Anita SINGH
‘Oh, my goodness, she’s eating! I think it’s an orange!” said former royal correspondent Wesley Kerr as he watched some archive footage in The Queen Unseen (ITV). Sightings of the monarch letting a foodstuff pass her lips in public are rare. Sightings of Kerr are not; I think he has appeared in every royal documentary I’ve watched over the past 12 months, along with the royal historians also featured here.
Perhaps future generations will uncover some dynamite news about the Queen that will upend everything we know. Until then, films like this will tell us nothing new. The Queen is quite reserved, has always put duty before all else, and loves corgis.
Really, these documentaries – and there seem to be an awful lot of them around at the moment – should stop trying to claim that they are revealing great secrets and just allow us to enjoy them for what they are: charming footage of the Royal family from years gone by, and a gentle reminder that the Queen has been doing a marvellous job for nigh on 70 years. There is nothing wrong with a little nostalgia, particularly when viewed in glorious colour as it was here.
This delve into the archives showed the Queen at her happiest. We saw her playing with her children on the beach, helping out at a family barbecue, and relaxing in the garden of the New Zealand governor-general while the Duke of Edinburgh tried and failed to clamber onto a lilo.
In 1972, Buckingham Palace is said to have ordered the BBC’S fly-on-thewall documentary, Royal Family, to be locked away for letting daylight in upon the magic. But even in her unguarded moments, the Queen is the model of decorum.
Her broadest smiles were reserved for animal-adjacent activities: a day at the races, being greeted by her beloved dogs or, in my favourite bit of the programme, her 40-year friendship with a New Zealand dairy farmer who looked after the Queen’s cows. Clare Balding also popped up, recalling the Queen’s delight at winning a £50 Tesco voucher at the Royal Windsor Horse Show.
As friends and former courtiers testified to the Queen’s shyness, and her policy of giving away almost nothing of her thoughts, it seemed impolite at best for ITV to hire a lip reader to decipher private conversations caught on camera. Surely that sort of thing is best reserved for royals caught up in scandal.
When it comes to TV comedy, I love a repeat. In theory, jokes should be less funny when you’ve heard them 20 times before, and sitcoms should provide fewer laughs when you can see the punchline from a mile away. And yet, while I relish a new drama or documentary, for comedy I crave the familiarity of Peep Show and I’m Alan Partridge and The Inbetweeners. I adore re-watching The Office and The Royle Family and Blackadder. Nothing is as perfect as Del Boy falling through the bar. And, unfashionable as it may be, I could happily watch re-runs of Friends until the end of my days.
I say all this by way of an apology to Jon Richardson and Lucy Beaumont, stars of Meet the Richardsons (Dave). Lots of people love this show – the first series was Dave’s highest-rated launch in five years, drawing more than a million viewers per episode. So it’s probably good, and they’re probably funny. But they are performers about whom I know absolutely nothing, stuck as I am in my comedy rut, and becoming acquainted with them for the first time here, the beginning of series two, left me feeling as if everyone was in on the joke but me.
They’re a real-life married couple, but they’re playing exaggerated versions of themselves. They’re living in Hebden Bridge (this is true) and rehearsing Lucy’s sitcom, which is directed by Johnny Vegas (this isn’t true. I don’t think). Their conversations are scripted – sometimes? All the time? – and a gag throughout this episode was that they’d accidentally taught their young daughter to swear, except she wasn’t actually swearing so it wasn’t as amusing as it could have been. Was everyone else laughing at that bit?
I laughed at one line, when Lucy explained that her ex had appeared in a Fiat Punto advert and “granted it’s not the biggest role but that performance bought him a flat in Crouch End so there you go.” As a north London resident, I’m aware that actors make up around a third of Crouch End’s population, so got the reference. Maybe everyone else did too. Maybe I need to expand my comedy horizons.
The Queen Unseen ★★★ Meet the Richardsons ★★