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The overwhelming impression given by the film was of a woman happy and busy in
her public and private life, enjoying her job as much as she did the company of her four
children. The image was one of a contented, united family, rather charmingly oldfashioned
in their kilts, pullovers and shortish haircuts, surrounded by horses and dogs
in their traditional British upper-class way of life. The project, which seemed to have
fulfilled all the highest hopes of the royal advisers in its presentation – or representation
– of the royal image, with hindsight seems fraught with dangers. The
emphasis on the ideal family was to return to haunt Elizabeth twenty years later when
her children’s marital disasters revealed the cracks in the fabric. The film innocently
whetted the public’s appetite for the royal soap opera, which was to reach epidemic
proportions with catastrophic consequences when this began to go wrong.
The Evening Standard’s television critic, Milton Shulman, warned:
Richard Cawston’s film, Royal Family, could not have had a better critical reception if it had been the
combined work of Eisenstein, Hitchcock and Fellini. But the making and showing of such a film with the
Monarch’s co-operation may have constitutional and historical consequences which go well beyond its
current interest as a piece of TV entertainment.
What has actually happened is that an old image has been replaced by a fresh one. The emphasis on
authority and remoteness which was the essence of the previous image has, ever since George VI, been
giving way to a friendlier image of homeliness, industry and relaxation.
But just as it was untrue that the royal family sat down to breakfast wearing coronets as they munched
their cornflakes, so it is untrue that they now behave in their private moments like a middle-class family in
Surbiton or Croydon.
Judging from Cawston’s film, it is fortunate at this moment in time we have a royal family that fits in so
splendidly with a public relations man’s dream.
Yet, is it, in the long run, wise for the Queen’s advisers to set as a precedent this right of the television
camera to act as an image-making apparatus for the monarchy? Every institution that has so far attempted to
use TV to popularize or aggrandize itself has been trivialized by it.
Nineteen sixty-nine was a key year for the monarchy, which started two potentially
dangerous trends. First, by bringing the television cameras into the Queen’s private
family life, they not only let in daylight on the magic but whetted the public appetite for
more intimate detail. From being allowed in to the drawing-room, they would soon be
expecting to be let in to the bedroom as well. Secondly, Philip brought the question of
the cost of the monarchy into the public arena by announcing on NBC’s Meet the Press:
We go into the red next year, now, inevitably if nothing happens we shall either have to – I don’t know, we
may have to move into smaller premises, who knows? We’ve closed down – well, for instance we had a small
yacht which we had to sell, and I shall probably have to give up polo fairly soon, things like that…
It was an extraordinary piece of what Philip himself called ‘dontopedalogy’ (putting
his foot in his mouth). By going public on the always sensitive question of financing the
monarchy which was already being secretly discussed at the time, Philip was inviting