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A group of British Royal Family look-alikes. London. SouthWestEnders could be a whole new Royal soap opera. Alamy Stock Photo
ColumnSouthWestEnders innit
The royal family have become Britain's biggest soap opera
Britain’s Queen Liz was the ultimate royal superstar. Now the Windsors are mired in scandal, the family is more soap opera than monarchy.
IN A GALLERY tucked away around the back of Buckingham Palace, an exhibition elegantly titled ‘Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style’ is currently doing a roaring trade.
Tickets are rarer than snaps of a laughing Enoch Burke, and all are sold out until next year – the original six-month April to October run has been extended out to 12 months. It has garnered glowing reviews, most particularly in the more patriotic publications of the English media.
The theme of the exhibition is quite simple; a curated collection of Queen Elizabeth’s wardrobe from lace-bedecked baby clothes to tweeds-and-headscarves to frocks and ballgowns, plus a couple of diamond bedecked tiaras which could take your eye out.
Last Sunday afternoon, the 1.30pm crowd formed an orderly queue – very orderly, given the preponderance of expectant grey-headed royalists who in all likelihood read The Daily Express as an actual newspaper rather than as an unintentionally hilarious Viz comic minus the jokes.
But there were plenty of tourists in the line too, sporting paper maps of London’s landmarks and the glazed expressions of the over-walked. Their numerous presence was also inevitable – after all, the former British monarch was a bona fide global figure, an A+ list instantly recognisable superstar who ruled Britannia and toured a world smelling permanently of fresh paint for an astonishing 70 years, from 1952 to 2022.
Or, in world leaders’ years, from Winston Churchill to (eye-roll) Liz Truss, and from President Truman to (facepalm) President Trump.
And once the queue made its orderly way through an airport-style security check, a genuinely fascinating exhibition awaited. The centrepiece is a circular room displaying an array of mostly vividly coloured formal gowns, each of which has a story to tell of how haute couture aligned with high politics.
A note under each dress details the intricate, meticulous work involved in each creation and it is not hard to imagine the armies of dressmakers employed to hand-stitch, tailor and embroider them all, often with meticulously calibrated diplomatic symbols when Herself was overseas: delicate maple leaves (Canada); stunning embroidered cherry blossoms (Japan) – and the 2,091 hand-sewn embroidered shamrocks on the deceptively simple white silk dress which Queen Elizabeth wore at the State banquet in Dublin Castle in 2011. (A more mischievous curator would surely have been tempted to place this frock between a green one and an orange one, just for the craic).
Long live The Queen
However, perhaps the most telling dress of all is a deceptively simple unembellished black velvet number, marking the occasion when the Queen of Hollywood, Marilyn Monroe, was totally out-diva’ed by Elizabeth in full Queen of Fucking Everything mode.
There is an iconic shot of the two women shaking hands at a 1956 film premiere, exchanging smiles way too bright to be sincere. Her Majesty’s black tight-fitting frock was deliberately designed to show off the cascade of round-shaped and square-shaped rocks draped around the royal neck and head. Marilyn, in an eye-popping low-cut gold lamé, didn’t stand a chance.
Afterwards, two impressions linger.
Firstly, the 400 or so items on display are a fraction of the 4,000 stored away in her clothing archive, and the exhibition highlights the sheer opulence, privilege and sumptuousness of an unimaginable and utterly non-relatable life in which her chief purpose appeared to be the Alpha in every public or private space she occupied – even her own children had to bow/curtsy anytime they landed in her presence.
Secondly, it underlines the complete soapification of the remaining royals who, since she died four years ago, are frantically engaged in trying to keep the wheels from coming off the royal wagon.
Although the trouble kicked off during the queen’s lifetime, it’s now accelerated/deteriorated to the point where the only realistic option is to abolish the weirdest job in Britain and set the family to work in an actual soap opera. When the family has reached a nadir where their flagship gaff, Buckingham Palace is now so closely associated with the Epstein scandal, it’s time to head for the hills of reinvention.
It totally makes sense. Call it ‘The Windsors’ or ‘SouthWestEnders’. The sets – various palaces and stately piles – are already available and free, courtesy of the British taxpayer. There are multifarious plot lines so bananas that each episode could happily end with dramatic ‘doof-doofs’. And oh my word, what a ready-made cast of characters.
For starters, just ponder the mad stuff which could be packed into every episode, going right back to when Queen Elizabeth’s decennia horribilis roared into life, around the time that the family was shaken from its torpor of dusty deference by the undisputed doyenne of dramarama, Princess Diana entered stage left, swiftly followed by the braying arrival of the dodgy duchess, Sarah Ferguson.
The Crown effect
And yes, the story has already received the royal treatment, courtesy of the Netflix series, ‘The Crown’. But drama ain’t soap, and can’t do full-throated justice to the storylines. It needs screaming-matches and thrown pints down in the local pub, the Kilt & Corgi, as Di and Chas go hammer and tongs over the ‘ovver woman’, the peroxide-haired, chain-smoking side-piece Camila who Chas has been keeping on the down low. At the bar, their Auntie Annie, a right battleaxe, is knocking back the gin and picking a winner.
It needs a dishevelled Fergie on the rampage, swilling a bottle of bubbly robbed from the local offie and swearing to bleeding kick the ‘ed orf the swine who ratted her out to the mother-in-law. It were only a bit of ‘armless toe-sucking, nuffing more.’
It needs Randy Andy, the skirt-chasing, entitled spiv who is roundly hated by his staff, always stuck for a few bob, the biggest soap villain since Dirty Den, and who sleeps with his teddy bears. Andy, who struggles with his weight and with reality, is regarded as a bit of a joke figure, until he has to go on the lam following revelations that he used to pal about with a pedo.
It needs Our Kate, the good-looking ambitious girl who married into money and escaped from her impoverished middle-class roots, and who spends her time trying to sharpen up her gormless hubby Will before he has to take over the family business when his old man, Chas, carks it. Will is also busily scheming how to backstab his younger bruv, the dimwitted over-sharer ‘Arry permanently out of the family firm to stop him turning up on the doorsteps with his hand out, whinging for money. Will and ‘Arry haven’t spoken since they got into a massive scrap outside a Pizza Express over his shock marriage to American Meg, a glamorous but scheming chancer with a murky past, who fancies her chances as a top influencer. Or as the next queen.
Sure lookit. It’d be a box-office hit, and it would make the royals genuinely relatable to the sizeable section of their subjects who periodically wonder what’s the purpose of them at all.
King Charles and Queen Camilla are expected to visit this country next year, having being formally invited by President Connolly in May.
They’ve been here several times before, but this will be only the second State visit by a reigning monarch to the Republic following the unexpectedly jolly historic first one undertaken by his mother in 2011.
It will have all the attendant bells-and-whistles and undoubtedly a high level of press coverage and a warm welcome from a fair portion of the citizenry.
But it won’t be anything like the previous hullabaloo. The royals are in their entertainment era, but they haven’t been the same since their superstar main character departed.
The Queen is dead. God help the King.
Lise Hand is a journalist and writer. This column runs every Wednesday.
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