IAN HYLAND on the weekend’s telly
The Queen: Duty Before Family? Channel 5 ★★★
Channel 5’s obsession with royal documentaries shows no sign of ending any time soon. I totally understand why. They pull in decent ratings and fill an awful lot of airtime. Still, I’m a bit worried they might be running out of ideas.
This latest offering on Saturday night was based on a woefully thin premise: Does the Queen put her job before the welfare of her family?
Given that her job is pretty much all about ensuring the long-term welfare of her family, it was a pretty moot point. Of course the job and the institution will always come first. If they didn’t, there would be no job and no institution.
Once that was established, the only place this show could go was conjecture.
Just how much does the Queen put the job before her family? Should we judge her harshly for leaving for a six-month tour of the Commonwealth instead of staying at home to read Prince Charles a bedtime story? (When Charles was a small boy in the 1950s, I mean. It would be a bit weird if he still wanted bedtime stories now.)
We never heard a proper answer to any of these questions, of course – we just got a run through of the main storylines from the first couple of The Crown and a few minutes on the recent Prince Andrew scandal.
Sadly, none of the royal observers interviewed was able to offer any insights into what will happen to Andrew, given his links to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
However, the narrator did end by reminding us: “Again and again the Queen has sacrificed those closest to her for the monarchy.” So if it was a clue you were looking for…