Last night on television Anita Singh The Windsors’ secrets are safe in this stale series
What would be revealed by Inside the Crown: Secrets of the Royals (ITV)? The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s plan for world domination? The Duke of York’s Pizza Express receipt? Alas, its title was highly inaccurate. What we got was a stale bun of a documentary, the contents of which would only be news to you if you had just woken from a lengthy coma.
Steady yourselves, but it turns out that the Prince of Wales and Diana, Princess of Wales, were not happily married. You heard it here first. Did you have any idea that Princess Margaret was in love with a man called Peter Townsend? And you’ll never believe this: Edward VIII abdicated to be with an American divorcee! All of this and more was packed into an episode called Love and Duty.
You have to pity the researchers. Just when they thought they’d nicely top’n’tailed this with a smiling Harry and Meghan, the couple go and leave the country – putting love before duty, some might say. Cue hasty re-editing and a new bit of the voice-over saying something about the difficulty of balancing public and private lives.
It was a different ITV documentary, presented by Tom Bradby, that produced one of the royal scoops of the year as the Sussexes laid bare their unhappiness with palace life. This one was an assembly of the usual suspects (historians, royal “experts”) running us through a bog-standard history of royal relationships from Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson onwards.
Colourised footage of the Queen’s 1947 royal wedding was a visual treat, and there were occasional snippets that raised a smile: a description of the bachelor Duke of Edinburgh as “a big dog wanting a basket”, and the always-excellent-value Baroness Glenconner (will someone give this woman a series of her own?) recalling asking Princess Margaret which of their circle she would have married if she had to: “She said Sunny Blandford, so she might’ve had Blenheim.”
Charles and Diana’s wedding gave me a jolt of nostalgia, and veteran photographer Ken Lennox shared a striking image that I had never seen before: Diana, overwhelmed by the crowds on an early Australian tour, sobbing in an open-topped car while her husband smiled away, either oblivious to her unhappiness or unwilling to acknowledge it.
It was perfectly pleasant to watch. But if you want some actual secrets about the royals, you’d be better off watching The Crown.
Now here’s a peculiar thing. Travels in Euroland with Ed Balls (BBC Two) was a documentary about right-wing voters, on the BBC, featuring a collection of perfectly pleasant people rather than knuckle-dragging thugs. Was this going to be the balanced approach that the corporation’s critics have craved?
Well. Balls didn’t set off on his journey with a completely open mind. For him, populist parties are conning voters by latching on to a national tradition under threat – trawler fishing in the Netherlands, which is being stymied by EU law, or bullfighting in southern Spain, which faces a ban on cruelty grounds – to secure a mandate for “something far more nasty”.
Like an anthropologist studying a previously undiscovered tribe, Balls wanted to find out why millions are rejecting mainstream parties in favour of the Far Right. “You have to listen… to understand why they are asking for change,” he said benevolently.
In a different documentary, the contributors would have been given just enough rope to hang themselves. Balls, to his credit, didn’t try to corner them or fish for offensive views. Instead, he kept things light, chatting amiably while trying to respect their beliefs. “I can understand why they want somebody to defend their beloved tradition even if I find it deeply uncomfortable,” he said of Black Pete, a Dutch sidekick to St Nicholas played by white people in blackface.
Ever since Strictly, Balls’s television career has been categorised as “ex-politician, can do comic turns as required”. So among the earnest conversations about voting intentions, he played the bull in bullfighting practice and had a dip in the North Sea.
He concluded that British politics should learn a thing or two from the rise of the Far Right: to be proud of our country and of who we are. “Unless it can do that, populism is going to continue to grow, thrive and divide.” The programme barely scratched the surface of the phenomenon, but felt more useful than one that demonised anyone who votes for it.