A brief history of our future king
You wait ages for a royal documentary, then three come along at once. Did ITV get them as a job lot? Interviews with members of the Royal family used to be a rare occurrence, but now they’re falling over themselves to share the schedule with Coronation Street. Hot on the heels of the Tom Bradby interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and a two-part examination of the Duchy of Cornwall came Charles: 50 Years a Prince, originally commissioned for ITV Wales and now repeated nationwide.
We were taken back to 1969, when a callow Charles was uprooted from Cambridge and packed off to Aberystwyth to learn Welsh ahead of his investiture. The Prince referred to that time, wryly, as “an interesting experience”. Welsh nationalism was at its height and there were demonstrations everywhere he went. The Prince’s reminiscences were cut with archive footage. Rather sweetly, as His Royal Highness recalled, there were usually counterdemonstrations “by splendid middle-aged ladies who got out of a bus”. A news reporter informed a group of male students that the Prince was a hit with the ladies. “It’s the car,” they sniffed.
If you want more of this then it’s a period covered, in more entertaining detail, in a forthcoming episode of the third series of Netflix’s The Crown.
The programme served as a brief history lesson on the drama of the day. Images of the young Prince kneeling before the Queen in all his regalia, vowing to be her “liegeman of life and limb”, are often replayed. Less familiar are the scenes of police snipers on rooftops, and the edgy atmosphere that surrounded the event: two men were killed on the evening of the ceremony while planting a bomb, and a retired detective told the programme that he and his colleagues were armed with a photo album “like a bird book” to identify anyone who might pose a threat on the day.
The rest of the hour was taken up with the Prince talking about his love of the Welsh countryside, the Welsh people, Welsh crafts and his Welsh cottage. Once derided for talking to plants and reviled by many for the breakdown of his marriage, the Prince has been successfully rebranded in recent years as an avuncular grandpa figure and wise old owl. So expect more of this sort of thing: documentaries that befit a future king.
Charles: 50 Years a Prince ★★★