Britain may have entered a new regnal era, but satire is hanging on to some recognisable features from the last century.
In the 1970s and 80s, Mike Yarwood, the popular impressionist, regularly brought his version of Prince Charles to viewers of his sparkly evening television show. Now the baton, or jewel-encrusted sceptre, has passed to Harry Enfield.
The comedian, a Yarwood fan in his youth, is to star again as Charles in a special coronation episode of Channel 4’s irreverent soap opera The Windsors. He has by now made the character as much part of his admired repertoire as the loathsome plasterer Loadsamoney, or Kevin, the recalcitrant teenager. In fact, though, he gave his first professional impersonation of Charles’s voice back in the 1980s on Spitting Image, where he occasionally had to fill in when the performer who usually voiced the part was not around. “It was just a question of who could do it best on the day,” he says.
The royal family were a mainstay during the heyday of the satirical puppet show, appearing as frequently as the politicians of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet. Charles generally popped up as a soppy sort of neo-hippy.
Enfield, 61, also had an earlier, amateur run at playing the prince while he was a schoolboy in Sussex. “It all started with Mike Yarwood for me,” said Enfield. “His impression of Charles was one you could perform at school, because there was nothing too rude in it. So I did Yarwood doing Charles, rather than actual Charles, along with his Harold Wilson.”
Down the decades, mimics have tended to focus on the same few physical foibles of the future king, so Enfield suspects there would have been a fair amount of cuff-action back in his teenage attempts: “It was all quite mild though.”
His approach to parodying the king is born of a degree of empathy, he thinks. “I was born in 1961, and one of the first things I remember watching on television with my father was the investiture of the Prince of Wales. I was so bored and thought he must be so bored as well, listening to all this. He looked bored.
“And since then, he’s had all these years of duty to perform, so I do have sympathy for him. And one other thing that has helped me identify is that, if you look, he’s got stupid little hands and so have I. Sausagey fingers.”
Step further back, a couple of hundred years, and satire of the royal family was much more unkind and often scatological. Caricaturist James Gillray would draw George III and his wife in the most personal and unappealing of poses.
Some of the full-on contempt that marked that kind of extreme satire, in what is described by academics as the Juvenalian mode, still surfaces now and then, but in our times a more moderate, wry brand of fun-poking, or Horatian satire, tends to hold sway. And while Channel 4’s The Windsors is full of wild exaggeration, its targets are more the red-top newspapers’ distortion of the royal drama and the cliches of soap opera, than the monarchy.
“Charles is quite cartoony in our show. It as if the writers of an American show like Dynasty had tackled the royal family with only the British tabloids to base the story on,” says Enfield, although he acknowledges this doesn’t mean the royals would actually enjoy the show. In fact he’s heard that Charles finds it “rather cruel” and this surprises him because the plots are “so stupid” – “The Crown is crueller, I think, because it’s more believable.”
The trailer for The Windsors, released before the coronation special, shows Enfield’s power-crazed King Charles dressed in an enormous crown and dazzling cape as he joins Camilla, the Queen Consort, played by Haydn Gwynne, on the balcony “to wave at the idiots”, as she puts it.
“Haydn plays Camilla as Cruella de Vil, but it’s pantomime. My Charles came out of a show I did with Paul Whitehouse once, where I played him trying to telling a joke that wasn’t funny, but which everyone still laughed at. The royal family must think we’re all pretty stupid because people just laugh along at everything they say.”
The lampooning of the royal family, he believes, has its place in society, yet will never change anything. “Satire is part of the establishment really. While we were doing Spitting Image, the Tories got back in three times after all, and the programme won a Queen’s Award to Industry.”
The series of The Windsors that follows the special will play with the notion of a slimmed-down royal family, on the Nordic model. But Enfield is unconvinced. “You have to wonder what the point of it would be if we didn’t have the royal coaches and if the monarch said they believed in everything wider society believes in. The magic goes.”
Enfield underwent a road to Damascus-style epiphany when he watched then prime minister Liz Truss come out to speak to the press after the Queen’s death. “I thought, ‘thank God she is not head of state’, and then ‘thank God Keir Starmer is not going to be head of state either’.
“I am definitely a revolutionary, but I don’t believe the revolution involves getting rid of the monarchy and replacing it with a politician. Whatever the civil list costs us all in taxes, it’s good there is someone whose job is simply to unite people and bring us all together by saying non-controversial things like ‘Now it is winter and we are all feeling the cold.’”
His suspicion, he says, is that Britain will lurch further towards populism and that King Charles “might be a brake on that”.
“He’s a stepping stone towards a different kind of monarchy, so he will be the transition king. William will be a lower-key head of state. And we should remember that if our prime minister really did just take the monarch’s advice once a week and do exactly what they suggested, I am not sure we would be much worse off.”
Enfield has yet to be confronted with the real king at close quarters. He would not duck away, he says, if he saw him approaching. “No, I would not dodge it. I’d like to shake him by the hand, with my podgy hands. We could have a podgy hand-off. Although I’ve noticed he is wearing gloves a lot these days.”
