leg was amputated after a bombing which killed 10 girls. Margret fell in with the interdict. “I can’t dwell on what happened to me,” she explained. “The past is like water. Once it is spilled, it’s spilled forever.”
This approach doesn’t fall in with the Western concept of the talking cure. But the government has a lock on their story. It barred the production from asking questions about their experience of Boko Haram, and at university banned the young women from associating with other students.
The camera picked up a bit more when it eavesdropped on the women as they were reunited with the families. To get a sharper picture, the production encountered two young women known as “Forgotten Girls”, who had managed to escape. Unsupported, even shunned as potential suicide bombers, they had no one to suppress their traumatic memories.
Thus Zahra, abducted at 16 and threatened with death unless she helped kidnap more girls, carried the guilty burden hearing a girl of 14 being raped by 10 men then dying alone. Habiba, abducted at 15 and locked in a cage for four months, was forced to marry. “He looked like a hyena that eats people,” she said. She escaped when she was two months pregnant and infected with HIV. “My life is ruined,” she concluded, and yet two orphaned boys adopted her as their mother, investing their hopes in her.
Balanced between hope and despair, this was a searching and sensitive portrait.
The Windsors: Royal Wedding Special ★★★★
Nigeria’s Stolen Daughters ★★★★