Is a TV drama about the royal family sacrilege?

02 January 2008

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Clemency Burton-Hill, who appears in the new ITV series The Palace, muses on the outrage it has provoked and the taboos that still govern fictional portrayals of the monarchy

‘I was probably more influenced by Hamlet than I was by our own royal family,’ jokes Grieves. ‘Richard is 25, he’s a complex kid — when his dad suddenly dies of a heart attack, he is terrified he won’t live up to the role he has been born to assume. Here is this ancient, ritualistic institution that demands that somebody’s child will wake up one morning and may never again express an opinion. I wanted to explore that — what do these people do? How will this boy become a man, overnight? A king, overnight? It had nothing to do with what Prince William might do.’ With Richard’s assumption of the throne, moreover, a modern conundrum about succession that we may yet face in our own monarchy is debated. Although there are indeed two princes in The Palace, there are also two princesses. When the king dies in episode one, his eldest child Princess Eleanor is overlooked in favour of his elder son, Richard. Believing she is more suited to the role of monarch, Eleanor is riven with jealousy and launches a plot against her brother which leads to a great twist at the end of the series. On that, however, I’ll say no more....

If nothing else, The Palace exposes the bizarre constraints that are still placed upon the monarchy in the 21st century. In doing so, it questions the very things — beyond the vital constitutional checks and balances we invariably take for granted — that we demand of them. ‘We expect our public servants to be superhuman,’ Grieves points out. ‘Not human beings. The idea that they can have really complicated emotions, really complicated lives, doesn’t even enter our heads.’

So will The Palace, celebrating as it does the more human foibles of this very special family, help matters? ‘Who knows?’ chuckles Grieves. ‘At the end of the day, it’s a television series. What were the Reithian principles? To educate, to entertain, to inform. I hope we’re doing all three. Very soon, whatever the furore, people can make up their own minds.

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ian skidmore

January 4th, 2008 6:01pm Report this comment

does your employee get paid extra for doing the PR on th film in which she is moonlighting. Or have you abandoned yet another journalistic convention

Jon Livesey

January 4th, 2008 8:22pm Report this comment

Let's see. You refer to "the royals and their weird, tax-evading, toe-sucking ways," and we are supposed to believe that you are just some objective honest Joe with no axe to grind, making a TV movie about the Palace?