A rollicking royal history lesson you can trust
You may have noticed that the history of the Royal family has been a hot button issue in recent weeks. You’ve probably also noticed that not everyone likes The Crown’s approach to recounting that history, which is using actors and writers to join the dots between recorded fact and authorial conjecture and coming up with a picture of a squabbling mob.
Enter, then, with perfect timing, a real Royal Mob (Sky History), which takes a different approach to royal history and then some. In fact it takes several approaches at once – this is a bizarre amalgam of storytelling methodologies that manages to yoke together every type of TV history ever conceived into one four-part series.
The subject at hand is the “Royal Mob”, a term Queen Victoria herself used to describe her sprawling, extended family – nine children, 42 grandchildren and 87 greatgrandchildren. Without knowing any more you can see that’s a lot of names and faces to cover, which is why, incredibly, Royal Mob’s daredevil concoction works. We get re-enactment, talking-head historians, and The Crown-style straight drama colliding with smash-cut graphics and animated family trees (that have even been updated to wind up with our own King Charles III). It’s all underpinned by a narrator who is – do keep up – a talking head in the form of an actor dressed up as Victoria’s granddaughter Princess Victoria Hesse.
The overall effect is like a GCSE history teacher ram-raided the supply cupboard for any gimmick available in a desperate bid to get her class’s attention. Yet, if at times it’s a little overdone, it is also effective. Quite simply, Royal Mob succeeds in giving faces and characters to the many, many names. When you have a story of the intermarriage, sparring and ultimately warring of the four great houses of Europe over several decades, that makes it a darned sight easier than reading about it in a book.
It’s probably not the fault of Royal Mob that it often veers towards comedy: I blame that on Horrible Histories, to which at times Royal Mob bears a strong, accidental resemblance. (And it has to be said that a lot of the story is as well explained, and more succinctly, in the “We’re the cousins, who ruled over dozens” song from HH series five.)
Still, Royal Mob’s “chuck everything at the camera and see what sticks” telling of history is at least novel, and seeing the young Kaiser Wilhelm II dramatised as an oleaginous weasel known as Willy certainly finesses ones understanding of the origins of the First World War.
As a paid-up nerd and Jet Set Willy obsessive myself it was hard not to get all nostalgic for the final part of Channel 4’s Made in the 80s. It made a convincing case that it was a very British nerdiness and insularity, born of troubled times and expressed through the medium of cheap synthesisers and BBC Micros, that gave birth to the modern world.
Alternative histories, many of them written in Silicon Valley, are of course available, but coming at a time when Britain feels like it is, to borrow Margaret Thatcher’s phrase, “a nation in retreat”, it was rather wonderful to see some of our best and brightest get their due. Tim Berners-lee we all know about. Clive Sinclair we may think we know about, but Made in the 80s did a good job of finally putting him on the plinth he deserves – the footage here of Sinclair predicting, and very often manufacturing, practically everything that constitutes modern existence, is truly remarkable. (How very British it is that he was so quickly cast aside as a risible, baldy boffin.)
The programme borrowed Adam Curtis’s technique of fast, disorientating cuts between style and subject as a means to make broader, longer-term links. The development of the ARM chip, almost by accident, by the people who made the BBC Micro (in four – four – days) was shown to be one of the defining moments in recent history. The chip used less power, they realised in passing, meaning that it would be ideal for battery powered devices – ie the devices that, 30 years later, you’re probably using to read this now.
The ARM story in particular was bravura storytelling, leaping from the mundane to the era-defining in a matter of minutes as a struggling Apple took a punt by investing $1.5m in ARM and then that investment wound up saving Apple as a company when they sold it for $8m a few years later. Apple then invented the imac and iphone and ultimately became the world’s largest company. Then again, had they held on to their stake in ARM, it would now be worth $15bn. It’s dazzling socio-cultural calculus... all of which, somehow, makes you proud to be British.
Royal Mob ★★★★
Made in the 80s: The Decade that Shaped Our World ★★★★