How a kilt-wearing Prince Philip insulted the King with a curtsey
FOR ADMIRERS of Prince Philip’s gaffes and affronts, this was a humdinger. On his first visit to Balmoral, when he was courting Princess Elizabeth after the war, he took umbrage at royal insistence that he must wear a kilt.
To the 24-year-old naval lieutenant, with not a speck of Scots blood in him, a kilt looked suspiciously like a skirt.
So when he first approached George VI in full Highland attire, he didn’t bow. Instead, he made a deep curtsey. The King was not amused.
This marvellous anecdote was one of many in Prince Philip: The Plot To Make A King (C4), which included footage of the moment the future Queen, aged 13, first set eyes on the 18-year-old who was to be her spouse.
A snatch of news footage revealed their meeting, at Dartmouth Naval College in 1939, and family snapshots showed them playing croquet later that day. Little Lilibet was reportedly smitten at first sight.
If Buckingham Palace had any concerns that this documentary might include embarrassments for the royals, their fears were baseless. The narrative touched lightly on Philip’s four sisters, who all married Germans — three of them outright Nazis — but this was old news.
There was nothing very revelatory about the story that the Queen Mum was suspicious of Philip at first and called him ‘the Hun’ despite his exemplary war record. What mother, after all, warms to her first son- i n- l aw straight away? The surprise i nstead was how caustically the programme dealt with Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten. He was depicted less as a kingmaker, more as a Disney villain. At every twist of the plot, there was ‘Uncle Dickie’ as the family called him, scheming ruthlessly.
King George, claimed narrator Tamsin Greig, feared a Mountbatten takeover of the throne and did all he could to disrupt his daughter’s engagement, insisting that she delayed the marriage for a year and engineering a four-month separation while Elizabeth undertook her first royal tour.
The royal wedding in 1947 was presented as a sort of coup d’etat by Germanic aristocracy — Mountbatten’s family name, after all, had originally been Battenberg.
Surely Lord Mountbatten’s daughters, Pamela and Patricia, could not have been told that the documentary would amount to a hatchet job on their father. The sisters sat side by side, sharing fond but insightful reminiscences.
They had grown up with Philip and they knew what sort of boy he had been, always a telling clue to a man’s character. As a lad, young Phil had enjoyed pranks — now there’s a shock. The sisters’ openness was repaid with a portrait of their father that verged on the vindictive.
A snatch of footage from the family archive showed ‘Dickie’ holding up a dachshund by the collar, like a ferret. Innocuous film of a family picnic was overlaid with raunchy jazz music and dark hints of debauchery in private.
It was all fascinating. But it sometimes felt like heavy-handed propaganda, as though a different script could have told an entirely different story.
The voiceover for Atlantic: The Wildest Ocean On Earth (BBC2) also spoiled the show, because narrator Cillian Murphy was giving it the full Hollywood basso profundo in a transatlantic Irish accent.
The words he was reading were bland guff about the Gulf Stream and the feeding habits of humpback whales, but he was delivering them in a rumble that portended the end of the world.
Like Clint Eastwood reading the shipping forecast, Cillian’s voice was all wrong, and we couldn’t be sure either he had all his facts right. As we watched the whales blowing lassoes around a shoal of herring, Cillian intoned, ‘Humpbacks are the only animal that traps its prey in a bubble net.’
David Attenborough would never have written such inelegant prose. And also, hasn’t Sir David shown us dolphins using exactly this trick to catch sprats?
Much of the footage was excellent, and must have cost months of diligent labour. A shame to wreck it with a slapdash voiceover.