Image capture from the documentary: 'The King's Monologue'.
This one's on me America. Take a constitutional sigh of relief that you did the right thing. Pride yourselves for ditching the royal yolk - even though you may sometimes miss its fairy-tale qualities. Here in the UK? We're still dragging our supplicant feet, swallowing the yolk in our daily TV diets.
Recently on British television we were treated (again) to a yawning documentary about the royal family ('Our Queen'). I won't honour the transmission as propaganda. 'Triumph of the Will' was propaganda. Royalty documentaries are just bad medicine from a hundred year old bottle that's a thousand years past its sell-by date. The show did however ignite a brief spate of critiques, captured partially in Mark Lawson's Guardian article: 'Our Queen: the latest Royal TV tells us almost nothing'.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2013/mar/15/our-queen-royal-tv-tells-us-nothing
Although there has always been a ground noise of frustration about the Royal family, one has to ask why real establishment challenges only go so far. Why do the critics always stop short? The answer is simple. The media is caught up in the 'Royalty Loyalty Trap'.
Intelligent, in - depth TV documentaries about the Royal family do exist. They have been made. The reason why no one has seen them is because UK broadcasters are too scared to air them. This is the real story.
Traditionally, the 'Royalty Loyalty' dance follows these steps: Broadcasters are initially attracted to the idea of a deeper investigation of royalty. These programmes might even reach the point of production. However, as the commissioners approach the moment of reality known as transmission, they begin to wobble violently with Royalty Loyalty. The editorial response is to wrench out story elements for fear of causing slight offence. Then as the narrative develops, the corporate lawyers walk out from behind closed curtains adding programme-killing legal provisos. This then injects fear into the process. The end state sees the programme maker watching a commissioner unspool as the mortally wounded show is finally put out of its misery. Programme makers are making the programmes. The trouble is, television executives are killing them off at transmission.
The 'Royalty Loyalty Trap' is a body-politic condition in the UK that is compounded further by journalists. Professionally crying foul when they point at compromised freedoms (a democratic feint really), they eventually are caught in the same rictus state of Royalty Loyalty, diminishing without a printed word and presumably walking backwards as they reverse out of the door. It's a kind of freedom silence that really amounts to censorship.
The 'King's Speech' (2011) was an extremely well-made film with a seductive human-interest plot, prettily calculated to appeal to the smarter filmgoer. People who like that sort of thing, like that sort of thing. But for anyone who cares about historical truth, the film perpetrated gross falsehoods. Read Christopher Hitchens' last brilliant article on the veracity of the film script ('Churchill Didn't Say That') for the full exposé, better than I can reflect here:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/01/churchill_didnt_say_that.html
Of course, when faced with these facts after Hitchens had so thoroughly wiped the Vaseline from the lens, the film's scriptwriter David Seidler immediately blamed his historical air-brushing on the producers who had cut all the best factual lines. We'll never really know who's telling the truth here but I suspect Seidler's hand was caught in the Royalty Loyalty Trap.
In pursuit of balance, with the over-romanticized version of history piled high on one side with the 'KING'S SPEECH', I produced a follow-up drama documentary 'THE KING'S MONOLOGUE' a more balanced and grounded documentary exploring granularly this rather odd little German dynasty. Again featuring GEORGE VI (our last king) but this time based on more extensive research of printed material and revealing significant so-far-hidden Windsor family history.
And truth of course is a lot more interesting than fiction. The stuttering Royal (who more unromantically stuttered because his father King George V used to beat him) ruminates on subjects as diverse as artificial insemination (Elizabeth and Margaret were conceived through this new scientific breakthrough) hushed gay alliances, elicit affairs, as well as Edward VIII's only partially communicated admiration of the Third Reich. Edward took his honeymoon in Germany with Mrs. Simpson and was photographed both receiving and giving the Hitler salute (THE KING'S MONOLOGUE uncovers footage of Edward VIII in Berlin with high ranking Nazi officials, wetting himself with excitement at a Wagner concert in 1936. OK. He was simply jumping up and down a lot on his seat, but you take my point. He loved the warm Teutonic blanket).
A lot of the core material for the documentary was, interestingly enough, drawn from books that have been published throughout the world but often unpublished in the UK, largely because of the House of Windsor's legal scare tactics. The last book of this ilk being 'The Royals', by Kitty Kelly. Sales of this book went through the roof in Australia and Canada but of course did not appear on British bookshelves.
And so it came to pass that SKY ARTS were due to transmit the documentary THE KING'S MONOLOGUE. That's when the Royalty Loyalty effect kicked in for us. The programme's fate followed its inevitable course with initial excitement - ending with two senior legal advisors declaring sheepishly that they: "...didn't want to pick a fight with the House of Windsor". And so the completed film was buired away from UK audiences. But not forever.
The UK's loss is now North America's gain as the film is being transmitted across numerous US cable channels. The Americans it seems do not blink an eye about the association, which of course makes the UK look naïve and stupid on the subject of Royalty. In short the world will now see the documentary everyone in the UK really needs to see. No UK broadcaster will pick it up. The 'Royalty Loyalty Trap' will make sure of that. Again, Anglo-Saxon prurience and an inability to face facts will win the day. Brexit anyone?
Is it possible to be innocently doe-eyed and full of fear at the same time? Yes. If anything was proven after the numerously reported paedophile events in the UK, it is that police and press fear to approach high-echelon celebrity. Now magnify this picture a thousand times with the British royal family. It's rather extraordinary to see serious, intelligent, executive-level men and women wither in the face of it. The spine just buckles. I am heartened at least that the Royalty Loyalty effect disperses when crossing a big ocean. The US can relax. The yolk is here to stay in the so called press-free United Kingdom.