Let me tell you, once and for all: royalty and television do not mix. Like oil and water or cheap gin and college freshmen, for decades the combination of the House of Windsor and the small screen has been a recipe for disaster.
There is no shortage of terrifyingly perfect examples here.
What will we choose? The footage that emerged of the Queen Mother, Princess Elizabeth and the man who would become Edward VIII doing the Nazi salute? The 1969 Prince Philip doc that corrosively removed royal magic? The 1981 engagement interview between Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer when he made the infamous “whatever love means” joke or, a decade later, his on-camera adultery confessions?
(You want to mention the ones from 1987 It’s a Royal Knockout or will i do it? It later emerged that Andrew had tried to push Meatloaf into a moat only for the singer to grab the prince and shout: “I don’t care who you are”).
Let’s not forget the time in 2019 when Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex used a documentary about their tour of southern Africa to talk about their problems, the television antics that challenged the Duke’s dignity with James Corden in 2021 (including the Duke asking a stranger if he could use his toilet), or that the duo followed it up with the H-bomb that was their own Oprah sit-down.
Then there’s the royal TV departure to top them all: Prince Andrew’s cataclysmic Newsnight appearance.
Yet all these curious, no-sweat, Nazi-infidelity-challenged setbacks don’t seem to have taught the younger generation of the royal family anything with the news this week that Mike Tindall, the husband of Princess Anne’s daughter, Zara, it is. It has been reported that he will appear in the UK version of I’m a celebrity, get me out of here.
So what we have here is someone who appears on the balcony of Buckingham Palace about to compete four nights a week against the washed up. X factor contestants doing things like eating kangaroo anus so they can win a small fortune? (Last year’s star recruit Mo Farah was paid more than $500,000 to participate.)
What could go wrong…
Tindall, it should be noted, isn’t breaking any rules or translating any kind of starchy royal protocol here. Anna decided to give up the titles for her children for this very reason: so that they could enjoy relatively normal lives, albeit ones in which her spouse occasionally has to fight off scorpions at bedtime. peak audience to pay for a new kitchen (I guess ).
But what I’m a celebrity The headline news this week is the thorny situation junior members of the royal family face when it comes to money. They need it, and unfortunately for King Charles, often his best selling quality is his proximity to the throne.
Now, for the sovereign and those who will sit on the throne, money worries are generally something they only understand in the abstract, like abandonment or having to fill out a job application thanks to $84 million combined annual benefits they enjoy. of the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall.
But move just a few spots down the pecking order and the situation is much less cheerful.
Take, for example, the children of Queen Elizabeth when she was in charge. Charles, thanks to his dukedom, had tens of millions to play with (lucky Camilla!), but his three siblings all lived on the relatively meager allowance of $513,000 (tax-free) they received annually from their mother. (The sovereign grant only covers official expenses such as travel and office staff.)
Which would be fine for you or me, but for royals used to living in the lap of luxury, that money doesn’t go very far.
Take everyone’s least favorite Pizza Express enthusiast, Andrew. It has been reported that the reason he decided to go to New York to spend a few days with his friend Jeffrey Epstein in 2011 was because he was looking to get $200,000 from the financier to help save Fergie from bankruptcy. (The Duchess was, in fact, more than $11 million in the red.)
As a friend of the Duke later said Vanity Fair: “Peripheral family members are severely underfunded and have limited options on how commercial they can be to make money. You can’t take a conventional job without leaving the family, and family duties take up a large percentage of your time.
“The root of the problem is that you can’t have the sovereign’s children looking for money. . . . You’re in a constant search for money.”
This “constant search” still extends to the next generation. Apart from Princes William and Harry, raised from birth through a lifetime of ribbon cuttings and suburban leisure center openings, the rest (Peter Phillips, Zara Tindall, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn ) have it all. they’ve been raised knowing they’re faced with the “j” word: work.
However, jobs at art galleries and marketing firms aren’t enough to keep a Windsor scion in decent pink and Chelsea townhouses, leaving them with only one option: trade with his royal status.
And that, for Queen Elizabeth and now King Charles, that has, and will continue to be, a regular PR nightmare.
In January 2020, Anne’s eldest son Peter Phillips rightly took part in the British press for appearing in an advert for a Chinese state-owned milk company. (So has the niece of the late Princess of Wales, Lady Kitty Spencer, who traded on her adjacency to the Palace by also flogging a different brand of Chinese milk.)
Or, there are the Tindalls who aren’t averse to putting their name to a wide variety of products, from CBD oil to Land Rovers to a Covid ‘passport’ app that later caused problems for safety (The Daily Mail has previously reported that the couple has earned nearly $2 million in commercial contracts.)
Andrew’s youngest daughter Princess Eugenie, her husband Jack Brooskbank and son August now live part-time in Portugal, where Jack is helping to develop a 300-home luxury estate. What exactly, you might ask, qualifies a man whose career highs include running Mayfair nightclub Mahiki and working as a brand ambassador for George Clooney’s Casamigos tequila brand for such a gig ? Could it have something to do with the fact that she is part of the royal inner circle by virtue of marriage? Handy for developers that now when someone writes about Eugenie, the CostaTerra Golf and Ocean Club might just end up being mentioned.
The thing about Mike, Zara, Peter and Eugenie is that they could automatically make the cut for the Royal Box at Ascot, they could summer at Balmoral every year and be on good terms with the King, but to maintain a certain lifestyle, they have very few options other than to change their royal connections.
It is difficult to see how, in the coming years and school fees grow, how this situation is not accentuated and, for Charles, more headaches.
poor guy Not only will he have to find a way to handle this messy incident, but Mike’s star turn will only affect Charles’ next appearance in the BBC series. The repair shop outside the rating park. Somehow I think we can predict what will be popular with the masses: watching Charles Dumfries house repair an 18th century stand clock or Mike eating a crocodile penis. May reality television reign over us all.
Daniela Elser is a royal writer and commentator with over 15 years’ experience working with various Australian media titles.
Read related topics: Queen Elizabeth II