Royal treatment
James Delingpole n the very night that Monarch: The Royal Family at Work (BBC1, Monday) was being broadcast whom should I bump into at the Pen International quiz at the Café Royal in the queue for the coats but Stephen Lambert.
Lambert, you may remember, was the head of the independent production company RDF who personally edited that dodgy reel preview which seemed to show the Queen walking out in a huff from a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz, when in real life she hadn't. As a result, he had to step down at RDF, while Peter Fincham lost his job as controller of the BBC, and dark things were muttered about the documentary being doomed never to see the light of day.
Well, that would have been stupid, wouldn't it? You can't secure hours and hours of 'unprecedented access' footage of the royal family, grab millions of pounds worth of publicity by being on the front page of every newspaper for a week, lose half your key staff and then decide to keep the programme locked in the vaults, can you? In fact, I'm slightly puzzled as to why the commentators who mooted this alarmist drivel expected to be taken seriously. (Ditto anything one ever reads by an environment correspondent on a broadsheet newspaper.) 'Hey, Stephen,' I say, because I know him a bit (decent enough cove, though a terrible knee-jerk pinko as all his TV kind are; very foxy wife who writes for the Guardian, thinks she's a lefty but is actually an unwitting Tory). 'It's your royal documentary on tonight.'
'Yes,' he replies. 'That's right.'
Yes, I'm sorry that anecdote didn't go anywhere. The thing is, though, I only really mentioned it to show a) the impressive breadth of my circle of acquaintance and b) so I could point out that my team, the Mail on Sunday team, won the quiz. And the questions were really hard and obscure, too. So hard and obscure, in fact, that we spent most of the evening whingeing about how our talents were wasted on such nonsense and that if this had been a proper quiz we'd have won easily. Marcus Berkmann and Susanna Gross were on our team, so you can perhaps take a bit of Spectator pride in our victory, too.
Anyway, Monarch. The first episode dealt with the Queen's state visit to the United States in May this year — the one where President Bush got that sharp, reproving look when during a public address he almost suggested that the Queen had been there since 1776. What struck me forcibly — as it invariably does with Queen documentaries — is just how mind-numbingly tedious it must be to spend pretty much your whole life being whisked from civic gathering to formal dinner to gala opening, exposed to endless pompous speeches, always on a tight schedule, rarely able to talk to anyone for more than a few seconds and none of them being themselves because they're all so freaked at meeting someone as famous as you. And it made me think, 'This woman is a marvel. She is the last remaining reason why our country has yet to go completely down the pan. Anyone who doesn't appreciate this really does need his head chopped off.' (I'm sorry, Christopher Hitchens, that means you too, mate, even though in so many other respects you're a very fine thing.) And the obsessive preparation that has to be done before each event: that was the other main thing that struck me. Extraordinary! This means everything from the Virginia hotel where she's about to stay changing the bog seat in her room so that HM does not have to sit where others have sat (don't the Americans realise? Our Queen doesn't go to the loo!) to President Bush wearing a sheepish, naughty schoolboy expression as an adviser briefs him sternly on protocol.
The problem with the royal family, friends of mine who have to deal with them on a fairly regular basis tell me, is that they find it impossible to lighten up. They won't laugh if you make a joke, and even if you try to initiate conversation (I mean, I know you're not meant to with the Queen, but apparently even the minor royals are afflicted this way) they'll completely blank you. 'Everyone has to behave like they've got a poker stuck up their bum,' my friend explains. So that's ruined any of their chances of getting invited round to my place for a game of bridge or a spliff. But that doesn't mean I don't admire them greatly. Gawd bless 'em all, you especially, Ma'am.
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