From Revolting Subjects to Royal Consent: the troubled history of royal TV documentaries
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Version 0 of 1. A documentary about the British royal family’s relationship with the media, Reinventing the Royals (20 Feb 9pm BBC2), has become part of the story it tells. The programme should have been screened last month but was delayed following interventions from lawyers representing the royal family. As a result, Steve Hewlett’s two-part film joins the most select of the three sub-divisions of royal television programmes: Revolting Subjects. The other sections are Royal Command and Royal Consent. The Command category includes those shows that Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace have more or less produced and whose future re-broadcasts they generally maintain control over. Examples include The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the Queen’s annual Christmas broadcasts and intermittent special access documentaries, from Richard Cawston’s Royal Family (1969) to Michael Waldman’s Our Queen (2013). With this line of work, the Windsors have actual or tacit editorial and access approval and the broadcasts are formally part of the monarchy’s publicity operation, although conservative voices were initially opposed to the screening of the Coronation and Christmas Day messages on the grounds that they might reduce the mystique around the crown. A slightly lower rank of programming – the OBE to the CBE of By Royal Command – is Royal Consent. While it is commonly understood that the Queen does not, and will not ever, be interviewed, the Princes Philip, Charles, Edward, William and Harry, and Princess Anne regularly receive requests to talk to broadcasters, much in the way that government ministers do, the difference being that agreement to speak essentially guarantees that they will be asked nothing difficult. ITN pioneered this format, Sir Alistair Burnet strolling around the gardens of the Queen Mother and the Prince of Wales, encouraging them to show their lighter side, although the finest film of this type was the one in which the Duke of Edinburgh drove Sir Trevor McDonald at terrifying speeds in a Land Rover around the Balmoral estate, responding to the most nervously sycophantic inquiries as tetchily as if he were being interrogated about his sex life. Such is the touchiness of the subject matter that shows in these genres can suddenly cross categories. Edward on Edward (ITV, 1996), in which Prince Edward explored the story of the abdicating Duke of Windsor, was technically a By Consent rather than By Command programme, as the request to make it came from an outside broadcaster, although it was unusual in actually having a member of the family behind the cameras, as one of the projects of Prince Edward’s short-lived Ardent Productions. And one prominent Consent project – Charles: The Private Man, The Public Role (ITV 1994), in which the Prince of Wales chatted candidly to his friend and fellow organic farmer, Jonathan Dimbleby – was subsequently refiled under Revolting Subjects after Charles’s admission to adultery during his marriage became part of the ammunition used against him by Diana-ites both before, and more particularly after, his ex-wife’s death in Paris. The Dimbleby documentary is one of the two TV programmes that Charles would most eagerly apply a regal delete key if he were to become king. The other is the ultimate example of the Revolting Subjects sub-group: the 1995 Panorama, in which Diana, Princess of Wales, secretly filmed at Kensington Palace after sending her staff home early, destabilised the monarchy by presenting herself as a victim of cruelty and neglect by the family into which she married. Hewlett was in charge of Panorama at the time, which may have encouraged suspicion from the royal family towards Reinventing the Royals, and means that Hewlett has two programmes on this elite Palace blacklist. He will be relieved not to have been involved in another: It’s a Royal Knockout! (1987, BBC1), a disastrous attempt to humanise the Windsors through participation in slapstick watersports, which did more than anyone except Oliver Cromwell and Princess Diana to encourage British republicanism. When it was made, however, It’s A Royal Knockout! was a By Consent programme – part of a deliberate scheme to modernise the monarchy by promoting the younger royals as fun – and even arguably By Command, as it was an initiative of Prince Edward, the would-be TV producer. The fact that both It’s a Royal Knockout! and Charles: The Private Man, The Public Role were pieces of TV that the royals first promoted and then disowned illustrates the difficulty of their media calculations. And it’s possible that Reinventing the Royals may turn out to be a show they are happy to have been transmitted. But the initial reaction is revealing. Ironically, one of the themes of Hewlett’s programmes is the way in which the royals, in the transition between the second Elizabethan and presumed third Caroline age, have become savvier about publicity and coverage. However, their reflex opposition suggests that when the crown becomes a subject of the media, there is still an expectation that the media should remain subjects of the crown. |