The facts that the BBC still designates a middle manager to fill the shadowy position of royal liaison officer, while Buckingham Palace controls the broadcasting rights to the 1969 BBC documentary The Royal Family, symbolises the deferential tendencies of the state broadcaster’s relationship with the head of state.
The BBC’s main terrestrial news rival, ITN, has been luckier. Its former royal correspondent, Tom Bradby, became a close friend of Prince William and was actually invited to attend his wedding, rather than grudgingly being placed in the press pen. With Bradby recently appointed as the main anchor of News at Ten, this connection may leave the bulletin well placed for future exclusives, although it makes ITV no less likely than the BBC to examine the royals rigorously. This may explain the extremely cautious coverage on the UK’s two oldest networks of the recently released film showing the Queen, as a young girl, apparently giving an imitation of the Nazi salute. With Sky News often compromised in a different direction – as many of the riskier royal stories, including Princess Elizabeth’s seeming heil to Hitler, come from its newspaper stablemate, the Sun – genuinely independent coverage of the monarchy has generally been left to Channel 4. Its programming has ranged from the cheeky – scheduling against the Queen’s Speech a message from a different political or racial perspective – to the fearlessly historical: in the past, C4 has screened dramas and documentaries about subjects such as Princess Diana, Princess Margaret and the abdication on which it is hard to imagine BBC or ITV executives gambling their pensions and future knighthoods.
The channel continues this brave tradition with Prince Philip: the Plot to Make a King an insightful and revelatory documentary about the Duke of Edinburgh’s transformation from Greek-Germanic sailor of dubious repute into a pillar of the second Elizabethan reign. Deeply researched and judiciously presented, Richard Sanders’ film deserves the bit of luck it has had in appearing just after the fuss about the possible Nazi affiliations of the Queen’s side of the family.
It tells a riveting tale of how the slippery old fixer Lord Mountbatten conspired to marry his nephew, Prince Philip Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, into the British royal family.
The outlines of this story have been told before but the strength of this rendition is the supporting evidence, from both archive and witnesses. Photos show Philip at the funeral of one of several Nazi relatives, and a veteran survivor of his bloodline, startlingly, reads aloud a privately printed memoir by one of his sisters, describing encounters with Goebbels and Hitler. In another book written for private circulation – the documentary benefits greatly from this literary ancestor of blogging – Philip’s naval captain reveals that, with the encouragement of Mountbatten, he was writing weekly to Princess Elizabeth when she was only 13.
For many viewers, though, the biggest shock will be the claim that the British royals were initially suspicious of Philip because of his leftwing views.
While it is easy to imagine the present rather ideologically different Duke harrumphing and bloodying during the film – especially in the sequence about his Nazi sisters – the programme is not unsympathetic to him as a man who had to more or less invent the role of royal consort. Most of Channel 4’s previous royal programmes have clearly not been what the palace would have wanted but the status of Prince Philip: the Plot to Make a King is intriguingly ambiguous. A number of his relatives and friends take part and so there is a feeling that either he or those close to him wanted to tell these stories before they become the province of obituarists and secondhand reporters.
Prince Philip: the Plot to Make a King, Thursday 30 July, 9pm, Channel 4.
