IAN HYLAND
On last night’s telly
Credit where it is due. ITV at least attempted some kind of creative response to the pandemic last night.
This old royal documentary was niftily repurposed and given a Covid-19 theme. Apart from one or two sudden and clunking changes in editorial direction (from corona to coronations, anyone?), ITV just about got away with it. However, we were still watching footage we’d all seen before and listening to royal experts taking wild punts.
The wildest of these came from Penny Junor who decided the Queen had had “a miraculous escape” in not contracting
Covid-19, as if Her Majesty had been doing a 12-hour shift in a local care home with no PPE. That inevitably led to some speculation about what would have happened had the
Queen not escaped.
This allowed the editors to fill another few minutes with old footage of Prince Charles, which may have been a little boring for anyone who is fed up with hearing about a monstrous carbuncle. (The speech in which Charles called a new building a monstrous carbuncle, I mean. Not Charles himself.)
Elsewhere there were more random anecdotes about his mum. My favourite was the one about the Queen’s reaction to the news in 1980 that another longstanding monarch, Juliana of the Netherlands, was abdicating.
Apparently our Queen sniffed that this was “typically Dutch”.
That would appear rather at odds with former BBC reporter Wesley Kerr’s view that “the Queen makes no distinction between people of different races”.
That’s always been more Philip’s department.
‘‘ We were still watching footage we had all seen before