For years people have argued about whether or not we should have a royal family, and that if we should, what kind of role it should play in today’s world.
Should it be old and stuffy, a moth-eaten metaphor for the Britain that once was? Or should it have a more meaningful role than opening hospices and asking visiting dignitaries from Bongo Bongo land if they’ve come far?
And if it does have a more meaningful role, what should it be? I mean, how can you move something along when it has the millstone of history around its neck?
You can’t, so how’s this for a brilliant idea I’ve just had? You simply cut those irksome ties with the past and move the royal family into the most modern arena of them all . . .
We have a craving for soap opera in this country. Coronation Farm and EastEnders are watched by millions of people every night. We can’t, it seems, get enough of who said what to whom, and what the ramifications of that might be. Other people’s lives. Other people’s trivia. We lap it up.
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And now we’re drinking from the saucer of Big Brother as well, which when you think about it is just another soap opera only with no story line, no plot and no actors. Just a lot of very clever editing to make these dreary non-people look interesting.
And boy does it work. So desperate are we to keep abreast of their fortunes that even today, several years after she left the Big Brother house, Jade Goody, who is part woman and part scientific blunder, is still unable to go to the gym or pop to the shops without being papped.
Is there room for more? More Love Island? More I’m in a Jungle? More soap. More bit-part nobodies to feed the insatiable hunger of the British red-topped tabloids and the legions of readers?
Yes, of course there is and so, ladies and gentlemen, I give you . . . The Royal Family. We turn the whole damn shooting match into a reality soap opera, stripped across the week’s TV schedules with late-night updates and a big publicity machine to feed the morning papers.
At present the cost of the royal family to each taxpayer in Britain is 60p a year. That looks like bad value when all the key players ever do is open stuff and talk to vegetables. But 60p a year for a five-times-a-week soap opera. That would be the best value television in the world.
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We already have the cast of characters. There’s Miss Ellie, in the shape of the Queen. Quiet. Dignified. And always in charge. Then you’ve got Wills as JR, Harry as Bobby, and Charles who had no equivalent in Dallas but only because they never thought to include an ecomentalist uncle who talks to his food and gets cross with buildings.
Of course we’d also need a Cliff Barnes. A bit of a joke. A bit of a loser. Someone with a real and genuine grudge against the Windsors. And I know just the man: Mohamed al-Fayed, whose son died in a car smash in Paris with the ecomentalist uncle’s first wife. Jesus. What scriptwriter could have come up with a plot line as good as that?
We even have a modern-day interpretation of Pam in the increasingly gorgeous shape of Zara Phillips. She’d pop up from time to time in dresses with lower and lower necklines, on the arm of her boyfriend, who plays rugby for his country.
Do you see what I’m getting at here? That the story’s already been written. That the characters are already in place. So no clever editing is necessary. That we have the house — several houses actually — and best of all that the family, with the possible exception of Philip, and maybe Anne, would leap at the chance to have their currently rather silly lives given some meaning and purpose.
I’m not joking. Being born into a “soap opera” is no more stupid really than being born into a “royal family”. And I do think that at a stroke it would make Queen Victoria, and the Queen Vic for that matter, look hopelessly out of date.
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We wouldn’t ask them to do anything different to what they do already. But instead of being shocked when Harry drives his small hatchback through Wiltshire at 60mph, we’d be dismayed that he wasn’t doing twice that, in a Lamborghini.
And when he leans over to fiddle with the bosoms of a blonde, we won’t wonder what the country’s coming to. We’ll hope that shortly after the picture was taken, and under the glare of the watching cameras, he slipped into his Hermann Goering outfit, bent her over the DJ’s deck and gave her a damn good seeing to.
Why not? At the moment everyone is screaming for contestants on Big Brother to make jiggy-jiggy, so why would it be any different for Harry and Wills, and the delectable Zara.
Will they oblige? Well, that’s just the point. That’s the fizz. Because we just don’t know. Of course, we could employ scriptwriters, but no matter how good they might be they’d never come up with what the royal family manages all by itself.