The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘They are such an eternally unusual bunch’
Victoria Coren Mitchell on her favourite royal soap opera – and ‘The Crown’
Much-loved 75-year-old broadcaster John Sergeant was in the news this week, saying The Crown is bad for our Royal family. At the risk of sounding like some sort of Viz cartoon where different sorts of TV presenter slug it out on topical issues of the day, I disagree with him. I think it’s great for them.
I say this having watched only the first episode of the new series. I know everyone else is bingeing on the lot, but, as a former chain smoker who could easily gobble eight KitKats in under 10 minutes, I try to pace myself. However, that deeply pleasurable hour and my clear memory of the previous two series was enough to know that, at a really hellish time for the Royals in mainstream news, this offers a helpful dollop of context and perspective. To put it another way: things have always been awful.
Mr Sergeant worries that a deal has broken down between the monarchy and the public, whereby they were “royal and distant” but suffered media coverage without complaint. He is now “not sure they should be portrayed at all in a multimillion-pound blockbuster [such as The Crown]”.
But people have been saying this sort of thing for my entire life – and presumably before then; it would be a weird coincidence if my birth marked a precise change of national view. Diana shouldn’t do interviews, Fergie shouldn’t write children’s books, Prince Charles shouldn’t sell watercolours, Pippa Middleton shouldn’t publish party-planning guides, nobody should do It’s a Royal Knockout. (Obviously, nobody should do It’s a Royal Knockout.)
I remember the roars of “FATALLY inappropriate!” 10 years ago when Peter Phillips sold his wedding to Hello! magazine. I didn’t mind his choice at all. In fact, I still chuckle happily at the memory of a sentence from that article: “It is the stuff of storybooks that Autumn is marrying the former Gordonstoun head boy who is the apple of his sovereign grandmother’s eye.” Wow. One could get lost in that sentence for hours.
Anyway, the magnificent royal soap opera has to be funded somehow. I love all of it; I myself would happily go without a few schools and hospitals if it meant more pictures of the Queen going round a biscuit factory in a hard hat, but some people have different priorities.
Peter Phillips told Hello! that he met his bride when “I was working for BMW Williams and Autumn was working in the main BMW hospitality suite.” I wouldn’t have objected if he’d added: “We were both drinking delicious beakers of Carlsberg Special Brew at the time, while relaxing on the comfortable Ikea ‘Ektorp’ sofa, £350.”
Indeed, I see no reason why Her Majesty the Queen, as her opentopped carriage glides into Royal Ascot, should not have “WILLIAM HILL” on her hat. But that’s just me.
Of course the Royal family do not make money from The Crown; I just mean I don’t worry about them being cheapened. They are such an eternally unusual bunch. My father once met Princess Anne and apologised for the fact that he had a swollen knee and was limping.
“Yes”, she replied, “it’s been a terrible year for equine VD.”
And we pay them to be a bit nuts. The ones we relish from history are the huge curiosities: Henry VIII, Richard III, Elizabeth I. To this day, they delight us with magnificent costumes, colourful characters and relentless narrative. (One of the lesser but by no means irrelevant tragedies of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, is that Mohamed Fayed would have been such an excellent member of the extended family. All he wants is to wear a gold crown and do preposterous things.)
I’m not saying they don’t work hard. The Prince of Wales is up at 5 o’clock every morning to bake those biscuits. And the Queen herself is so dedicated, hardworking and efficient, anyone would think she was German. But they also provide a lot of fun and entertainment, in a grey (increasingly dark grey) world.
Prince Andrew was always one of the stronger players in that field. There is something innately hilarious about him. That is why we desperately don’t want him to be found too guilty in the Epstein scandal. We want to enjoy all the stuff about sweating and shooting weekends and Pizza Express in Woking, without fearing that he actually did anything remotely as evil as the gruesome Epstein himself.
Can the Royal family survive that business? Of course it can. Can it weather a lawsuit from Harry and Meghan against the press? Of course it can. Does the broadcast of The Crown represent a terminal low in royal experience? With respect to John Sergeant, of course it doesn’t.
What The Crown actually does, in my view, is remind us how much ghastliness the whole thing has survived already, in recent living memory (before you even think about the decapitations, excommunications and murdered princelings of the past). So the timing of its release is genuinely helpful.
That single first episode of series three alone – thanks to a wonderful, chilling yet affecting performance from Samuel West as Anthony Blunt – reminded us that a KGB spy sat at the centre of Buckingham Palace for decades, while the Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon were no strangers to the concept of “sex scandals”.
Also, there was a great opening sequence about stamps. I love this show. I hope it runs and runs.
This piece is dedicated to Clive James, eternal idol of anyone who ever tried to write about TV
At a hellish time for the Royal family, The Crown offers a helpful dollop of perspective