The ex-Prince Andrew worked assiduously for many years, opening up a crack in the it-never-closes Costume Play (Cosplay for short) that is the British royal family. When it was wide enough, he then promptly put his foot in it and took a great fall.
For his pains, he’s now being shuffled off to a twenty-thousand-acre estate in Norfolk to abide rent-free in accommodation that most people would consider a house of their dreams. Although after the grandeur of his previous digs, Royal Lodge, Mr Mountbatten Windsor will probably equate it to a crofter’s hovel.
But cushioned by a generous freebie allowance siphoned off the hard-working Great British public via his co-Cosplayer elder brother, here at least he can indulge to his heart’s content in golf and horse-riding – his two most favourite pastimes, apart from the one that got him in trouble in the first place. It’s a tough life.
A quiet canter through the annals of Royal Family escapades quickly reminds one that scandal is a condition never far from the radar. With the Royal Family, there are only two types of scandal. There’s the one that is just dying down and the one that is simultaneously just cranking up. In fact, it’s part of the job description that scandals continue to be the bread and butter of all robust monarchical activity.
In times of yore, before the media got too massy, there was a natural ecological balance, so to speak. Egregious royal misdoings could soon be hoovered over by the miscreant taking an out-of-sight-out-of-mind three-month constitutional on the Continent. However, the new technology has thrown a spanner in all of that.
The All-Seeing-Eye with its invisible cameras has become ubiquitous, as have the all-hearing microphones and the never-forgetting computer memories. There’s now nowhere to hide nor chance to forget. No rest for the wicked.
Some might say that’s a good thing, but conversely, that means there’s no wicked for the rest. And the rest – ie, the public – want their regular fix of wicked. Whatever role the monarchy once performed in pragmatic affairs of state has long gone. Now it’s just a glorified soap opera. Like ‘Coronation Street’. And ‘Coronation Street’ wasn’t called Coronation Street for nothing.
But not to demean Coronation Street. It’s been a golden goose for its TV producers over the years. A whole gold mine, in fact, although the seam has been running a bit leaner lately. But not so The Firm, as apparently the late Queen Liz liked to call the Royal Family. Tourism contributes over £250 billion to the Brit economy – that’s over half a trillion NZ dollars. And all the paraphernalia that surrounds heritage connected to the monarchy accounts for a substantial part of that.
In other words, it’s Big Business with capital ‘B’s. Show Business. And just as Hollywood pays its stars mega bucks to attract and appease the fans, so the UK government of the day willingly swipes the card on whatever it takes to keep the Royal show on the road. They know that whatever amount it is, it’ll come back to the Exchequer coffers in spades through the tourist box office.
The changing of the guard, the horses and carriages, the garden parties, the walk-arounds, the ‘royal charities’ are all part of that. But any downstream commercial value aside, underpinning it all is the enduring public empathy and support for the whole charade.
It’s been a long while in the making. The original meaning of ‘pharaoh’ is ‘great house’ or ‘palace’, in other words. Then the term became synonymous with ‘king’ several thousand years ago. To the Egyptians back then, the pharaoh embodied both heaven and earth. If you mucked them around, the whole shebang would collapse. A gruesome end lay in store for anyone who tried.
And somewhere along the line, the notion crept in that the blood that flowed through the veins of these elevated personages was of a different order. It was ‘royal’ blood. Some even said it wasn’t the usual red, but blue.
The tale goes that the ‘blue’ is derived from pale skin, which tends to accentuate the bluish veins in the body. And pale skin indicated either a high status person of wealth and leisure not required to toil in the fields and thus get tanned, or that the person whose skin was of the less tinted variety was racially ‘pure’.
Whatever. These folk were thus deemed to be a cut above the common Joe or Joanne Blow. Plus, back in the days before fancy notions like democracy emerged, they not only held the power of life and death but were literally the kingpins in the affairs of state.
Hence, the gestures of deference emerged: the tugging of the forelock, the nodding, bowing and scraping, the curtsying, and so forth. They indicated you knew your place in the scheme of things, and it wasn’t in the ringside seats.
A time came when the British Parliament made it clear that it, not the Crown, was top dog when it came to law-making. They did this in 1649 by detaching the head of the monarch at the time, King Charles I, from his torso. Naturally, the king was lost for words, and ever since, the Royals have kept to a more ceremonial role.
Now, at all the grand occasions like coronations, weddings and funerals, when the humble hoi polloi line the Mall (pronounced Mal, as in pal), frantically waving their little Union Jacks and straining for a view, we still see evidence of the strange manic fandom that accompanies the royals, still vestiges perhaps of the pharaonic divine status once enjoyed.
But times have moved on. The punters now want more than just clusters of braid, medals and fascinators. In the age of scandalous reality TV and the fraught melodramas of the soaps, they also want their fill of dramarama from the biggest CosPlay of them all—the real-time extravaganza that is the Royal Family.
And as even toddlers know, what’s the glamorous princess without the evil witch? What’s the dashing hero without the dastardly villain? And what’s the virtuous and hard-working family without the prodigal and promiscuous son?
Somehow, it seems as though if there wasn’t an Andrew in real life, the Royal Cosplay would have to invent one.
Frank Greenall has been a copywriter, scriptwriter, artist, political cartoonist, adult literacy tutor and administrator, and Whanganui Chronicle columnist for many years, amongst numerous other sundry occupations. His cartoons and articles have appeared in most major NZ newspapers at various times. He has a BA in politics and a Masters in adult literacy/numeracy. https://stevebaron.co.nz/author/frankgreenall/