Ten Days that Changed the Nation by Stephen Pollard

Author:Stephen Pollard [Pollard, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847378033
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

The Prince’s company survived for nine years. It was a shambles, described by another producer at the time of its collapse as: ‘[A] sad joke in the industry, really . As time has gone on, their incompetence has become more and more obvious. There have been very small examples of vanity TV companies before, but not on this scale. Any company, in any industry, that had burned through that much share capital without making a profit would’ve been closed down by its investors years ago.’ 127 And its behaviour was often as arrogant and unthinking as that of its founder, such as when it was discovered filming Prince William as a student at St Andrews undercover to get footage for a programme it was making for the US, The A–Z of Royalty. Prince Edward was forced to apologize to his nephew and to his brother, the Prince of Wales. 128 In 2002, Ardent closed with losses of over £2 million. But whatever Edward’s company’s losses, the loss to the royal family brought about by the prince’s first venture into TV production was incalculable. It’s a Royal Knockout was the beginning of the end – the moment from which the royal family became forever a laughing stock.

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It would, of course, be wrong to blame Prince Edward and his programme single-handedly for the end of deference to and respect for royalty. In some ways, It’s a Royal Knockout was a symptom of the already collapsed image of royalty. One could argue that the rot had set in in 1969, with the BBC fly-on-the-wall documentary Royal Family – the first time that royalty had been treated as simply another form of celebrity. Instead of the traditional aloofness and mystery, the documentary revealed the royals as being like any other family – albeit a far more privileged one. From BBQs to tiffs – they had them all.

The family faced a choice. The new age of media and journalism no longer deferred to authority figures, and they had to adapt to this. But how? They could have chosen to make themselves more accessible, more normal, and more down to earth – to become more like the surviving European royal families, such as the so-called ‘bicycling monarchs’ epitomized by Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. But rather than do this, they became instead precursors to the modern phenomenon of celebrity. The Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, for instance, could have sought recognition for her good works; instead, she became a staple of the diary columns for her partying, drinking and liaison with the socialite Roddy Llewellyn. The family’s press advisers sought to create fairy-tale stories, such as the marriage of Princess Anne; but instead all they created was the royal as proto-celebrity, feeding newspapers non-stop stories over the search for a bride for Prince Charles.

For sheer celebrity quotient, of course, none of the royals came close to Charles’s first wife. Initially, Diana seemed able to square the role of supportive wife doing good deeds with the increasing public interest in her clothes and her growing celebrity.

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