38656356325923

14
Daylight upon Magic
‘You’re killing the monarchy you know, with this film you’re making. The whole institution depends on
mystique and the tribal chief in his hut. If any member of the tribe ever sees inside the hut, then the whole
system of the tribal chiefdom is damaged and the tribe eventually disintegrates.’
David Attenborough, anthropologist and maker of wildlife films, to Richard Cawston, producer-director of
Royal Family
Elizabeth’s deepest instinct was for privacy and for the preservation of her family life as
far as possible from the public gaze. She had, like her father, been trained in the
principles of Walter Bagehot, who had warned of the fragility of the monarchy’s
mystique: ‘We must not let in the daylight upon magic.’ Her advisers, however, were
concerned that in the context of the 1960s, the monarchy was seen as boring and
outdated. The answer, it seemed to them, was to bring the monarchy closer to the public
by allowing them to peer through the keyhole by means of television cameras. First they
were invited into the palaces to view the royal collections in a joint BBC/ITV
collaboration, Royal Palaces. With Royal Family, in 1969, the public were permitted not
only to look into the palaces, but also over Elizabeth’s shoulder on private as well as
public occasions.
The Mountbatten family persuaded Elizabeth to overcome her reservations about the
idea. Mountbatten himself was always an eager publicist (two years earlier Independent
Television had made a film about him, The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten), while his
son-in-law, Lord Brabourne, was a successful film producer (although not he but Lord
Windlesham was to be the producer on this film). Philip was, as always, in favour of
new ideas and change as far as the monarchy was concerned. A new element had been
introduced at the Palace with the arrival in 1965 of a young Australian, William
Heseltine, as Assistant Press Secretary and the retirement in 1968 of the stonewalling
Commander Colville, whom he then replaced. Heseltine, unlike the Commander, saw his
job as giving the press easier access to the royal family and the film was timed to
coincide with Charles’s highly stage-managed investiture at Caernarvon. The film
commentary promoted it as a revolutionary step in allowing the royal family to be seen
as human beings, speaking and acting normally where before they had always appeared
as icons behaving, and above all speaking, in a formal ‘royal’ way. The idea of
presenting the royals as ‘normal’ and ‘ordinary’, ignoring the extraordinary
circumstances under which they have to operate, was to prove a dangerous step,