Who did Harry get his sense of fun from? The Queen of Giggles
The Queen, we’re often told, has a sparkling sense of humour. We don’t see it in her severely formal Christmas broadcasts, and there was no evidence of that quick wit in Claire Foy’s portrayal in The Crown on Netflix, but anyone who knows her Majesty will tell you: she’s a riot in private.
The Queen’s Green Planet (ITV) showcased this irreverent side of her personality more vividly than any previous TV programme. Perhaps, one week before her 92nd birthday, she doesn’t feel the need to be quite so boringly discreet.
Or perhaps, more probably, this was a perfectly calculated ploy by a woman with a long lifetime’s experience of diplomacy, who was determined to find a way of highlighting a project that, while worthy, might not seem terribly exciting: tree conservation.
She is the patron and driving force of the Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy, set up to create a network of protected forests throughout the former British colonies (see, I warned you it wouldn’t make the pulse start racing).
To push the project into the headlines, she invited the great naturalist and presenter Sir David Attenborough to take a stroll with her through a part of the palace grounds rarely shown on TV. And the Queen was in a playful mood.
Pointing to two colossal London Planes, throwing shade over the rear terrace, she commented that ‘they do exactly the right sort of protection racket’ — as though the twin trees were Ronnie and Reggie Kray.
But she really got the giggles when Sir David ambled off to read a pair of plaques under trees the Queen had planted to commemorate the births of her younger sons, Andrew and edward.
As the game old explorer lent forward, hands clapped on thighs, to confirm the wording, he stuck out his backside for balance. Off camera came a choked sound, that of a monarch trying to stifle an outburst of hilarity. ‘I don’t think he believes me,’ she gasped.
her sense of humour has skipped a generation and been passed to grandson Prince harry, who was seen on a Royal tour of the Caribbean and leaving trees wherever he went. Shovelling compost into a hole with a sprouting twig, harry growled at the assembled dignitaries: ‘It’s what our family do... travel the world — planting trees!’ he made it sound like spy work.
This wasn’t the only compost in the hour-long show: spadefuls of filler were packed around the edges to cover up gaps. A dull sequence about epping Forest had no business on prime-time TV, and any claim that film star Angelina Jolie made the topic of trees more interesting was a wild exaggeration.
A touch of dramatic exaggeration is desirable in a programme title. No one’s going to watch the Quite Good Bake Off or Britain’s Got Mediocrities.
But Nightmare Pets SOS (BBC1) was taking liberties. A show under such a bloodcurdling banner should bring us killer gerbils roaming school corridors after being exposed to freak doses of radiation.
We want to hear about maneating goldfish, flushed down the loo as tiddlers and now prowling for vengeance through the waterways of an unsuspecting market town.
What we got was a dog that didn’t like being taken for walks, and an incontinent cat.
I felt for the two-year-old terrier Pupageno, not least because of his painfully middleclass name. It’s a doggy pun on a character from a Mozart opera. Something tells me Pupageno’s dog biscuits don’t come from Lidl.